A Second Home by Honore de Balzac (1830 - A Novella - A Component of the Human Comedy)

My Posts on Balzac

A Second Home, a short novella, is a very melodramatic work that contrasts two Parisian families, one rich and loveless and one poor and full of warmth and kindness.  The common factor in the two families is Comte de Granville.  The Comte, from a very wealthy aristocratic family was pushed into a marriage arranged for dynastic purposes far before he was ready.   When we meet him he is maybe forty and there is no love and no passion (Balzac makes it obvious there is no sex) left in his marriage.  On the way home from his office he often prefers to walk and his path takes him through one of the poorest parts of Paris.  He often sees an elderly woman and her beautiful daughter.  They are clearly destitute living from their meager income as embroiderers.  One day the Comte hears the mother say they will soon be evicted.  The Comte throws his money filled purse through the window.  Compressing a lot he soon comes to find in the girl the warmth his life lacks.  He would rather eat a pauper's dinner with Caroline and her mother, who was once an aristocrat, than dine in his mansion on elegant cuisine. I am not sure why Balzac felt he needed to make the mother a fallen aristocrat.  Fifteen years pass and Caroline is living in a luxurious apartment with her and the Comte's two children.  

Balzac does his usual great job describing the eniviorment.  The poor parts of Paris came very a life.  In a very exciting scene the wife has tracked him to his second home and things go very badly for the Comte and Caroline when wife arrives in his second home.  

A Second Home is early Balzac.  The very strong elements are in the descriptions of people and the slums.  The weakness is in the romance.  The bad marriage is totally perfect.  I liked A Second Home a lot.  

I am now reading Vendetta, about Corsican family fights.  Napolean is in the first chapter!  

25 of 91

Mel u

  

Waiting for the Bullet - Short Fiction by Madeleine D'Arcy (2014)

Short Listed for The Edge Hill 2015 Prize for Short Fiction

"A story is an apocalypse, served in a small cup".  Hortense Calisher

My Q and A With Madeleine  D'Arcy. Author of Waiting for the Bullet

Doire Press - Publisher of the Best of Contemporary Irish Literature 

Waiting for the Bullet, the marvelous debut collection of Madeleine D'Arcy, is a beautifully written highly perceptive set of stories about relationships in times of transition, in periods darked by social and economic stresses and personal crisis.  The stories are set mostly in Ireland but they allow us to see the universal in the particular.  D'Arcy has a keen eye for small nuances in relationships.  She helps us understand the built in paradoxes in relationships that often bring them to an end, the tension between the craving for a partner that excites you, gives you a sense of the edge and one that provided stability and affection.  You can see this strongly in the amazing story "The Fox and the Placenta".  In writing on Irish fiction over the last few years I have been guided by the ideas of Declan Kiberd in terms of a post-colonial reading of Irish literature and I see repeated manifestations of the theme of they weak or missing father in these profound stories.   D'Arcy helps us see the humanity in others, one of the greatest benefits of deep stories.  I think another great story teller from Cork, Frank O'Connor, would have been an admiring reader of Waiting for the Bullet.  

I find reviewing short story collections very challenging.  Often the stories were written not for the collection but simply placed there.  When we read the stories as a group, one impacts the other, stories bleed into each other.  Most reviewers of short stories simply use a few metaphorical terms to apply to the collection and then write a line or two on a few stories.  To me this is not really a much service to potential readers or fully respectful of the artist.  I try to give enough coverage of at least half of the stories in a collection to convey a sense of the work.

I endorse without reservations of any kind Waiting for the Bullet to all lovers of a suberbly crafted short story.  The stories are beautifully written, at times nearly heartbreakingly sad, funny and not without some interesting sexual scenarios.  There is Irish slang in the stories and I enjoyed that a lot.

"Clocking Out"

"Then I see it trailing along behind me, slithering along the foot path like a big slug"

"Clocking Out", the lead story in Waiting for the Bullet, does superbly what first rate fiction at it's best does.  It forces us to see the humanity in people we try not to notice as we make our way around the city.  In just a few masterful pages Arcy takes us deeply into the life of a still young woman, not very smart, not too pretty.  She had a job nobody would take if they could get anything else, working in a factory as an assembler.   She overhears her mother tell someone she is lucky to have the job.  I really don't want to tell more of the plot of the story.  Their is a very visual scene where we are on the tube 

(the subway or city train) with the woman.  She looks at a smartly dressed couple and her thoughts brought me a great feeling of sadness when you feel the inferiority society has forced her to internalize.  

