Later, I discovered Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, the 1966 novel that is the supposed prequel, and modern rebuttal, to Jane Eyre, and I briefly identified with its heroine: the impoverished, neglected Creole beauty, Antoinette, who is unappreciated by her dysfunctional family in Jamaica and callously married off to a broody, uptight Englishman. He (though unnamed, we know it’s Rochester) is soon appalled and repelled by his wife’s true, passionate nature—not to mention the madness that runs in her family—and starts calling her “Bertha.” Heartbroken, Antoinette soon begins to unravel. After a disastrous honeymoon, set on a decrepit estate in Rhys’s native Dominica, the poor girl is whisked off to dank, drizzly England, loses her mind altogether, and is locked up in the attic of Thornfield Hall. There, inexpertly guarded by the gin-soaked Grace Poole, Antoinette dreams of making a big, warm fire, like the one that destroyed her family home when she was a child.
But identifying with Antoinette was a bit of a stretch—she was too earthy, too extravagantly animated, too suntanned and gorgeous, really, for the brand of droopingly adolescent, pseudo-intellectual narcissism I favoured. Jean Rhys, however—there was a character worth obsessing about. Over-sensitive, monumentally talented, devoutly alcoholic, reviled by her uncaring, unimaginative relations, tragically misunderstood in a male-chauvinist world—how could any self-respecting late-twentieth-century feminist English grad with literary pretensions not identify with Jean Rhys? Her personal history was irresistibly sordid: the down-at-heels descendant of slave owners, Rhys left her home in Dominica at sixteen and briefly attended school in England before running off to become a chorus girl, then a kept woman, then a sort of prostitute, then the high-society wife of a Dutch writer/embezzler in Vienna, then a penniless protegé of Ford Madox Ford in Paris while her husband was in jail, then the unhappy player in a ménage à trois with Ford and his mistress. Long story short, Rhys went through a couple more husbands, severe poverty, debilitating depression, and several arrests for drunk-and-disorderly behaviour before achieving fame and financial stability at age seventy-six with Wide Sargasso Sea. She died in 1979.
One reason Dominica remains mysterious: it’s hard to get to. Note that it is not the Dominican Republic. It’s Dom-i-neek-a, one of the Lesser Antilles, the little islands that curve furthest east into the Atlantic. Its airport has a short runway surrounded by jungle, which means no big planes allowed. I had to fly from Toronto to Barbados, then catch a prop plane to Dominica. I was the only white person among thirty or so passengers, which gave me pause, having grown up in a white Winnipeg neighbourhood and assuming that I was and always would be in the dominant cultural group. So even before landing, I was reassessing my place in the world and feeling on guard—against my own unconscious racism, against potential racist assumptions about me, against focusing too much on skin colour when everyone around me seemed oblivious. Or maybe they were intensely conscious of the colour difference, but in a way I couldn’t imagine. Or possibly they were merely thinking it was strange for a white, middle-aged woman to be travelling alone. Or, outlandish as it seemed, perhaps they weren’t thinking of me at all.
In Dominica, the terminal was strangely deserted, the other passengers having evaporated into the cars of friends or family. I strode outside the small terminal building, saw half a dozen shiny new cars with drivers lounging about, turned around, and strode back in. I felt shy, stupid, self-conscious—a familiar sensation to an over-sensitive freelance writer anywhere, but one that would be elevated to the level of a chronic condition in Dominica. I decided to drive across the island myself; at least if I drove off the road and got lost I wouldn’t have to talk to anybody. But one of the drivers had followed me back inside to the car-rental counter. “No, no, you shouldn’t rent a car,” he said. “Too dangerous.” The woman behind the counter nodded in agreement. One hour and $60 (US) later, after a harrowing but scenic rollercoaster ride through the thickly forested mountains that cover this 47-by-26-kilometre island, the driver dropped me at my hotel, just south of the capital, Roseau, where I checked into my ocean-view room.
Though grateful to be alive, I was momentarily discouraged by the accommodations: a TV on a metal arm jutted out into the room and the remote control didn’t work; in the shower the plastic curtain flew inward due to a convection current created by the hot water spray; the plug for the kettle didn’t fit into the outlet. At dinner, the menu was tailored to presumed North American tastes: chicken fingers, frozen french fries. And the hotel was filled with hardcore sun ‘n’ fun tourists: scuba-diving tour groups, snorkelling honeymooners, families lining up on the dock like sheep to go whale-watching.
But what did I care? I didn’t come to watch TV and eat junk food or sign up for pitiful excursions to tourist traps. I didn’t even come for the sun, which makes my skin blotchy and gives me migraine headaches. I was here to explore the real Dominica behind the enigmatic character of Jean Rhys, and I would begin the very next morning with a brisk two-kilometre walk to visit her famous childhood home.
It was too hot, even at 8 a.m., to walk into Roseau. The desk clerk told me the bus ride in was a couple of Eastern Caribbean dollars (about $1 Canadian). After standing in the blood-boiling heat for twenty minutes, I staggered back into the lobby and learned that taking a bus meant waving down a minivan with the right combo of letters on its licence plate. I wondered why she thought I would have known that. No matter. Minutes later, I was dropped off at the tourist office on the waterfront. Though surrounded by recently constructed suburbs, the town itself is tiny—a few dozen streets of low, rundown wooden buildings. Jean Rhys’s home was at Independence and Cork streets, and, with one of the tourist brochures, I easily found it.
I just couldn’t believe it when I saw it. I knew the two-storey rectangular wooden box of a house had been converted into a guest house, but now it wasn’t even that. The wooden jalousies of her youth had been replaced with cheap plastic shutters. A sign said “Closed for renovations,” but there was no work going on. Another sign read “Vena’s Guesthouse Restaurant & Bar,” and below, “The House of Famous Dominican Novelist the Late Jean rhys.” A back door was ajar, but it revealed only an empty drywalled hallway inside.
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