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Jean Rhys, a Dominican writer, published the novel "Wide Sargasso Sea" in 1966. The book is a response to Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre" and focuses on the story of Bertha Antoinette Mason, the madwoman in the attic. Rhys humanizes her and explores themes of colonialism and race. Rhys had a difficult life, facing discrimination and struggling as an actress before finding success as a writer. You're listening to The Secret Life of Books with Sophie G and Jonty Claypole. This episode, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rees. So it was all over, the advance and retreat, the doubts and hesitations. Everything finished, for better or for worse. There we were, sheltering from the heavy rain under a large mango tree, myself, my wife Antoinette, and a little half-caste servant who was called Amelie. Under a neighboring tree I could see our luggage covered with sacking, the two porters and a boy holding fresh horses, hired to carry us up 2,000 feet to the waiting honeymoon home. Wonderful. That's Wide Sargasso Sea, published in 1966. It was the final novel by the Dominican writer Jean Rees, and it was composed when she was herself in her late 60s and 70s, so really late in her life. It's a book way before its time, and it's become a really important text in postcolonial literature. The reason for this is that it's an extraordinary, audacious response to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. It takes the madwoman in the attic, and it retells the story. It's the story of Bertha Antoinette Mason. So Rees very intentionally took the madwoman and humanized her. Yeah, it's such a big theme in Jane Eyre, and when we did our two episodes on Jane Eyre, we deliberately kept this issue of race as is embodied by the madwoman in the attic and decided to give it an episode on its own and to look at it through the eyes of Jean Rees and through the lens of Wide Sargasso Sea. Rees extrapolates from really just a couple of paragraphs in Jane Eyre that offer Antoinette's backstory, and fills this story with color and psychological plausibility. The book is in three parts. In the first part, Antoinette recounts her childhood in a plantation in Jamaica shortly after the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. The second part of the book swings between the perspectives of Mr. Rochester, who is the romantic hero of Jane Eyre, and between Antoinette. It's during their honeymoon after their marriage, and it tracks the increasing distrust and ultimately the hatred that forges and grows between them. Rochester feels that he's been conned by her family into marrying a madwoman, and Antoinette, quite rightly, feels that she's being used for her money. The third, shortest and bleakest part of the novel is from Antoinette's point of view again, but she is by this point completely mad. There are moments of lucidity. She's in Rochester's home in England's Thornfield Hall in the attic as Jane Eyre presents her being in Jane Eyre, but she is by this point attacking the house guests, getting ready to burn the house down. So in this episode, we're going to look at Jean Rees' masterpiece. It's a short, brilliant book that really rewrote postcolonial fiction as it existed at the time. It also deeply engages with writing set in and written about the Caribbean world for the last several centuries, and we're taking a deep dive into the theme of colonialism and race in Jane Eyre as Rees saw it, and more broadly, how colonialism shows up in English literature from the 18th century onwards. But John T., first of all, tell us a bit about Rees herself. Who is she? I love literary biography, as you know, Sophie, and this one is a corker. Are you ready for a life full of sordidness, demi-monde escapades, high points, low points, bohemianism, lovers? Are you ready for all that? We love a demi-monde escapade on this show. So Jean Rees was born in Dominica, the island of Dominica in the Caribbean in 1890. It is at that time a British colony and has been for a long time. Dominica was an important part of the transatlantic slave trade, and following the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which is an inciting incident for the book Wide Flag SoC as well, Dominica became the first colony with an elected legislature controlled by an ethnic African majority. Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah, the English planter class, the traditional slave owners who were no longer able to keep slaves but continued to hold their land and businesses, they were not happy. And they campaigned very heavily over the following decades and did their best to ensure that Dominica could not thrive as an independent or quasi-independent territory. And eventually in 1896, when Rees was six, the island was just pulled back under direct rule from Britain again. So Britain actually went backwards. Her father was a Welsh doctor who moved to the island. Her mother comes from one of these historic plantation families. I think Rees's grandfather or great grandfather had been a governor of the island. Yes, that makes sense, which was often the case, wasn't it? Those early plantation families ran the show as well as holding the land. Plantation owners should not be allowed to become rulers of countries or governors, but that was how the British Empire worked. That's how it worked. Yes. Rees is what was called white Creole, which means that she's grown up in the island culture. Although her skin is white, she has coloured cousins. She has black friends. She is familiar with the Creole patois of the island. So her culture and identity is very much Creole. She goes to convent school, but then when she's a teenager, Rees is sent to school in England. She goes to Perth School for Girls in Cambridge. She had a very difficult time. She was teased for her accent. She was nicknamed West Indies. Then there's a moment where they study Jane Eyre at school. When the mad woman in the attic appears in Jane Eyre, the girls immediately start pointing their fingers at Jean Rees. Oh, wow. So it was explicit. It was picked up on. She was bullied as a mad woman in the attic. Apparently around the time they were reading the book, a fire broke out in the school, which is obviously what happens at the end of Jane Eyre when the