Burning Down Her Master’s House (Again): Marlon James Responds to Jean Rhys

Fifty years after its publication,  Wide Sargasso Sea  has pride of place in a postcolonial canon and thus is open to inter-textual interventions itself. One of these is Marlon James’s  The Book of Night Women  (2009) which, set at a Jamaican plantation at the turn of the eighteenth century, acts as a prequel to  Wide Sargasso Sea.  James’s novel reminds us that although Antoinette Mason was victimized in a number of ways, she was the daughter of a planter and her family’s life on the island was supported by victimization of enslaved African women to an incomparably more horrific extent. James’s novel provides the supplement needed to read  Wide Sargasso Sea  today. Lilith, the novel’s protagonist and a potent Obeah woman, embodies a possible backstory for the character of Christophine and helps today’s readers understand the full revolutionary potential of Rhys’s most powerful female character who laughs when told that slavery had ended.