There is a starkly brutal event at the heart of this story, one that made perfect sense.  "Clocking Out" is a wonderful story fully in the tradition, as my limited knowledge sees it, of the Irish short story.

"Hole in the Bucket"

"It's 5.32 PM and I'm going home on the rattaling oxygen starved Piccadily Tube Line"

"Hole in the Bucket" makes an interesting pairing with "Clocking Out".  A good bit of both stories takes place on a London Tube ride, for starters.  "Hole in the Bucket" is about a woman mentally and financially secure people try not to notice on the tube.  "Hole in the Bucket" tells us what happens when Leanne, an office worker who recently ended a long relationship, see a woman she has has not seen for eight years or so.  They were teenagers together.  The other woman is now begging for money in the tube, singing horribly.  Leanne wonders if she should speak to her on slip off the train.  She makes the mistake of speaking and we see how different they now are when her old acquaintance turns on her.

We also sense an emptiness in Leanne's life, both women have their involvements with unreliable men.  Drink is a big factor in the story.  In just a few pages D'Arcy takes us into two very different lives.  

"Salvage"

"Salvage", like the prior two stories, focuses on someone recently out of a relationship and on how the breakup impacts them.   Only in this case our subject is a man.  Vincent's wife was a doctor.  She was not just successful she was beautiful.   At the start of the relationship Vincent made great money as a fire hazard inspector.  He was riding high on the rise in the Irish economy, the Celtic Tiger.  When the construction trade dropped way down, his income collapsed.  His wife basically got tired of paying all the bills and told him to leave. After some looking he finds a place in a  house with a room to rent.  This story is really a slice of a few days of life, not a problem solving life changing story.  Vincent adjusts to life in the house and becomes friends slowly with the land lady.  A cat plays a part in the story and that is a plus.  Alcohol, ever present in Irish literature, plays a part.  "Salvage" is an excellantly done story and the ending is moving.  I liked it a lot.

"Waiting for the Bullet" 

"I told myself that relationships were like economies, that they were cyclical things, with peaks and troughs".  

"Waiting for the Bullet", the title story of the collection, centers on a married couple aged about forty, going through a bit of a recession in their relationship.  You can see reflected in the literature of this century the impact of the decline of the Irish economy on relationships.  The couple are comfortable financially, the husband, the wife narrates the story, is in the building trade.  One day he brings home a very real looking toy gun.  His wife is shocked until she finds it is not real.  It makes a sound like a real gun when fired.   Compressing a bit, one evening they have couple over for dinner, the husband's clients, and the gun becomes the center of focus.   I don't want to tell too much more of the plot but the close  is very powerful.  D'Arcy does a suberb job of letting us see the dynamics of the marriage and gets us inside the mind of the wife.  Like the other stories, alcohol plays a big part in "Waiting for the Bullet".   

"Wolf Note"

"Wolf Note" is a very well done story about a married man cheating  on his wife for the first time.  Eddie is forty and owns his own company.  Christmas is approaching and his wife sends him a text message saying he needs to play Santa at the party for their children.  He and his wife exchange some texts as he doesn't feel like doing it but he agrees to do it to avoid an argument.  In the mean time his bachelor man about  town friend with a reputation as a ladies' man  invites him for a night out with the guys.  He wants to go but of course his wife does not like the idea.  The plot action is very interesting, a bit erotic, and I certainly learned something about cellos I did not know.  The story was a lot of fun to read and it is a good portrait of a marriage that still endures but might have seen better days.  Alcohol helps fuel the action.  

"Housewife of the Year"

"Housewife of the Year" is a fascinating rather frightening story that totally drew me into the world of the narrator, an Irish woman we first meet when she is in high school and with whom we part ways with at twenty nine.  Every year there is an Ireland wide contest for the title of "Housewife of the Year".  Her mother, a widow who runs the family hardware store, pretty much hates her five kids but she puts on a good act on the TV show finals and wins.  As soon as the children can, the narrator is the youngest, they leave home and move either to America or Australia.  The mother tells the narrator she cannot leave but she gets a civil service job, finds a man, and moves to Dublin.  I jus rio not want to spoil this story for first time readers but it takes two and I see a third shocking turn coming.  The very real power in this story comes from the brief undercurrents from which we must try to understand the narrator's actions.  This can be seen as another story about the missing Irish father.  This is a disturbing look at the dark side of family life.  We wonder what terrible memories destroyed so much.

