Wide Sargasso Sea (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

The publication and wide critical acclaim of Wide Sargasso Sea returned Rhys to the spotlight. Her earlier popularity had faded, and her previous publications had gone out of print, leaving Rhys so lost to her public that most people thought she had died. Wide Sargasso Sea, having won two prestigious awards and being praised by literary critics as well as Rhys's general readers, caught everyone by surprise. After that, Wide Sargasso Sea remained popular. It has become, wrote a Christian Science Monitor critic, "Rhys's most famous novel." The novel portrays the plight of women, a theme that is recurrent in many of Rhys's works. The same Christian Science Monitor critic, for example, went on to state that all Rhys's female protagonists could be described in a similar way: "[T]he typical Jean Rhys heroine is a feminist's nightmare: a textbook illustration of what not to be." This view has not dissuaded feminist critics from exploring Rhys's work, however. Quite the contrary, even though Celia Marshik, writing for Studies in the Novel, claims that Rhys is "an insistent anti-feminist" who nonetheless has "created texts that feminists have claimed as their own."

Although many describe Rhys's female characters as weak and prone to acting out the role of victim, critic Jan Curtis states otherwise. Writing for Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Curtis believes that "[e]ach Rhys heroine struggles to heave herself out of the wide Sargasso sea found in every Rhys novel." Curtis goes on: "It is not until Wide Sargasso Sea that the Rhys heroine overcomes the Sargasso and discovers her strength in a fallen world of fractured consciousness and failed relationships by overcoming what [Wilson] Harris's narrator [in Palace of the Peacock] describes as the 'need in the world to provide a material nexus to bind the spirit of the universe.'"

It is hard to define Rhys, Marshik found. And rather than pigeonhole the author, Marshik concluded that Rhys "is a writer who seems to belong everywhere and nowhere." The reason for a resurgent interest in Rhys and her works, according to Tara Pepper, writing for Newsweek, is due in part to the fact that Rhys's "contemporaries were uneasy about her morally ambiguous, fractured characters and the seedy world she dwelt in, as well as wrote about." Pepper believes that Rhys's characters were too strange for the general public (especially British readers) to accept at a time when "inhabitants of former colonies were still considered culturally inferior." Today, Rhys's characters are better understood.

Wide Sargasso Sea, writes Dennis Porter for the Massachusetts Review, is "unlike her other novels with a contemporary setting," because it is based on another work of art (Jane Eyre). Although this influence strongly affected the way Rhys wrote her novel and, therefore, is not a "fully autonomous novel," it does, however, achieve "its purpose because it is a remarkable work of art in its own right." The story is written, states Porter, in a language that is lyrical, "a functional lyricism that incorporates both beauty and terror and simultaneously defines the limited consciousness of the two narrators."