house was set on fire. At that point, everyone was, you know, you West Indies, you're the one who started the fire. After finishing school, Jean Rees goes to RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. She wanted to be an actress. She wanted to be an actress. But quite early on, her father, who doesn't have much money, writes to the director of the school and says, look, has my daughter got it? And the director of the school says, well, if you're worried about money, I wouldn't bother spending much more. And the reason given is actually that her accent is so strong that she's never going to make it as an actress. Which now, of course, would be a huge plus. And also, presumably, actors can change their accents. So I don't quite get it. But maybe she was this enormous anxiety about the return of the empire, I think. I know just as an Australian, someone with an Australian accent. Every time I set foot in Britain, and I have a hint of an Australian accent, something that I might, you know, there's a real knee jerk anxiety about people from the Commonwealth. Yes, there is. And my mom, who's Australian, when my mom came over on the boat in the late 60s, very quickly on arriving in London, shed her Australian accent in order to make her name as a journalist. She just couldn't have a broad Australian accent. So Reece was up against all of that with the additional piece. I mean, people tease Australians for being from a convict country. But in Reece's case, with the additional piece of being from a slave-owning society, which for the British, I think, has continued to be a source of enormous national shame and anxiety. Yeah. So her father tells her to come back home, and she doesn't. She's old enough not to. She's in her late teens. And she decides to become a chorus girl instead. She gets herself booked with various theatrical companies and starts going on tours. This is all before the First World War. And would that have been sort of a quite shameful and risky, or risqué thing to do? I mean, is that sort of like being a call girl, being a chorus girl? Very risqué. There is a fine line. The older profession in the book. So yes, she's definitely pushed herself out of the world of respectability, where her father and mother might have wanted her to be, into what is called the demi-monde. Yes. That French phrase, the half-world. The low point in Jean Reece's life, and this is a low point, I think, by any standards, she's part of a production touring the north of England. And her role is to play an enormous chicken. And the highlight of her brief appearance in this show, it's a kind of musical show, where she is an enormous feathered chicken, and she has to lay an egg on the stage. And this is... Although, again, just to come in at that point, I saw in your notes, you've got low point colon chicken, and I was thinking, God, what's it going to be? I mean, in the world of being a chorus girl, being a giant egg-laying chicken, at least, I don't know, it has a sort of aura of respectability. I wouldn't say respectability, but I'd say avant-garde. Like family-friendly. I've definitely seen this show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Yes. So... Do you think it'd be interactive now, wouldn't it? It would be very interactive. There is a difference, however, between an Edinburgh Fringe Festival audience in the 2020s, and between a working man's audience in the north of England in the 1910s. Yes. The egg-laying chicken act did not go down well. It's not all egg-laying chickens. There are some slightly more glamorous moments to Jean Rhys's stage career. The highlight being, she gets a job in the chorus of Operetta by Franz Laha, a very respectable operetta writer. Yes. She's in a show called The Count of Luxembourg. It's seen by the king and queen, so that's something. Very much so. And it's also seen by Lancelot Hugh Smith, a wealthy stockbroker. And Lancelot Hugh Smith goes and, you know, sends his card after seeing Jean Rhys's legs on stage. Yes. And sets her up as his mistress. So again, this is another moment of intense disempowerment for the young Rhys. And she says, he had money, I had none. Yes, that's a blunt assessment of the relationship. And he calls her kitten and gives her a dress allowance. And it ends with her having an abortion at Christmas time on her own, as those sorts of affairs often do. It's around this time that she discovers a drive to write. So after this low point, after this abortion, she's living in a bedsit in Fulham in London, getting by just doing some hat making, working as a film extra. And she describes a night in 1913 when she's 23, where she impulsively buys some notebooks and stays up all night. She just starts writing and writing and can't stop. And she writes a line which actually goes on to appear in one of her later novels, which is, oh God, I'm only 20 and I'll have to go on living and living and living. Great line. Great line. I can see why she reused that. Yes. I suppose that's why writers keep notebooks. During the First World War, she volunteers in a soldier's canteen, then has a job in the civil service. And she meets at this time a Franco-Dutchman, which is his half French. We're perilously close to Belgium again, which is where we were in Jane Eyre, weren't we? We are. All roads lead to Brussels in this podcast, Sophie. She meets this guy called Jean Lenglet, who is a very charming rogue. Is he swashbuckling? He is swashbuckling and very charismatic. Because we love a swashbuckling rogue. We love a swashbuckler. And he's forever getting into scrapes and having to flee the law. So he proposes to Jean Rees in 1917, and then it immediately has to flee for reasons no one knows. Okay. After the First World War, she travels out to Holland, to The Hague, and marries him. She wants to go and live in Paris. I mean, who wouldn't want to? In 1919, that's the place to live. And I think she's drawn to the fact he's half French. But it then turns out, having got married, that he's actually not allowed into France. Oh, that's so unfortunate. And they have to smuggle themselves across the border late one night. Okay. It's quite Casablanca. It's very Casablanca. And Lenglet, amazingly, because he's rather dodgy, gets a job as an interpreter for the Inter-Allied Commission of Control. So the Inter-Allied Commission of