"The Fox and the Placenta"

"The Fox and the Placenta" had me at the title.  There are two main onstage characters, a woman nine months pregnant and due right now and her boyfriend, who may or may not be the father of her baby.  I learned something I did not know from this story, that London has a lot of wild foxes.  The foxes are a nuisance as they knock over garbage bins.  

Marilyn's current boyfriend Brendan is solidly reliable, considerate and decent.  Her old boyfriend Sam was a "bad boy" sort.  We can see Marilyn kind of wishes for a fusion of the two characters.  In a very cinematic scene, Marilyn goes into labor.  I just cannot spoil this story but Brendan kind of becomes a bit of the wilder man Marilyn craves in a conflict with the foxes of maybe Marilyn just sees more into him.

Author Bio from http://www.madeleinedarcy.com/

Author Bio

Madeleine D’Arcy was born in Ireland and later spent thirteen years in the UK. She worked as a criminal legal aid solicitor and as a legal editor in London before returning to Cork City in 1999 with her husband and son. She began to write short stories in 2005.

In 2010 she received a Hennessy X.O Literary Award for First Fiction as well as the overall Hennessy X.O Literary Award for New Irish Writer.


One of her stories came joint-second in the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen Short Story Competition 2011. Her work has been short-listed and commended in many other competitions, including the Fish Short Story Prize, the Bridport Prize (UK), and the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Competition.

Publications in which her work has appeared include: Sunday Tribune; Made in Heaven and Other Short Stories; Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails (Stinging Fly Press, Ireland); Irish Examiner;Necessary Fiction; Irish Independent; Irish Times; The Penny Dreadful; Long Story Short; Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts;Short Story (University of Texas, Brownsville); and Unbraiding the Short Story (Ed. Maurice A Lee, University of Arkansas). Other stories are scheduled for publication in Surge: New Writing From Ireland (O’Brien Press, November 2014) and in The Quarryman (Bradshaw Books, April 2015).

A short film of Madeleine’s story ‘Dog Pound’, featuring the distinguished Irish actor Frank Kelly, was premièred at the Hennessy Literary Awards in April 2014 and will be screened at Waterfordand  Film Festival 2014.

She has been awarded bursaries by the Arts Council of Ireland and by Cork City Council, and was the scholarship student on the inaugural Masters Degree in Creative Writing at University College Cork.

I loved Waiting for the Bullet and look forward to reading much more of the work of Madeleine D'Arcy.

Gertrude by Hermann Hesse (1915)

German Literature Month November 2014 Year IV

Works I have so far read for German Literature Month 2014

1.   Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

The schedule and guidelines for participation are on the event webpage.  Just reading the  posts of all the other participants is tremendously informative. 

I am very happy to be once again participating in German Literature Month, hosted by Caroline of Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Lizzy of Lizzy's Literary Life.   Events like this are one of the great things about being part of the international book blog community.  I know there is a lot of work that goes into a month long event and I offer my thanks to Lizzy and Caroline.

This is "Award Winner Week" on German Literature Month.  In 1946 Hermann Hesse (1877 to 1962) won the Nobel Prize and the Goethe Prize.  Having just read and posted on his Siddhartha I planned to reread his Steppenwolf.  Looking through the books by Hesse on Amazon I saw a recently translated work I had not previously heard of, Gertrude, so I decided to give it a try. 

In his introduction Thomas Fassano says the book is "disappointing" and I for sure agree.  It is the story of the career of a young musician, a writer of violin sonatas and operas.  His character is never made interesting.  I am seeing a "fault" in Hesse.  Why does a woman have to be conventionally beautiful to be worthy of love, for her opinions to be of interest?  For a writer who deals with the search for wisdom and esoteric knowledge, this seem very commonplace to me.  The central character develops a relationship with a music producer and famous performer who guides him but I found nothing of much interest in it. He falls in love with Gertrude but she is involved with the music master. Of course much space is devoted to devoted to the beauty of Gertrude.   We see the narrator's family life but that still disappointed.  I am glad I have read another Hesse work.

