Antoinette Cosway’s life begins to unravel when her childhood home falls to fire. Her mother breaks in its aftermath, slipping into a darkness from which she never returns. Years later, the circle closes. Antoinette burns, as if the fire had been waiting, patient and hungry. It is this path—marriage, madness, fire—that Jean Rhys traces in Wide Sargasso Sea, her postcolonial prequel to Jane Eyre. By 1966, when the white Creole writer published the novel at seventy-five, her life had endured its own fires: ruinous marriages, years lost to drink and despair, arrests for assault and public disruption, psychiatric confinement, and the derision of social exile.
At Michael Werner Gallery, Postures: Jean Rhys in the Modern World sees Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and curator Hilton Als continue his exploration of literary lives through art, following exhibitions on James Baldwin and Joan Didion. Postures brings together paintings, sculptures, photographs, and memorabilia, some from nearly a century before Rhys was born in 1890. They add up to a collage that, by evoking her memories and grievances in metaphorical images, heightens their fidelity to feelings rather than facts.