Control was set up after the First World War. By the Allies, as a way of imposing sanctions on defeated countries. I was going to say, it sounds like a euphemism. What's the euphemism for? Yeah, he's on the gravy train. It's the sort of body that Nigel Farage would be furiously raging against. So suddenly, they're living the high life. They go to Vienna. He's an interpreter there for the Commission. They go to Budapest. They have a chauffeur. It's all going fantastically. They have a daughter called Mary Vaughn. Unusual name. It is. It's like Mary with Yvonne stuck on the end. It's all going very well. And then one night in 1922, Lenglet announces to Jean Rees that he's been quietly embezzling from the Inter-Allied Commission. Oh, dear. And they have to flee back to Paris. It doesn't get better. Shortly after arriving back in Paris, the police arrive one night where they're staying and tell Lenglet that he needs to go back to his first wife. Oh, my Lord. Oh, my goodness. He's been married all along. So hang on a second. Press pause. Press pause. So this is Jane Eyre playing out in real life. Rees's husband is already married. And she doesn't know. And then suddenly, it's this catastrophic discovery. Yes. Extraordinary. And no wonder she recognized the tale of Jane Eyre. I hadn't thought about that. It's completely true. And Lenglet is a very Rochester-like character. Is he? He's very mercurial. Is he small and dark? He's small and dark. I've seen pictures of him. Yes. He's very mercurial. OK. He's incredibly charming like Rochester, though. Oh, wow. All right. So despite doing all these terrible things, he still loves him. He sort of gets away with it. And he's obviously a gaslighter. He's a gaslighter, as all the great literary heroes from the 19th century are. So he's much closer to Rochester than the Belgian swashbuckler who Charles Raleigh falls in love with. Yes. He's even more Rochester-like than the model for Rochester was. You're quite unique. Yeah. And then, having been ordered back home to his first wife, he's then imprisoned for felony. Oh, dear. So Jean Rhys, having been living the high life in Vienna and Budapest, is now thrown back on a completely hand-to-mouth existence. The daughter she has sort of packed off to a nursery. And she spends these years in the early 20s living in various dingy hotels in Paris. It's the sort of world George Orwell describes in Down and Out in Paris. Great book. In London. And she starts writing stories about the bohemian life she's living. Yes. And the bohemian world she's occupying. Yes. She writes a story later called Hunger, which very specifically lays out how long a woman can survive on just bread and coffee. And it's five days before physical collapse. Yeah. And she's clearly writing that from a place of personal experience. So I think... Was she quite sort of robust and upbeat about all of this? Or was she a bit desolate and destitute? She has an amazing capacity for suffering and just for getting on with things. And finding the glamour and stuff. I think that's the important thing. She suffers, but I think she finds the glamour in suffering. Yes. And I think... Yeah, I think that's how people do it, isn't it? That's the thing about bohemianism, isn't it? There's a thin line between bohemianism and squalor. Yeah, very thin. She starts writing stories about these experiences of being down and out in Paris and sends them to the Daily Mail of all. Okay, good choice. Yeah, wrong publication. Is that just because she kind of didn't do her homework? I think so, yeah. I think she was fundamentally misunderstanding what the Daily Mail is and what its values are. Yes. And an editor gets back and says, these are all very nice. You write well, not really for us. Not enough complaining about immigrants. I think you should send them to a bohemian periodical called the Transatlantic Review, which was edited out of Paris by the writer Ford Maddox Ford. Yes. Oh, okay. So that's a big change. Yes, Ford Maddox Ford, very famous writer. Is he already famous then? He's written The Good Soldier. He's starting to write Parade Send. Right. Where are you on Ford Maddox Ford? I admire it. Yeah. Where are you on it? I'm not into it at all, actually. Well, we won't be doing Ford Maddox Ford at any point. No, yet. Yet. No, maybe when we get to episode 1,237 and scratching our heads. Smash cut to... It's the Ford Maddox Ford eight part. Yeah, eight part. Parade Send episode seven. She ends up being mentored by Ford Maddox Ford. Mentoring is a very loaded word, isn't it? We've talked about mentoring in... It's a bit like authenticity. It can cut both ways, mentoring. Because certainly in this case, Ford Maddox Ford does mentor Jean Rees. And he says you've got real talent. And then he sleeps with her. And then he sleeps with her as well. It's that sort of mentoring. And she ends up living in a menage a trois. Oh, really? Lengley's in prison. So she ends up living for a while with Ford Maddox Ford and his partner, Stella Bowen, the Australian artist. Oh, I guess I knew that, but I sort of forgot. So Stella Bowen later remembers Rees at this time and describes her as a doomed soul, violent and demoralized. So like Bertha Mason. Like Bertha Mason, yeah. And Rees later, when she comes to White's Sagaso Sea, writes that book very much identifying with Bertha. That comes through, I think. Ford Maddox Ford, he sleeps with her, but he does come through on his word. And mentors her as well. He gets her first volume of short stories published. So in 1927, she publishes The Left Bank and Other Stories. It has a long introduction by Ford himself, which is mostly about himself. Obviously. It takes him actually 12 pages to mention her name. The first 12 pages is Ford describing his time in Paris and then finally sort of gets around saying, oh, yes, here's some interesting... Someone else wrote this book, actually. Here's an interesting collection of stories by Jean Rees. Those guys, they really haven't got the memo, have they? I don't think the memo had been written. There's another memo that had been written and they'd all read it really carefully. The Left Bank and Other Stories, it doesn't sell, but it is well-reviewed. And this is enough to launch her as a writer. And she now enters the most productive part of her career and writes a series of rather