I would say unless you are determined to read all the Hesse you can, I goal I respect, read his better known works first.  

I am rereading after a decades long hiatus Stepphenwolf.  I am enjoying it.  As I read Hesse I am influenced by memories of where I was in my life when I first encountered his work.

Mel u

 

The Ball at Sceaux by Honore de Balzac (1830 -A Novella - A Component of the Human Comedy)

My Posts on Balzac

The Ball at Sceaux, the fifth work in The Comedie Humaine, was inspired by a fable of La Fontaine. I tremendously enjoyed this brief novella.  The central character is Emile de Fontaine, the youngest and very spoiled daughter of a wealthy family.  Having three daughters that would, were we in France (or the Philippines for sure) in 1830 be of prime marriage age I could directly rate to the father's efforts to make sure his two sons and three daughters are properly married.  The portrait of the spoiled daughter is totally perfect, a miniature gem of the vast Balzacian universe.  Balzac goes into scrumptious detail laying out the behaviour of the daughter and her appearance.   He got the character of the spoiled baby daughter of the family exactly right.  You could feel her tyrany over the family.  She is very close to her  elderly uncle, a former admiral and a noble man, whom she bullies about knowing he can deny her nothing. He is a great minor character, still full of life. She has strict demands for a future husband, no one in the family circle of acquaintances is handsome enough, rich enough or has the potential to be a peer of France, one of her requirements.  You can sense the frustration of all and you feel she is enjoying her power.

As I mentioned before, one of the very frequent characters types in the early 19th century novel is the handsome young commoner who latter is revealed to secretly be very rich aristocrat from a family of ancient nobility.  A mysterious young man very secretive about his family and past enters the scene.  Emile quickly becomes infatuated with him.  He enters the family circle through the efforts of the uncle who sees him as a good match based on his bearing.  The uncle is a great comic secondary character.  Balzac describes vividly all his characters and I liked the uncle a lot.  

One day she sees the man working in a shop and loves turns to contempt.  She has no interest in a common shop keeper.  No real spoiler here but the mysterious msn turns out to be fabulously wealthy and from one of the finest families in France, but by the time this is revealed Emile had already married her uncle.

The very real greatness of the story is in the portrait of the spoiled daughter, a domestic terrorist and family tyrant of the first order and the family dynamics.  Balzac gives his normal wonderful descriptions of furniture and clothing. The ending is interesting even if straight out of the standard plots of the period.   

The Ball at Sceaux is a very good work.  It could be enjoyed by all, not just those reading the full Human Comedy.

24/91

Mel u

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse (1922)

German Literature Month November 2014 Year IV

The schedule and guidelines for participation are on the event webpage.  Just reading the  posts of all the other participants is tremendously informative. 

I am very happy to be once again participating in German Literature Month, hosted by Caroline of Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Lizzy of Lizzy's Literary Life.   Events like this are one of the great things about being part of the international book blog community.  I know there is a lot of work that goes into a month long event and I offer my thanks to Lizzy and Caroline.

I'm pretty sure Herman Hesse was the first author

 from Germany I ever read, besides Grimm's Fairy Tales, way back in the long ago.  Steppenwolf was the first novel by Hesse I read, Siddhartha" was the second.  I went on to read a few more novels by Hesse.  

Siddhartha was a near holy text in the so called "counter cultural years" of the 1960s.  Rereading it now is a very different experience.  Siddhartha was a book for youngish intellectuals seeking "eastern wisdom", things not taught in American and European academies.  There were many guru like figure at the time, people were searching for a truth beyond materialism, outside of mainstream thought.   People looked to the "mysteries of the east" for overarching philosophies.  Now I see this as epitomizing Orientalism.  I do not like guru figures and I distrust grand philosophical structures, other than for their artistic value.  

Works like Shiddhartha, not meaning to at all, helped open the path in Germany for a philosophical creed allegedly based in part on "Ancient occult wisdom" as explicated to the believing masses by a guru, one designed to solve all problems.   

The plot seems a bit clichéd  now.  Some of the philosophical reflections are interesting. Once I thought this was a great book, full of wisdom.   In part I still felt that. I acknowledge I cannot really separate my reading of the book now from my memories of reading it long ago.  I think about the lost reading life companions with whom I first shared this book.  I am glad I reread it.  Next I will read Hesse's Gertrude, a translated for the first time in 2013 novel.

