Prequel and Deconstruction 
 I have been hearing about this book for years, as something unique and transformative. It was a brilliant idea of Rhys, certainly, to imagine the life of the first Mrs. Rochester, the madwoman in the attic of Jane Eyre. Antoinette Cosway (the birth name of Bertha Mason in the book), is a Creole like the author herself, born of white parents in the Caribbean. Rhys suffuses the book with remembered beauty: the lush profusion of the Cosway estate at Coulibri, between the river and the sea, shaded by royal palms, scented with frangipani. 
 But it is a faded beauty. The Cosways were slave owners. Since Emancipation in 1833, Antoinette's father has lost their money and is now dead, the lovely house is in disrepair, and Antoinette's lovely mother is jeered at as a "white cockroach" and worse. Antoinette herself has some friends among the black children, but they too fall away. Although things will look up again both for her and her mother, the original sin of slavery leaves a legacy of hatred that will ultimately destroy her. 
 Like Charlotte Bronte before her, Jean Rhys spends a good deal of time on her protagonist's childhood, including a rather touching interlude at a convent school. But Antoinette is no longer poor. Her mother, "the most beautiful dancer in the Caribbean," has married again, and her new husband is generous. His early death leaves Antoinette rich enough to attract a suitor, but also without the guidance that might have prevented her from making an unwise marriage, to a man who is far from the romantic figure of Charlotte Bronte's novel. 
 For Antoinette's marriage, which began in love, founders on three things, which in turn make her husband appear first credulous, then culpable, then cold. There is a series of letters alluding, falsely, to her past. There are their sexual relations, which Rochester enjoys on his own terms, but later sees as signs of degeneracy. And there is the suspicion that makes everything about the tropics seem ungoverned and alien to the cold-blooded Englishman. It is impossible to read Antoinette's tragedy without losing all respect for Mr. Rochester. Wide Sargasso Sea serves as an illuminating prequel to Jane Eyre, but it quite destroys the role of the original as one of literature's great romances. 
 Deliberately so, surely. For Rhys' novel is a powerful feminist tract, deconstructing both the male-dominated society of 19th-century Britain and the colonial ethos on which it--and its literature--was founded. But Bronte was not the only author I felt lurking in these pages; the other is more surprising: William Faulkner. Most obviously for his moral theme, of slavery as the sin whose wages are visited upon each succeeding generation. But also for his technique of using shifting and overlapping narrators. The first part of the novel, a richly colored exposition, is narrated by the child Antoinette. Later, as a child of a totally different sort, she returns to narrate the chilling conclusion, in the attic at Thornfield Hall. The middle section, though, where Antoinette's transformation takes place, is a tropical nightmare, narrated by Rochester but with unheralded shifts back to her voice. Definitely Faulknerian, and appropriately so. But I wish Rhys had been able to do it without resorting to such extreme characters; both Rochester's chauvinism and Antoinette's instability show the novelist being subverted by the polemicist, which Faulkner never was.