good novels, which are all semi-autobiographical accounts of her life and the world she's in. So her first novel is called Quartet, which is really a fictionalized account of her and Lengley and Ford, Maddox Ford and Stella Bowen. Oh, I see. That's the Quartet. Yes. She writes After Leaving Mr. McKenzie in 1931, Voyage in the Dark in 1934, which is about a young chorus girl in England who grew up in the West Indies. That sounds autobiographical. Yeah, except the chicken doesn't appear. Okay. Well, that's a missed opportunity. It was a missed opportunity. Voyage in the Dark is really significant because it is one of the first novels in which rather than the colonies being written about from the viewpoint of London, the capital of the empire, it is looking at England from the viewpoint of somebody from the colonies coming to England. Oh, that's really interesting. Coming to England. That's really interesting. And the first passages of the book make England the other. One of the first times England becomes the other. Yeah. It's incredibly innovative. Incredibly innovative. And it's why she's such an important writer. So, yes, she remains very well-reviewed but has very few readers. Meanwhile, she has an on-off relationship with Lengley. Okay. At least because he is literally... Does he feel married? It's very hard to follow exactly who is legally married to who at any given moment in this story. They do actually divorce it in the end. Yes. And in the early 30s, Jean Rees meets and marries a much more stable chap, a solid Englishman. Oh, good. He's an agent and an editor. Oh, splendid. And he's called Leslie Tilden Smith. Okay. So you get the vibe. I'm picking up what you're putting down. Solid, dependable, very English. Yes. Probably speaks like I'm speaking now. I hope so. Wearing a lounge suit, perhaps. And he's so solid that they even manage to have a honeymoon. Oh, nice. There they go. They go to Dominica. For the first time in, well, over 25 years, 30 years, as they're sailing to Dominica, they pass through a patch of the Atlantic called the Sargasso Sea. And it's named because of this kind of floating brown weed called the Sargassum. Oh, yes. And I think why that's significant, why Jean Rees uses it is it's this idea of brownness, of mixed colors, of mixed black and white. I see. He sees Dominica again through new eyes. And significantly, she rereads Jane Eyre in 1938. Okay. And this is when she has an idea that she somehow wants to redress the great wrong that she believes Charlotte Bronte did in depicting Bertha Antoinette Mason, the madwoman in the attic, in the way she did in Jane Eyre. That's when the idea of the book begins. Yes. Little did Jean Rees know at this point, it was going to take her 30 years to write this book, because two things happened that just stopped her career in its tracks. The first thing is that she publishes her fifth novel. It's called Good Morning, Midnight. And she publishes it. Great title. It is, as the title implies, massively bleak. It's a kind of stream of consciousness about an old lady adrift in Paris. It's basically Mrs. Dalloway homeworld. Oh, gosh. Right. Mrs. Dalloway is not exactly a bundle of laughs as it is. No, she's not, but at least she's got her house. And her MP husband. This is unremittingly bleak. And it kind of torpedoes her career, because even those critics who have been saying, she's an amazing writer, are a bit like, this is tough, this is a bit heavy. So that's very demoralizing. Right, that's a shame. And then the war breaks out, the Second World War. So things are sort of tanking. In various ways, Jean Rees becomes embroiled in. So we're going to park her life for a bit there, Sophie, but before we really get into how she writes, why it's like SOC, but I just want to come back to this idea that Jean Rees's desire is to redress the wrong that she believes Charlotte Bronte has done to the Creole people of who she is a member. And what is that wrong? And actually just to start by saying, formally speaking, formally speaking, in terms of the history of the novel, so as we said, when we were talking about Bronte, she has this extraordinary innovation, which is to bring the Gothic to life in the middle of a marriage plot. So there's this mad woman in the attic, and it's- We're talking about Jane Eyre. I'm talking about Jane Eyre. So the mad woman in the attic sort of lurks, unseen for the first third of Jane Eyre, then she surfaces, and then she kind of dominates the rest of the book with an incredible innovation. And Rees really has a parallel piece of literary innovation, which is to bring a character who is absolutely at the margins, barely seen in the story, bring her into the centre, and make the whole story about her. And it's really important to note that this is something that has subsequently been taken up. Katsia does it with Robinson Crusoe. He writes Faux about Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. So the sort of rewrite from the marginalised character's point of view, I think even Andrew Davies' recent screen adaptation of Jane Austen's Sanditon makes much of her mixed race character, her mulatto character in Sanditon, which is a little known thing about Austen. So to become this trope of writing, but Rees is really one of the very first people to do this. Yeah, are there any examples before? I was thinking about that, actually. There's a strange rewrite of Robinson Crusoe, actually, in the 18th century. It's called The Female American. It's anonymous. No one knows who wrote it. It's a female Crusoe who finds herself stranded on a basically deserted island and has to survive. And she becomes a sort of priestess, a sort of religious icon, and then is eventually rescued by her English cousin, actually, to whom she marries. And they sort of found a mission. That was a very strange rewriting of Robinson Crusoe in the 18th century. But that's different to taking a character. Yes. So the equivalent would be taking Man Friday and writing Robinson Crusoe from Man Friday's perspective. Nice correction, Jonty. You're quite right about that. I don't think it's been done before. I can't think of an example. I can't either. No, no. So that's well done, Jean Rees. Yeah. Amazing. Right. So her big breakthrough she makes is to, as you say, write from the margins, write as either back to