Explorations Read-Aloud: “Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys

Every Friday, at 11:00 am, on the library’s YouTube Channel and Facebook Page, the library will stream a brand new recording of local thespian, Joseph Coté reading aloud selections from a wide variety of fascinating and entertaining books of fiction and non-fiction.

For November 21, Coté will read aloud from Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea.

Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 historical novel by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys. The novel is set in Jamaica in the 1830–40s and serves as a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1847), describing the background to Mr. Rochester’s marriage from the point of view of his wife Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress. Antoinette Cosway is Rhys’s version of Brontë’s “madwoman in the attic”. Antoinette’s story is told from the time of her youth in Jamaica, to her unhappy marriage to an English gentleman, Mr. Rochester, who renames her Bertha, declares her mad, takes her to England, and isolates her from the rest of the world in his mansion.  Wide Sargasso Sea explores the power of relationships between men and women and discusses the themes of race, Caribbean history, and assimilation as Antoinette is caught in a white, patriarchal society in which she fully belongs neither to Europe nor to Jamaica.

Click the links to find the library’s YouTube Channel and Facebook Page.

Thoughts to share? Book ideas to suggest?
Contact Joseph at friday-explorations@usa.net