Perhaps Jane sees what she wants to see because she loves him, but that is her decision to make. She loves him, woman in the attic or not. She decides what she thinks about Rochester, and what she will and will not put up with.
She refuses to be anything less than his wife and his intellectual equal and she does not compromise on what she wants. It’s bad.īut it’s not my opinion of Rochester that matters it’s Jane’s. Either way, Rochester keeps her locked in an attic. Maybe she’s crazy and dangerous, or maybe she’s smart and angry and homesick and heartbroken. Was he good, we want to know, or was he bad? Was he a decent man who made a mistake or a misogynist monster? Yes, these questions are worth discussing, but I am much more interested in Jane than I am in Rochester. What irks me, though, is how much of this discussion revolves around Rochester. It falls short in some regards, the most glaring one being the woman in the attic. Jane Eyre is a remarkable feminist achievement.
Wide Sargasso Sea does not make sense without it. Important and/or worthwhile, yes, but, given the way the book is structured, and who actually tells most of the story–not radical.īefore I get into what I found problematic about Wide Sargasso Sea, let me take a moment to discuss Jane Eyre. This might be a truthful depiction of the world at a certain time and place–the postcolonial Caribbean–but it’s unclear to me why simply reflecting this fact in a novel is especially feminist. In Wide Sargasso Sea, just about everyone–except for Mr. It felt, to me, like a meditation on exploitation–of women, of poor people, of indigenous people, of black people. In many ways, I think it has to do as much with the conversation surrounding the novel as the book itself: it’s lauded as a feminist book, and yet, to me, it felt decidedly un-feminist. But Wide Sargasso Sea was disappointing.įor weeks I’ve been trying to figure out why I disliked this book so much. I was hoping Wide Sargasso Sea would enter into a conversation with Jane Eyre. It’s such a good hook for a novel: to give voice to the voiceless woman in the attic. I finally read Jane Eyre last winter, and it completely blew me away.
I’ve been putting off writing this review for weeks, because I really disliked this novel. It’s hard for me to figure out where to start with this one.
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