the centre or back to England itself. So she rewrites the Caribbean, rewrites the West Indies from the point of view of someone who has grown up there. And that hasn't really happened before. Just to back up and think about why are the West Indies so important in the English imagination, in the English literary imagination, just we learn, for example, that I think Jean Rees' reading material when she was a girl was Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, actually Treasure Island. These are all early novels that are using these colonial settings. I mean, Robinson Crusoe is explicitly set in the West Indies. And it's an enormously important sort of imaginative and literal space in the early 18th century. So the West Indies are the obsessive focus in British colonial history from the early 17th century onward. Colonisation began in the early 17th century. Jamaica was taken from the Spanish in 1655 as part of Cromwell's Western design. So Cromwell is the Republican leader of England after the revolution. And he thinks it's going to be incredibly important for England to stake its claim as a major European power by getting more land, basically. And he decides that they're going to try to colonise areas of the West Indies and the Americas. And so Jamaica is seized back from the Spanish, the Spanish being the main rival of England in terms of European geopolitics. The English are obsessed with getting power from the Spanish. I didn't realise Cromwell was the significant figure. It was sort of his idea. West Indian colonisation was basically Cromwell's idea. Yes. He didn't really push it through completely, but it was he who recognised that if England was going to become a major economic player in Europe, it would need to happen through conquest and development and production in the West Indies. So his people took Jamaica back from the Spanish. There was a formal treaty in 1670. And during this period, indentured servants and prisoners were sent to Jamaica by Cromwell's government. The settlements never really took hold. They were never hugely prosperous or successful. And then in the 18th century, you have the sugar revolution, where the sort of technology that you need to process sugar and produce sugar in vast quantities comes into being. And the other thing that comes into being after the War of Spanish Succession is concluded in the early 18th century are the mechanisms of transportation and trade that are going to mean that the slave trade becomes the major driving mechanism of British financial prosperity through the 18th century. And so those things, sugar and slaves, mean that the Jamaican economy really takes off. And that was Jean Rees's ancestry. It was plantations, sugar production. Yes. Now, Jean Rees, of course, is from Dominica, and her family, it was a slave-owning family. But Antoinette Mason, Rochester's wife's family, was from Jamaica in Jane Eyre. So that's why there's the overlap with Jamaica. So Jamaica reaches its peak in productivity of sugar in the mid-18th century, and it then starts to trail off. And that's partly because sugar prices dropped, and it's also because the abolitionist movement is gaining significant headwind at this point. Yes, you get those prints from Gilray of posh ladies in England boycotting sugar and sitting around having tea parties where they're all looking appalled and disgusted, trying to force this sugarless tea down their throats. Yes, exactly, exactly. So not taking sugar became a major political position at the time. So by the time Jane Eyre is taking place, by the time the Mason family that Rees focuses on would have been in Jamaica, they were already in a bit of financial trouble. You know, sugar was not prosperous in the way that it had been. And through the second half of the 18th century, you have fairly regular slave rebellions and slave uprisings in Jamaica and the other West Indian islands. It's a fairly constant drumbeat of political activity. There's never really a period where the trade in enslaved people is uncontentious, even though vast sums of money are being made. And the specific backdrop to Bronte's choosing the madwoman in the attic to be from Jamaica was the so-called Baptist Rebellion of 1831. This was an event in Jamaica. And an enslaved Baptist preacher named Samuel Sharp led a strike among the enslaved, and they were demanding more freedom and a working wage. And it became known as the Baptist War. And it was the largest slave uprising in the British West Indies. It lasted 10 days, and it mobilized as many as 60,000 of the approximately 300,000 enslaved people in Jamaica at the time. And there was a severe suppression of the rebellion on the part of the authorities, of the governor and the Jamaican authorities. Approximately 500 slaves were killed across the revolution or the revolt itself. And then into the aftermath, there were judicial executions, and there was sort of a general crackdown on the movements of the enslaved and the maroon communities on Jamaica as well, who were the escaped or emancipated mixed race communities. And in 1833, you get the Emancipation Act. You get the legal end of enslaved labor in Jamaica. And how much would Charlotte Bronte have been aware of these things growing up? Oh, she would have been very aware. It's all being reported on. Very much so, very much so. These are far off events, but they're very much in the public eye. One of the things I think is so interesting about Bronte's decision to use the figure of Bertha Rochester. I mean, she could have taken her mad woman from anywhere, really. And so it's so fascinating that she chooses to make the mad woman in the attic, this white Creole woman from Jamaica. And what would the general attitude of being in Britain, reading about these things in the newspapers? By this point, I suspect the mainstream opinion is that slavery is wrong. I think, although not everyone thinks that. At the same time, there's probably a feeling that law and order is important. So what would the mainstream view be of the West Indies? Yeah, it's a great question. I think the mainstream view of the West Indies, really from the mid 18th century onward, is extremely complicated. I think the British public feel a kind of unacknowledged shame about the fact that the fortunes of the middle classes and the aristocracy in the