A question that we've been addressing over the course of the novel and explicitly in class today is who is the more sympathetic character: Rochester or Antionette. And additionally, whose story are we reading?
I believe, like many others in the class, that Rhys is primarily concerned with Antoinette and her previously unexplored background, especially as it relates to her fate in Jane Eyre. Antoinette's childhood is flushed out in great detail, not only recounting scarring events such as the burning of her home in Coulibri and her emotional falling out with Tia, but also her troubled origins. As the daughter of a hated slave-owner and a mentally unstable (labeled insane by locals) mother, she is cursed to be a social outcast, treated with disgust by both upper-class whites and the former Jamaican slaves. Antionette is strikingly perceptive, conveying much of her situation with few words.
(Antoinette and her mother)
"A frown came
between her black eyebrows, deep
- it might have been cut with a
knife. I hated this frown and once
I touched her forehead trying to
smooth it. But she pushed me away,
not roughly but calmly, coldly,
without a word, as if she had
decided once and for all that I was
useless to her."
(Antoinette and Tia after the burning of Coulibri)
"I looked at her and I saw her face
crumple up as she began to cry. We
stared at each other, blood on my
face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw
myself. Like in a looking-glass."
Strife stemming from class and race dynamics remains a theme throughout the the novel, which makes it hard to imagine that Rhys was writing a story about Rochester, who serves to represent the external, white upper-class perception of Antionette more than anything else. His background is detailed only in relevance to and to provide context for his relationship with Antoinette. However, Rochester is not a simple character by any means, harboring his own insecurities and pain. Rhys ultimately shows the damage that these class/racial dynamics have on both characters in the novel.
You make a good point about the raw materials Rhys is working with here, drawn from Charlotte Bronte's novel. Rochester is an enigmatic but fairly well-developed character in _Jane Eyre_, as Jane spends a good deal of time contemplating him and trying to understand his mysterious sadness and suffering. In _WSS_, she's building on this material to explore his earlier life, the way he was before the West Indies "changed" him.
ReplyDeleteWith Antoinette, she has more of a blank slate. Bertha's past is given only in a sketchy outline in _Jane Eyre_, and her physical presence in the book is as an inarticulate monster, really just a physical manifestation of Rochester's guilt and dark past--not a three-dimensional woman with thoughts and feelings who must be taken seriously into account, other than as an obstacle to Rochester's happiness. Rhys invents a whole life for her--a whole other *name*--and tries to show that person being "made into" Bertha Mason, the "madwoman in the attic."
Another way that Antoinette's story might seem central--despite the fact that Rochester actually narrates more of the story--is that her story mirrors Rhys's own in many ways. It's clear that when Rhys read _Jane Eyre_, she identified more with this West Indian woman feeling lost and confused in England than with sincere, morally upright Jane. Rhys herself was brought to England from the West Indies as a girl, and she always felt herself an outsider to English culture, and lived in the margins of society in England and in Europe. When Antoinette laments about England's coldness and greyness and cardboard qualities from her attic room, it's hard not to presume that Jean Rhys herself is acquainted with that particular form of homesickness and dislocation. When Antoinette tries to smell the last fading scent of the islands on her red dress, and feels that part of herself slipping from her grasp, the particular kind of pain being expressed here seems very *personal* to this reader.
I agree that Rochester is also affected negatively by the Wide Sargasso Sea; by the gap in culture and status between England and its Caribbean colonies. His housekeeper says that he came back from Jamaica a changed man, and we know he's very troubled in Jane Eyre. I must say, though, he is not very resilient. He was there for less than a year, right? Nothing really terrible happened to him except loneliness; you'd think he'd get over it after being back home for a while.
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