Mel u

Letters of Two Brides by Honore de Balzac (1841, An Epistolary Novel - A Component of The Human Comedy)

"His novels, in spite of their extraordinary close tissue, all betray the want of leisure of the author". -  Henry James

My Posts on Balzac

Letters from Two Brides is an epistolary novel told in sixtyseven  letters, mostly between two young women who spent the years nine to eighteen attending a convent school. The letters cover about fifteen years in their lives.    It was serialized in a newspaper before publication as a whole.  It may not, OK is not, on a par with Clarissa but it very much worth reading and not just because Balzac wrote it.  If I had been a newspaper subscriber in 1841 I would have eagerly read all the letters to see what happens next.

The letters begin shortly after Loiuse and Renne leave the convent school and return home to their families.  The girls have had little family contact besides an occasional letter and maybe a once a year visit.  The girls are both, of course, very pretty and you can see Balzac had a lot of fun describing them!  

Louise's family lives in Paris and is quite  rich with a fortune going back generations.  Louise barely knows her parents and brothers and we see in her letters to Renee that she is initially overwhelmed by the glamour of her parents.  The portrair of her thirty eight year old mother that emerges in the letters is a tribute to the comic genius of Balzac.  The mother is described in great detail and is very beautiful and sexually alluring. The daughter is at first intimidated by her mother.  The mother's time is taken up with a constant flurry of social events and operas.  It is obvious she is what is called in the American slang of 2014, a "cougar", an older woman seeking out much younger male lovers but the daughter only very belatedly catches on to this.  A lot happens in the novel, the serialized format pretty much dictates a lot of cliffhangers, and of course love and marriage dominate the letters.  The father at first wants Louise to become a nun so her money, her grandmother left her a fortune, so her brothers can have her money but she refuses this option.  As I mentioned in a prior post on Balzac, his work seems to contain a lot of seemingly impoverished people who turn out to be rich nobility.  Much of the opening letters from Louise are taken up with a description of her family home and her gradual metamorphism from shy convent school girl to beautiful high society young woman.  Balzac skillfully lets us see her own sense of her sexuality and personality emerge in the course of the letters.   Loiuse has two marriages, she was widowed at 24 from her marriage to a Spanish nobleman, lots of standard melodrama. She at twenty seven marries a poet younger than her  and forces money on him to support his work.   This relationship is not that well developed but the ending action was very good and I bet contemporary subscribers loved it.  The close out of her life at twenty seven might either seem heartbreaking or it might make you realize Balzac was trying to get as much emotion in this as he could.  

 

Renne  is from a much less affluent but still comfortable family, poor girls did not normally go to convent school.  She is more practical, less controlled by romantic impulses and is kind of the voice of reason in her letters to Loiuse.  The women are very close and tell each other their most intimate thoughts.  Renne marries a hard working man and has three children. Overtime she learns to love the man who does rise up to be a peer of France.  In a way Louise is the city, Renne the country.

There are also short letters from others in the novel, I enjoyed those a lot.  The longest letter took about seven minutes to read and many are much shorter.

The faults in this novel center around the romances of Louise.  Somehow they don't quite work and the fact that her Spanish tutor seemingly in poverty turns out to be a wealthy aristocrat who regains his fortune is kind of pot boiler stuff.  The romance with the younger poet could have been a lot better developed.  The strengths of this novel, which way out way the flaws, are in seeing the characters of the girls emerge, seeing them grow from naive convent girls to women, I wondered if Loiuse ever figured out her mother had lovers, and the descriptions of Louise's house, the furniture, the food, and if course the concerns over money.  The friendship of the girls was very real for me.  In many ways the epistolary format forced Balzac to show rather than tell us things.   

I liked Letters from Two Brides quite a bit.  I guess it had to be melodramatic to be an initial success.  I think it would be enjoyed by anyone who enjoys epistolary letters.  The preface to the first English translation was written by Henry James.  

23/91

If you have a favorite Balzac, please share your thoughts with us.

I have now begun a short novella inspired by a fable of La Fontaine.

Mel u

"Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys. Reflections on Second Reading

This post is a slightly edited version of the post I did the first time I read Wide Sargasso Sea, January, 2010. The first time I read it I sucked it up as fast as I could.  This second read i took more time reading it over a month long period. In the hiatus between treads   I have focused a lot on post colonial literature and if I were to do another calmer post today I would talk more on that.  