period, the great wave of British prosperity and empire building came out of sugar. And it was known that this was based in enslaved labor. So there was a huge amount of sort of national and cultural shame and unspeakability around this. And at the same time, I think there's a turning of a blind eye. There's a sort of sense that the show must go on. I mean, even as the Emancipation Act was passed in Jamaica, enslaved labor was still being used across the British empire in many, many other areas. And the colonization or the colonial redevelopment of the Indian subcontinent is just kind of getting going. So that's going to be a big shift of focus. We see that at the end of Jane Eyre with St. John Rivers heading off to Calcutta. And then, of course, Australia is going to become the next big focus of British colonial energy. So I think that the sort of rebellion, revolution, frontier war basically is something that the English or the British across all the centuries of colonization have an incredibly ambivalent attitude toward. And there's also this two steps forward, one step back from the Abolition Act in the 1790s where slavery in theory is abolished. After that, I mean, things just go on as they were. Absolutely. So the British slave trade came to an end at the very beginning of the 19th century. That had already happened. I think it's 1807. And that's noted actually in Austin's writing. So the Emancipation Act is a step toward actual emancipation, the end of enslaved labor more generally. But as the civil rights movement and the Black Lives Matter movements of recent decades have made abundantly clear that the long tail of colonial violence doesn't end. And so for all the kind of legislative reforms and legislative amendments, the deep structural inequities of colonialism and race remain in place. Yes. And I think the resonances between Jane Eyre and Wide Soak SoC are touching on all of those things. So when we see the mad woman in the attic in Bronte, she is a sort of allegory or totem, a sort of iconic representation of the failure of empire and the shame of empire, I think. We see that she's in the deep shade at the further end of the room. A figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not tell. It groveled seemingly on all fours. It snatched and growled like some strange wild animal. But it was covered with clothing and a quantity of dark grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face. I mean, that is one of the great curveballs in literature, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Because we've been reading a marriage plot story and suddenly Charlotte Bronte drops in that scene. It is completely, and it's horrifying. It's completely horrifying. It's not what you're expecting. I remember the first time I read Jane Eyre, not knowing what was up in the attic, and I was completely appalled. And Antoinette's not even gendered here. Yes. She's just it. It snatched and growled like some strange wild animal. And so I can see why Reese felt that this was a literary wrong that needed to be righted, that Bronte had stripped humanity from Bertha Rochester, Bertha Mason, that she'd stripped identity from her, that she'd taken away her past, she'd taken away her capacity to have a life story or to have subjectivity. I think you could also make the case, though, that Bronte is making quite an interesting and even radical point about the impact of empire on humanity and on subjectivity, that what you have after a century and a half of sustained plantation agriculture, I mean, Bronte wouldn't have used those words, but what you have after a century of the slave trade are dehumanized beings who are groveling on all fours. And that in a way, already, even in Jane Eyre, the kind of horrifying impact of empire has sort of come back as this specter, this Gothic specter in the middle of a 19th century novel. Yeah, we talked in the Jane Eyre episode about Charlotte Bronte reading Gulliver's Travels when she was young, and Antoinette is a Yahoo. Yes, yes, yes. Charlotte Bronte's taken the Yahoo, which are the savage human beings in Gulliver's Travels in the land of the Wynnums and brought the Yahoo back and installed us at the top of an English stately home. In Yorkshire. You're completely right about that. Yeah, she is a Yahoo. And as I said, Reese read Gulliver's Travels along with Robinson Crusoe, so the other things I think just to say about Bronte's representation of Bertha Mason so that we can then bounce off that to get to Reese again. While Bertha is in many ways a disenfranchised character, obviously she's also quite powerful and critics have pointed out that she's sort of Jane's double in the book. She is her shadow or her kind of demonic parallel figure. She acts as it were on Jane's behalf, the kind of violence and desire for retribution and sense of profound injustice that Jane ought to feel at Mr. Rochester's gaslighting of her. Bertha Mason is kind of acting that out by coming downstairs periodically and trying to kill him. We should just say that we're using Bertha and Antoinette slightly interchangeably. So the full name is Bertha Antoinette Mason. Thank you for clarifying that. And so sometimes we're saying Bertha, sometimes we're saying Antoinette. They are the mad woman in the attic. Yes, they are the same person. Yes, thank you. And then the other thing that I really noticed re-reading these books together is demonic laughter has a big role to play in these books. I mean, famously Bertha in Jane Eyre, what we know of her before we see her on all fours is her laugh, this horrifying, empty demonic laugh. But we also see Mr. Rochester's intended bride, Blanche Ingram. She has a scary laugh that is noted several times in Jane Eyre. So there's a kind of funny doubling between Mr. Rochester's first wife and the Blanche Ingram character who's supposed to be the kind of love interest. And then actually Bertha's or Antoinette's stepfather in Wide Sargasso Sea, Mr. Mason, who we never see in Jane Eyre, he also has a scary, menacing laugh. So I'm sort of, what is laughter? I mean, there's a lot of psychoanalytic work on laughter. It's a sort of aftershock, isn't it? It's a kind of way of processing something so unspeakable or horrible that you can't talk about it straight on using language. You can only have this kind of laughter that