Though the Best Ones Fall and That Is Another Song: A Reparative Reading of Jean Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea

Abstract

Read primarily as the prequel of Jane Eyre, much of the criticism on Jean Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea focuses on delineating the harmful effects of the colonial and patriarchal systems on its protagonist, Antoinette. While this line of interpretation is important and productive, it can also be—in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwicks words—a paranoid mode of reading. This paper employs Sedgwicks concept of paranoid and reparative reading to interpret Rhyss fiction on two levels: first, as a way to understand and examine the way in which, within the fictional world of the novel, the characters either take the paranoid or reparative mode to read each other, creating moments of either harmful othering or reconciliatory empathy. Secondly, I suggest on another level that the whole project of reading the sadness in the novel is an exercise in the reparative mode of listening for the readers themselves, a challenge to find hope and empathy in a seemingly hopeless story of persecution and paranoia.