Wide Sargasso Sea is a work of great depth, born of pain, loneliness and inhabited by old  magic.  In it you will find no answers, only see deeper darker mysteries, if you open yourself to it.   

Many who commented on my first post said Rhys got the character of Edward Rochester all wrong.  I am now very willing to say she got it totally right and in the doing of this we can find the unraveling of much of the evils of colonialism, of western forms, of the craving of women to be dominated.  

I also noticed in the speech patterns an underlying resemblance to older Anglo-Irish dialect.  

The beauty of the prose is overwhelming.  The closing sections where we see descent into madness is at least equal to The Bell Jar.  

Below is my slightly edited original posts with a few pictures and quotes added.

I invite all comments and welcome dissent.  I know the extreme importance of Jane Eyre.

Wide Sargasso Sea  by Jean Rhys (1966, 150 pages-Penguin books-with an introduction and notes by Angela Smith.)

“I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its . Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it".

Before I begin my post on Wide Sargasso Sea I must make a preliminary statement.

Wow!!

One book often leads us to another.   When I finished reading Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier  I read the Wikipedia.com article on him.   Jean Rhys is mentioned as one of the many women  he had affairs with, mostly women in the arts and writers.      Ford Madox Ford was her patron and her first stories were published in a literary magazine which Ford edited.   After the six month relationship ended, Rhys wrote a novel, Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, in which a thinly disguised Ford is portrayed in a very negative way.  

Normally I see the life of an author as sort of an interesting side note, not as a central part of our understanding of a book.   I still firmly believe this but I will talk a bit more on Jean Rhys as a person because I think there are important things to be learned from the fusing of her life and work.  

Wide Sargasso Sea  is set in the late 1830s to early 1840s.    The work is a kind of prequel  to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847).    The book is the story of the first Mrs Rochester, the one who winds up as a mad woman.   More than this it is a story of colonialism, relationships between blacks and whites on the island, of men to women, of Europe to its cast off children, of order to chaos.    It is a story of how growing up in a place of wild beauty shapes people.   It is about life on a small island and the sense of place that can produce.   It is about patterns of speech.   Never have I see the spoken words of slavery era people of African descent conveyed in a more beautiful fashion.  (I do not know if the speech patterns and dialect in  the book are accurate.)     It is about love, passion and beauty.

The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, "Because she pretty like pretty self".

Slaves have just been emancipated.   The creoles (as the white residents of the island were called at the time) were to be paid a fee by the British government for their slaves, about half the then market value.  

She was my father's second wife, far too young for him they thought...When I asked her why so few people came to see us, she told us that the road from Spanish Town to Coulibri Estate where we lived was bad and road repairing was now a thing of the past.

“Very soon she'll join all the others who know the secret and will not tell it. Or cannot. Or try and fail because they do not know enough. They can be recognized. White faces, dazed eyes, aimless gestures, high-pitched laughter. The way they walk and talk and scream or try to kill (themselves or you) if you laugh back at them. Yes, they've got to be watched. For the time comes when they try to kill, then disappear. But others are waiting to take their places, it's a long, long line. She's one of them. I too can wait—for the day when she is only a memory to be avoided, locked away, and like all memories a legend. Or a lie ...” 

The economy  was based on sugar plantations which were not at the time an economically viable enterprise without slave labor.    The former slaves had no way off the island and no where to go.   Many never in fact left the service of their former owners but we do see the changing dynamics  of power.    In the 1830s there were five classes of people.   The largest class were freed slaves.   The second class were people of mixed heritage.   The narrator Antoinette (of two of the three sections of the book) tells us of the many different terms by which people could be designated by the balance of their racial heritage.   The third group were people of English background whose ancestors arrived after the advent of slavery on the island.   Before there were slaves on the island  it was largely populated by transported convicts and indentured servants.   With the introduction of the sugar plantations, it was became viable as an economic enterprise to import slaves.   The descendants of the first white occupants of the island were commonly called "white cockroaches".   There were also still carib people on the island, though their cultural identity was lost.   Antoinette was a  descendant of pre-slavery days whites.

Above all else Wide Sargasso Sea is about beauty and our ability experience it.

Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible--the tree of life grew there.   But it had gone wild.   The paths were over grown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell...Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched.   One was snaky looking, another like an octopus with long brown tentacles bare of leaves hanging from a twisted root. Twice a year the octopus flower--then not an inch of tentacle showed.   It was a bell shaped mass of white, mauve, deep purples, wonderful to see.   The scent was very sweet and strong.   I never went  near it.

Let us take a second and ponder over this incredible prose.   The island smells of new life and death in the same breath.   There is great beauty there but we cannot really touch it.    There is a pervasive evil in this garden. Is  the snake colonialism and slavery?    Maybe the snake has a name, Mr Rochester.   But this would be too easy.    Rhys is going very deep with this.   The snake is old and slavery is as old as man but the snake is also wise and slavery is not.   Imagine the heroine of an English novel of the 1840 comparing an orchid to an octopus.   When the flower blooms its tentacles do not show.   The tentacles are still there.   There is deep passion in Antoinette to be able to respond to a flower so deeply.   Imagine her misery in the moors.    Why does she never go near the flower when it blooms?    This book has more questions than answers (we can learn more from a good question than a good answer).    The prose in the book is as beautiful as the octopus orchid.    It has tentacles to take us in.    The book smells of beauty but it knows the price this island paid for its beauty.   Like the garden, you sense beauty and death as a pair.

"If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heavens. No more damned magic. You hate me and I hate you. We’ll see who hates best. But first, first I will destroy your hatred. Now. My hate is colder, stronger, and you’ll have no hate to warm yourself. You will have nothing.” 
The novel is divided into three sections.   Part one is narrated by Antoinette, know as Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre.   The reason for the name change is explained  as the narration proceeds.   My reaction to the names is to see Antoinette as a free spirit, perhaps not quite in tune with reality.   Bertha is a grinder of hoe cakes.   (This me only maybe).   Part two is told from the point of view of her husband,  Mr Rochester while they live together as man and wife on the island.

We hear her husband speak of her after a month of marriage.

She held up the skirt of her riding habit and ran across the street.   I watched her critically.   She wore a tricorne hat which became her.   At least it shadowed her eyes which are too large and can be disconcerting.   She never blinks at all it seems to me.   Long, sad, dark, alien eyes.  Creole of pure English descent she may be,  but they are not English or European either.   And when did I begin to notice all this about my wife Antoinette?   After we left Spanish Town I supposed.

Compare this for a second to the passage from the thoughts of the wife I quoted earlier.   Her description of the flowers is overwhelmingly sensual while recasting the experience in a way that sees quickly into the depths of her mythic consciousness.   In the prose of Rochester we see the Imperial style of the colonialist, school master approved prose.   There is talk of Zombies and Obeah all of which very much confuses Mr Rochester.    Here is a conversation he has with an elderly black man, and ex-slave now a servant:

"Is there a ghost, a zombi there, I persisted."

"Dont know nothing about such foolishness"

It was nearly dark when we were on back on the red clay path.   He walked more slowly, turned and smiled to me.   It was as if he's put his service mask on the savage reproachful face I had seen.

This is a very rich book.   The patterns of speech are so exquisite. Here is a passage in which Antoinette is seeking advice from  a former slave woman about her marriage.

All women, all colours, nothing but fools.   Three children I have.   One living in this world, each one a different father, but no husband, I thank my God.  I keep my money.  I don't give it to no worthless man...But look me trouble, a rich white girl like you and you more foolish than the rest.  A man don't treat you good, pick up  your skirt and walk out.   Do it and he come after you.

Stop for a second here.   "Three children I have" is real, speech from the depths.  "I have three children", the speech of the colonial master.    "But look me trouble" compacts several paragraphs worth of Victorian era prose into four words.   Mr Rochester and the other English born whites are annoyed by what they call the ignorant speech patterns of the former slaves and the deeply rooted creoles.   They lack the ability to see the speech patterns of the islanders have roots as least deep as theirs. 

Part three of the novel is narrated by Bertha while she is living in England in the mansion of Mr Rochester.    "Bertha" is the name given her by Mr. Rochester and the narration is through her stream of consciousness.   As the novel proceeds we see her descent into madness.

