steepholm

If you're like me, the only things you know about the Sargasso Sea are that it lends its name to a Jean Rhys novel and has something to do with the life-cycle of the eel. You may have wondered whether there was any connection between the two facts.

Almost certainly there isn't. However, I've never understood why the novel is called that (explanations I've read seem weak at best), so I was intrigued to learn that it was only in in 1959 that Denys Tucker discovered that European eels, having spent maybe a decade or two living it up in the sophisticated lakes and waterways of that debauched continent, all die without ever being able to make it back to the Sargasso Sea to spawn, leaving the work of creating the next generation to their American cousins. What an apt metaphor for the post-WWII view of intercontinental relations!

More to the point, what an apt metaphor for the sterility of Antoinette's life with Rochester, living as (in Tucker's description of the evolutionary position of European eels) a "useless waste product."

Now, I don't say that Rhys was abreast of developments in eel biology, but I do say that five years after Tucker's paper, she'd finished the first draft of WSS. Make of it what you will.

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sovay

it was only in in 1959 that Denys Tucker discovered that European eels, having spent maybe a decade or two living it up in the sophisticated lakes and waterways of that debauched continent, all die without ever being able to make it back to the Sargasso Sea to spawn, leaving the work of creating the next generation to their American cousins

"No eel marked in Europe has ever been recovered from the Sargasso Sea" is an incredibly poignant line.