"Like in a Looking-Glass": History and Narrative in Wide Sargasso Sea

Abstract

The dramatic appearance of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, after a quarter-century of silence and obscurity for its author, has tended occult the less romantic facts of the book's two-decade-long gestation. That the novel had been partly written by 1945 is significant, however. The years between the midforties and the mid-sixties having encompassed much of the break-up of the British Empire, and Wide Sargasso Sea alone of all of Rhys's novels engaging fully (though at a certain historical remove) with her background in the British West Indies, we might look for a difference in the way the subject of a narrative written at one time or another reads itself into history by means of that narrative. Elizabeth Nunez-Harrell has suggested that Wide Sargasso Sea might be a the nationalistic mood [in the West Indies] of the late '50's and '60's, which could have led Rhys wish to assume her place in West Indian literature (287). Yet the novel seems rather inhabit a limbo between nationalisms; it exists as a response the loss, rather than the recovery, of a place-to-be-from, enacting a struggle over identity which is a peculiarly modern rereading of West Indian history. The historical circumstances that set the novel in motion are the Emanci-