I must say again the prose is incredibly beautiful.   Wide Sargasso Sea seems like a wild garden gone back to riot but   it is as carefully wrought as The Good Soldier or A Sentimental Education.   There is a tie, in my mind, to the earliest works of Kenzaburo Oe to Wide Sargasso Sea.   Here is what I said in writing on Oe's The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears:


There is a long established literary tradition of using the insane to say what cannot be accepted by those in fully sunlit worlds.    The narrator of  The Day He Himself Shall Wipe Away My Tears has very deep roots in western culture.    His ancestors were in the plays of Euripides, his great grandfather was Dostoevsky's  underground man,   he speaks through Crazy Jane.   Oe has stated that he has come to understand the meaning of his own works through reading the poetry of William Butler Yeats. 

Now I will add Antoinette of Wide Sargasso Sea to this ancestry.   

In her quite brilliant introduction Angela Smith  by a marvelous coincidence (proverbs for paranoids-there are no coincidences) cites Edward Said in his book Culture and Imperialism as stating that classic realist fiction develops in Europe in the 19th century because the power to narrate or block other narratives from forming and emerging is a way of asserting cultural superiority.   Culture and Imperialism is often referenced by Oe as profound analysis of colonialism and the western world's creation of the other in Asian countries.    It is interesting to me to note that Oe's very first works are written in a style unlike Victorian narratives.   As he got older and more educated in a western fashion (he studied French Literature and wrote his dissertation on Sarte) his form became more like the Victorian novel.    We can see in the very different narrative presentation in the parts of the book told by Antoinette, Mr Rochester and lastly Bertha exactly how the notion of acceptable narrative style and speech controls.   Parts of the work do mirror the forms and diction of a Victorian novel, other parts are quite other from this.     

The relevancy of this work to the Woman Unbound Challenge really does not require a supplementary explanation.     Rhys'  life itself is a perfect story for the challenge.  She was born in Dominica in 1890-she moved to England at 16-she published four novels in her 30s.   Then she more or less disappeared for twenty years.    In her introduction Anne Smith says Rhys worked in a series of  "Demi-monde" jobs.  This means she was a nude chorus girl in Paris, an artist model, the companion of rich men (when she was lucky) and in sadness a prostitute.     She disappeared from the public eye around 1940 and her books (four of them) all went  out of print.   (She died in 1979)

Here is a description of the later years of Rhys from a good short biography of her I found online

From 1939 to 1957 Rhys dropped from public attention. Having divorced Lenglet in 1933, she married in 1934 Leslie Tilden-Smith, an editor; he died in 1945. Two years later she married his cousin Max Hamer, a solicitor, who had served a prison term and spent much of their marriage in jail. He died in 1966. With her second husband Rhys retired to Devonshire in 1939. She lived for many years in the West Country, often in great poverty, avoiding literary circles. In 1949 Rhys was arrested for assaulting her neighbors and the police.

Rhys herself was thought to be dead, but after a radio company became interested in her work, she returned to publicity. Her novel Good Morning, Midnight was adapted by the actress Selma Vaz Dias for the BBC. Encouraged by Francis Wyndham, Rhys started to write again, and her short stories were published in the London Magazine and Art and Letters. Rhys continued to live alone in her primitive Devon cottage at Cheriton FitzPaine, drinking heavily but still writing.

There is a recent biography of Ms Rhys, The Blue Hour:A Life of Jean Rhys by Lillian Pizzichini that has gotten good reviews on Amazon.com and Goodreads.com.   I hope to read it once it is out in paperback.  (I have now read this, it is decent - added Npv. 1, 2014)


I somehow imagined Ms Rhys making her way to a seat in the literary Pantheon.   I imagine the Brontes inviting her for tea but wondering if Father would approve of  her.    I can see Junichiro Tanizaki knocking Ford Madox Ford over as he rushes over to greet her.    Henry James looks very puzzled.     Flaubert knows of the places  she worked at in  Paris (in her demi-monde period) and suggests she have dinner with Turgenev, who will, of course, pick up the costs.     Walt Whitman keeps wanting to call it "The Wild Sargosso Sea."     Tolstoy asks if it is near the Caspian Sea.     Hemingway asks her if she prefers Scotch or Gin?    Of course she wants a Rum and coke.    Proust offers her his chair and makes a mental note to ask Flaubert what a demi-monde does?    Chekhov says "you know I am a doctor so should you need a physical please call me".

I will reread this at least once in 2015.


Mel u

I might do a series of ten or twenty posts on Wide Sargossa Sea next year, trying to force myself into a closer read.