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Summary
Summary
Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon the publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of fiction's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Set in the Caribbean, its heroine is Antoinette Cosway, a sensual and protected young woman who is sold into marriage to the prideful Rochester. In this best-selling novel, Rhys portrays a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind.
Author Notes
Jean Rhys, 1890 - 1979 Writer Jean Rhys was born in Roseau, Dominica, West Indies. Her father was a Welsh doctor and her mother was a Dominican Creole. Her heritage deeply influenced her life as well as her writing. At seventeen, her father sent her to England to attend the Perse School, Cambridge and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Unfortunately, she was forced to abandon her studies when her father died.
Rhys worked as a chorus girl and ghostwrote a book on furniture. During World War I, she volunteered in a soldier canteen and, in 1918, worked in a pension office. In 1919, she went to Holland and married the French-Dutch journalist and songwriter Jean Langlet. They had two children, a daughter and a son who died as an infant. She began writing under the patronage of Ford Madox Ford. Her husband was sentenced to prison for illegal financial transactions. Her affair ended badly with Ford, and her marriage ended in divorce. In 1934, she married Leslie Tilden Smith who died in 1945. Two years later, she married Max Hamer who died in 1966. Rhys lived many years in the West Country, most often in great poverty.
In 1927, Rhys' first collection of stories, "The Left Bank and Other Stories," was published. Her first novel, "Quartet" (1928), is considered to be an account of her affair with Ford Madox Ford told through Marya, a young English woman. In "Voyage in the Dark" (1934), the character is a young chorus girl involved with an older lover. She has also written "Good Morning, Midnight" (1939) and "Sleep It Off Lady" (1976) and the internationally acclaimed "Wide Sargasso Sea" (1960).
Rhys was made a CBE in 1978 and received the W.H. Smith Award, the Royal Society of Literature Award and an Arts Council Bursart. Rhys died on May 14, 1979 in Exeter. In the same year, her unfinished autobiography "Smile Please" appeared.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Guardian Review
They say when trouble comes, close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks. The negroes hated us, too. "You ain't nothing but white cockroach niggers," the young Tia said, stealing my dress as I bathed alone in the lush sensuality of the biblical garden pond. They were all the people in my life - my mother, my brother Pierre and my nurse Christophine - since old Cosway, my father, died five years back when all the old slave-owners left. Some said it was drink, some said madness, but emancipation surely did us no good. I was a bridesmaid when my mother married Mr Mason, but though he restored us from the steamy undergrowth of our sweaty impoverishment, we could not escape the madness of the post-colonial reinterpretation of Jane Eyre "Why must I flit from one half-remembered scene to another," I asked, "each more laden than the last with the heavy, humid symbolism of female oppression and neo-Marxist alienation?" "Because you are a creole, Antoinette," Christophine said, "and I am an old Jamaican negro, steeped in the old ways of obeah ." Flames licked the bamboo walls of our home, a haunting prelude to the historical inevitability of my death. "Black and white, they burn alike," the mob chanted, as Mr Mason carried Pierre to safety. A stone struck me on the forehead and I lapsed into a month of yet more fevered modernist memories of charred parrots and poisoned horses. "Is it true Pierre has died?" I asked on returning to a semi-lucid consciousness. "I long for the release of death." "They are saying it is a blessing the cretin has passed," Christophine replied, "and your mother has been committed to an asylum. She does not recognise you." "Then they will say I, too, am touched with madness." "It is unavoidable," Mr Mason added. "Madness is indeed a deterministic inevitability of a patriarchal, imperialist regime. So let me hasten you towards your destiny by marrying you off to an impoverished English gentleman to take refuge in sunshine and death." So this is Massacre. How did I come to honeymoon on the Windward Islands? Like so much else in my pitiful life, I, too, am now the victim of a proto-feminist Marxist plot to reinterpret Bronte's classic. See how I'm never given a name, yet you assume I must be Rochester! See how the action has been carried forward 30 years to resonate with the Emancipation Act! Truly, economic determinism works in mysterious ways! Yes, I married Antoinette to escape the shame and guilt of debt, but I was struck by the fevers of this oppressive, dream-like Carib jungle, and now that I am well, I find I do not love her. Like her? Yes. But love her? No. My heart is the very essence of stone-cold, Victorian materialism steeped in the pig-iron of the industrial revolution: she is black, yet white; mad, yet sane; the very essence of the Hegelian dialectic. "I beg you, Christophine," I said. "Give me an obeah potion to make him love me. For else I shall descend to madness." "It is a hard thing you ask," she said. "For black is white, night is day and you cannot escape your ending." The jungle breathed in, its lungs full of fetid menace, as I ravished my reified Antoinette before falling into a stifling, tormented sleep. I awoke to find myself full of hatred for her. Yes, hatred for her, my mad creole bride. Hungry for revenge, I forced myself on the willing maid Amelie while Antoinette listened by the keyhole. "Your cousin Daniel has written to say that all your family is mad, and Amelie tells me you have kissed your nigger cousin," I said. "How do you answer that, my Antoinette, my Marionette, my Bertha?" "Why do you call me Bertha?" "How else will everyone know you are the mad woman in the attic if I don't give you the same name?" I sneered. "And how better to objectify you than calling you that which you are not?" "Then my alienation is complete. I am dead though I am not dead. I am but a post-colonial zombie," she said, biting into my arm and drawing blood in a half-acknowledged homage to 1960s horror films. "See what you have done," cried Christophine Lee. "Your male, petit-bourgeois, racist cruelty has carried her off into total madness. One day you will be made to atone for the collective guilt of your class and gender." "Did you think I wanted to be portrayed in such simplistic terms?" I replied. "Did you think I liked being at the mercy of a woman who cannot write about men? Did you think I could escape my own determinism any more than she could? Enough! I am taking Bertha back to England." The candles guttered as I placed them carefully next to the muslin curtains. Come, burn, flames. Arise, sister, you have nothing to lose but centuries of feminist oppression. And a few expensive fixtures and fittings. John Crace's Digested Reads appear in G2 on Tuesdays. Caption: article-digsag.1 "Because you are a creole, Antoinette," Christophine said, "and I am an old Jamaican negro, steeped in the old ways of obeah ." "Your cousin Daniel has written to say that all your family is mad, and [Amelie] tells me you have kissed your nigger cousin," I said. "How do you answer that, my Antoinette, my Marionette, my Bertha?" "See what you have done," cried Christophine Lee. "Your male, petit-bourgeois, racist cruelty has carried her off into total madness. One day you will be made to atone for the collective guilt of your class and gender." - John Crace.