Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Published 1966 · 192 pages · 47,472 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Feminist Literature, Literary Fiction, Postcolonial Literature

How hard is Wide Sargasso Sea to read?

Wide Sargasso Sea scores 64 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 60 out of 100
Rhys writes in lyrical, sensory prose that captures the Caribbean with dreamlike intensity. The vocabulary is precise but strange, with the language itself seeming to dissolve stable meaning as the novel progresses.
Sentence structure: 65 out of 100
Sentences are often short and fragmentary, building through accumulation of images and sensations. Rhys's prose has the rhythm of consciousness under pressure, breaking down as Antoinette's world breaks down.
Abstraction: 72 out of 100
The novel explores colonialism, madness, and belonging through Antoinette Cosway, a white Creole woman in post-emancipation Jamaica who becomes the 'madwoman in the attic' from Jane Eyre. Rhys gives voice to the woman Rochester silenced, revealing what made her and what destroyed her.
Information density: 55 out of 100
Post-emancipation Jamaica, the textures of Creole life, and the collision of Caribbean and English worlds layer through the narrative. Rhys builds her world through accumulated attention to obeah, fire, and the lush natural world that both shelters and threatens.
Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
The split narration between Antoinette and Rochester reveals their different understandings of the same events. The reader must track both perspectives while recognizing what each cannot see about the other.
Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
Fire becomes symbolic of both destruction and liberation. The red dress becomes symbolic of passion that will be caged. Coulibri becomes symbolic of the paradise that cannot be recovered.
Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
Rhys maintains close, devastating proximity to Antoinette's consciousness while exposing Rochester's limitations. The novel is angry about what colonialism does to the colonized while showing how it damages the colonizer.
Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
The novel ends where Jane Eyre begins, with Antoinette about to set the fire. Rhys offers the completion that is also destruction, the resolution that Jane Eyre denied.
Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
The split narrative and intertextual relationship with Jane Eyre create demanding reading. The novel requires tracking both voices while understanding how Rhys rewrites Brontë's classic.

How Wide Sargasso Sea is regarded

Wide Sargasso Sea holds a literary regard score of 84 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where Wide Sargasso Sea sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (85 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Wide Sargasso Sea scores 88 out of 100. A second mythos, tragedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
What am I doing in this place and who am I?
Symbol: Formal
Then I turned round and saw the sky. It was red and all my life was in it.
Mythos: Irony vi (Visio Malefica) (irony vi)
I laughed when I saw the lovely colour spreading so fast, but I did not stay to watch it.
Genre: Confession + Romance
There is no looking-glass here and I don’t know what I am like now.

Where the story of Wide Sargasso Sea takes place

  • Jamaica and Dominica after the 1833 Emancipation Act (1834 to 1845), the main setting
  • Coulibri Estate and Spanish Town, Jamaica, after Emancipation, to 1839 (1834 to 1840)
  • Granbois, Windward Islands honeymoon estate, c.1840 (1840 to 1841)
  • Thornfield Hall attic, England, 1840s (1841 to 1847)

6 things that are true of Wide Sargasso Sea, with the passage for each

  1. The mob at Coulibri sets fire to the house, and the family's green parrot Coco burns alive in front of them.

    He made an effort to fly down but his clipped wings failed him and he fell screeching. He was all on fire.

  2. The convent embroidery gives the year 1839 and names Mount Calvary Convent in Spanish Town.

    Antoinette Mason, née Cosway, Mount Calvary Convent, Spanish Town , Jamaica, 1839.

  3. The husband says he was paid thirty thousand pounds for marrying Antoinette.

    The thirty thousand pounds have been paid to me without question or condition.

  4. Daniel Cosway asks the husband for five hundred pounds to keep silent.

    What is five hundred pounds to you?

  5. The husband insists on calling Antoinette 'Bertha', and she objects that it is not her name.

    ‘My name is not Bertha; why do you call me Bertha?’

  6. The last paragraph has Antoinette take her keys and candle, declare that she knows what she has to do, and walk down the passage.

    Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do.

Scenes in Wide Sargasso Sea that Frye would name

45 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, untitled
Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do. The final recognition pivots the story into the fire.
Anagnorisis, untitled
We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass. Antoinette recognises herself in Tia, the mirrored other, at the moment of rupture.
Analogy of innocence, untitled
Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible – the tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild. A fallen Eden garden of the pre-lapsarian childhood, a vegetable world of innocence in decay.
Agon, untitled
Some of them were laughing and waving sticks, some of the ones at the back were carrying flambeaux and it was light as day. The mob confronts the Cosway household on the night Coulibri burns, the first contest in the book.
Pathos, untitled
‘He died on the way down, the poor little boy,’ she said. Pierre's death is the sacrificial loss that breaks the mother.
Pharmakos, untitled
So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all. She names her position as outcast of both white and black communities.

Books that share these scenes with Wide Sargasso Sea

About the author

Jean Rhys