is both sort of denying violence and acknowledging it at the same time. So that's where the critics would go on all of that. And then what the Emancipation Act of 1833 produces in Jamaica and across the West Indies is a situation where the white, former slave-owning class had itself become repulsive and marginal and disreputable. So they're known as white cockroaches. And there's a moment, actually, in Wide Sagaso Sea where Antoinette overhears one of the black girls on the island singing a song and the Mr. Rochester character says, I don't always understand what they say or sing. And Antoinette says, it was a song about a white cockroach. That's me. That's what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders. So between you, I often wonder where I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all? The latter half of that passage is very Antoinette. She's incredibly disoriented and confused about where she is. And I think the confusion is partly a historical confusion. Yes. I just want to ask you about whiteness. Jean Rhys's Antoinette is white-crayol, like Jean Rhys herself, which is that her skin is white but in her extended family there are mixed race cousins. And do we know whether Charlotte Bronte sees Bertha Antoinette as being white-crayol or mixed race? She explicitly figures Antoinette as white-crayol. But I think the point to make about it is that even in the 19th century, any white person who'd been born in the West Indies is already kind of tainted or slurred by the possibility of racial intermixing. So she speaks about Richard Mason's face as being sallow and kind of discoloured, off-colour. Richard Mason is her brother. Richard Mason is Antoinette's brother in Jane Eyre and step-brother in whites, I guess I'd say, if he isn't he. I found in Charlotte Bronte's treatment of Bertha there's kind of curious race ideology going on. And it struck me because I associate that sort of racial ideology and obsession and that idea of racial hygiene as being something that emerges later in the 19th century. But in Jane Eyre, when Rochester gives that brief backstory into how he came to be married to Bertha, he says that he married her because his family made him do it for her money. So although the family had been ruined by the Emancipation Act, they still have a lot of money squirrelled away. And he then says that they married her to me because of my good race, which really stood out for me as a phrase, this idea of racial impurity and that they want to marry her to Rochester to bring more hygiene, racial or blood back into the family. And this idea of madness as well being both hereditary and unavoidable. So from the start, Rochester realises very quickly that Bertha is doomed to go mad because her mother was mad. She has a mad brother. Madness is embedded into the family through racial impurity. Yes. And that race in the... This is what you're saying, isn't it? That race, racism is in the mix with madness in the book. They are, as it were, mad because they are racially impure. They have become racially impure because they're mad. There's this sense of the West Indian plantations as this place of corruption and decay. And it's hard not to feel that Charlotte Bromfie is reinforcing those myths. Yes. There's an article by the critic Gayatri Spivak, who's an American postcolonial critic. And in that, she points out that in all the criticism of Jane Eyre, in all the scholarly work on Jane Eyre, which focuses on Jane as this iconic figure of a kind of fully realised female subjectivity in the 19th century novel, Bertha Mason, Antoinette Mason, is basically paying the price for Jane and her realisation of subjectivity. So Spivak talks about how Jane Eyre and all subsequent texts have reproduced what she calls the axioms of imperialism. And the axioms of imperialism are that a white woman's subjectivity is always paramount. And so she sees Bertha Mason, Bertha Rochester, as this indeterminate figure, part human, part animal, who she describes as a self-immolating colonial subject. So Spivak's point is basically that, you know, however you spin it, the colonies remain in Jane Eyre and beyond as this site of atrocity, site of disgrace, that can't be looked at fully and where they will always come second to the subjectivity of a white person born in England, even when that person, like Jane Eyre, has come out of poverty or neglect or a kind of abused background in England. So, you know, all this is to say that the presence of the Caribbean, the presence of the West Indies in English literature has, I think, always been this very contentious, very volatile way for writers, really from the very beginning of the novel, to represent this place that is both alluring and horrifying. It's immensely rich, and yet it also seems to be decaying. It's a place of great promise and newness, and yet at the same time, it's a place of great violence and oppression of other humans. And these things, we speak about them much more now, but they were certainly known at the time. Yes, I remember studying English literature at university and there was an idea that the empire, the British empire in the novel is always pushed off to one side, but actually it's always there. Absolutely. And I think one of the things I've heard you talk about before, Sophie, is the idea that the novel in England comes into being for all sorts of reasons and technological reasons, but it also comes into being partly as a way of processing the imperial endeavor that Britain has embarked upon. Because how do you imagine these places far away that you are taking ownership over if you don't have an imaginative way of both occupying them, but also rationalizing what's happening? Rationalizing and occupying, absolutely. Thank you so much for bringing that up, Chanti. Yes, so the first novels in English, Robinson Crusoe famously, and perhaps a bit less famously, Afra Ben's novel set in Suriname, Orinoco, and then a series of novels across the 18th and 19th centuries set in the West Indies and other South American and areas of Africa. And as I said in the episode on Bronte, we can think of the novel as this technology for getting inside people's minds, inside people's heads. You know, it's an expression of curiosity. It's also kind of an expression of crisis because at the beginning of the 18th century, the British state suddenly realizes that it's coming into contact with these vast numbers of human subjects whose inner lives, whose cultural beliefs and interior sort of makeup and sense of themselves in the world is completely different from a Western European model itself. And I think that's in there. And Rhys is unpacking all of that in Wide Sargasso Sea, and I would want to make the case that so is Bronte, actually, in Jane Eyre. The mad woman in the attic is just one half of the way through. And so there's this other, towards the end of the novel, when Jane Eyre has to leave Rochester. She discovers he's already got a wife. She can't stay with him. She has this destitute period and ends up living with a family in a house called Moor House, which is in some malls. And it's very much like Charlotte Bronte's own family home. But she introduces the character of St. John Rivers, who turns out to be a long-lost cousin. And St. John Rivers is an evangelical missionary. He's preparing to head off to the East and bring Christianity to what he perceives as the heathens of Eastern countries. And one of the ways of making sense of this whole twist in the plot at the end is that Bertha has come from the West Indies. St. John is going off on a civilizing mission to the East. And Yorkshire is a kind of pivot in between. It is a balancing point in between. But I don't really understand what Charlotte Bronte is doing with that whole St. John. It feels to me significant. It feels to me that she's introducing him as a counterpoint to the story of Bertha, the madwoman in the attic. But I don't quite understand what she's doing or how she's doing it. That's a really great thing to bring up because St. John gets the last word of Jane Eyre, doesn't he? And these aren't the words that he closes on. But what he says about his missionary ambitions are that he wants to improve the race. He says that he has hopes of being numbered in the band who have merged all ambitions in the glorious one of bettering their race. Now that's, you know, you wouldn't get away with that kind of talk now. But it's back to Rochester being married because of his quote, good race. That's exactly right. And so it becomes very, it becomes much more ambiguous as to what Bronte's position was on sort of the ongoing nature of empire and Britain's involvement in colonization and the oppression and marginalization of non-whites and non-Christians. So, you know, again, to go back to this critic Spivak, she says that the ending of Jane Eyre is actualized by the unquestioned idiom of imperialist presuppositions. And so to kind of take that out of academic language and put it into podcast language, I think what she's kind of saying is that, yes, Bronte has Bertha Mason come back to Yorkshire and burn the house down. Yes, there is a sort of the empire exacts a certain kind of revenge in Jane Eyre, but the closing vision is actually one in which empire must go on, in which, you know, the missionary goes back out into the savage lands and converts people to God. And as often with endings, they end a text, but do they actually close the text? Did they actually get the last word? Are St. John's words a little bit ironic at the end of Jane Eyre? Are we supposed to think, oh, my goodness, this cycle starting again? So my worry when I reread it, I was so struck by St. John having the last words of Jane Eyre. And my worry was that Charlotte Bronte was on board, is on board. And the idea that, yes, St. John is going out on a mission, a civilizing mission to increase racial purity and to somehow, through this act, correct the sin that had led to Bertha's existence and Bertha's marriage to Rochester. There is a horrible strain of ideas of racial hygiene running through Jane Eyre. And I can't make sense of the St. John character or the ending of the book with St. John having those last words, except by believing that Charlotte Bronte is buying into that and trying to make a point. Well, the only, the other way to approach that would be to say that what Charlotte Bronte is asking readers to notice is that empire goes in cycles, that the abolition in the West Indies and the end of the sugar trade has simply opened up the opportunity for a new cycle of colonial development and oppressive extractive productivity somewhere, manufacturing somewhere else. And that St. John, as the sort of avatar of the Christian word, we're actually supposed to see those sections of the novel with some irony or at least some scepticism. That would be another way to read it. But there are enough clues in Jane Eyre that Bronte is highly critical of the enterprise of empire and the enterprise of racial correction to invite us to be quite critical of St. John as well. And St. John is not a hugely sympathetic character. I would imagine that Charlotte Bronte wasn't entirely sure what she was doing either. It's very easy to look back now, isn't it? And think that she had assurance. Yes. I mean, you know, she's writing it in Haworth's Parsonage. She's writing it under her father's roof. He's a clergyman. She's been brought up as a believer. There's a lot of God in Jane Eyre for all the ungodliness. So the sense that Christianity was a saving faith, I think is probably kicking around. There is a lot and there is a lot that Jean Rhys is going to have to try and make sense of. Yeah, so let's get back to her. So Sophie, we are running out of time. I think we're going to need to split this episode on the Wide Saga SoC into two parts. And I think our cliffhanger is that we've looked at the early part of Jean Rhys's life. We've looked at how she's developed her writing career and begun to wrestle with her identity, that feeling of constant alienation, not feeling at home, either in the Caribbean or in Europe. And we've also looked at how she feels there is a wrong in Jane Eyre that needs addressing. And we've looked at all those issues of colonialism and race in the context of Jane Eyre. What we're going to do in the second episode is get into how Rhys is going to tackle that. And we're going to look at whether she succeeds or not. That's a great cliffhanger, Jonty. Gosh, we've done a lot in an hour, haven't we? We have done a lot. I hope that comes through. So you've been listening to The Secret Life of Books.
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