I first read
Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea in an upper level college course about
colonialism in 1993. I was aware, of
course, that the novel told the story of Rochester’s madwoman-in-the-attic
wife. I had read Jane Eyre only
three years earlier, and my Norton edition was filled with hastily written
marginalia declaring Rochester to be a smug, self-aggrandizing megalomaniac, so
I was excited to see him revealed as some kind of monster and victimizer. I was in fact so caught up with the novel’s
connections to the Bronte classic that I did a grave injustice to the book and
did not read it for what it really was, its own story. There is certainly enjoyment in seeing the
points where the narratives cross over, but if you come to Wide Sargasso Sea
looking for Jane Eyre tie-ins, you will not only be disappointed,
but you will lose the opportunity to find a heartbreaking and compelling
narrative all its own.
The novel is
divided into three parts. In the first
section, Antoinette narrates her time from the 1833 British emancipation act,
when she is a small child, to when she is a young adult, being removed
from the convent by her stepfather to meet the man he plans for her to
wed. At the time that the slaves in the
British colonies were freed by the emancipation act, the British government
promised financial compensation to the slaveowners, but that compensation was a
long time in coming. Families like
Antoinette’s that relied entirely on slaves found their funds rapidly depleted
and their estates increasingly rundown.
Antoinette and her mother lived near poverty, rejected by the wealthier
white British families and scorned by the black islanders who struggled with
their own poverty.
This state
of being between two worlds and belonging to neither defined Antoinette’s
existence. Many times does Antoinette
state that she does not know who she is or where she belongs, and Rhys makes
use of the recurring theme of looking glasses as a way of showing Antoinette’s
crisis of identity. She occupies a no
man’s land at the intersections of white and black, European and Caribbean,
colonizer and colonized, wealth and poverty, privilege and disenfranchisement. Traditional critical discussions of Wide
Sargasso Sea have centered on the cultural, racial, and national
complexities that make up Antoinette’s identity crisis and their inevitable
contributions to her madness. But the
reason the novel has endured over the last 50 years is not because of any of
the political quandaries it casts light upon, but because it allows the
problems and confusions of poor Antoinette to live and breathe with reality and
subtlety. Antoinette is not some puppet
for Rhys. She is a sympathetic,
heartbreakingly tragic figure with a real life dimensionality. As I found myself marveling at the depth of
the characters, I was drawn to Rhys’s treatment of “madness” itself.
In my memory
of my first reading, I would have told you that Rochester (who interestingly
remains unnamed in the novel) drove Antoinette to madness with his cold
cruelty. But of course Antoinette is
already in a fragile state before Rochester takes her away for their honeymoon. Having watched her mother’s passionate
outbursts at her own powerlessness, having been rejected by her mother when she
needed her comforting touch, having been taunted and physically assaulted by
other children, Antoinette sought nothing more in this world than safety. When she lay in bed as a child, she would say
to herself, “I am safe.” When her father
died and she and her mother slid into poverty, Antoinette notes that “feeling
safe in bed . . . belonged to the past.”
When her mother begins to fall apart, Antoinette observes this in terms
of safety: “Once I would have gone back quietly to watch her asleep on the blue
sofa—once I made excuses to be near her when she brushed her hair, a soft black
cloak to cover me, hide me, keep me safe.”
The world is hostile and a threat to Antoinette’s personhood and sanity. (As a side note, I find it not coincidental
that Wide Sargasso Sea and The Painted Bird were written and
published around the same time since they are both haunted by horrible
cruelty.)
In her relationship with Rochester, she dares to reach for more than mere safety. The shy and
self-protecting girl of the first section is replaced by a charming, happy
young bride in the second section, narrated by Rochester. She is talkative. She is earnest. She seems genuinely delighted with her new
husband as she loves him and believes he loves her. But all that improvement comes to a crashing
halt when Rochester’s dislike of Antoinette and the Dominican island lead him
to greater acts of cruelty, culminating in his sleeping with the servant Amelie
within earshot of Antoinette. In the
aftermath of this betrayal, Rochester has a long conversation with
Christophine, Antoinette’s childhood nanny, and the only person who seems to
care about Antoinette’s well being. This
conversation, or rather, confrontation, is for me the heart of the novel.
In this confrontation,
Christophine accuses Rochester of wanting to “break [Antoinette] up”:
you make love to her till she drunk with it, no rum could make her drunk like that, till she can’t do without it. It’s she can’t see the sun any more. Only you she see. But all you want is to break her up.
Christophine repeats the phrase “break her up”
to describe Antoinette’s emotional and mental meltdown. She never uses the words “crazy” or “mad.” It is Rochester who first uses the word “mad”
when he asks Christophine, “And that her mother was mad. Another lie?”
Christophine responds:
They drive her to it. When she lose her son she lose herself for a while and they shut her away. They tell her she is mad, they act like she is mad. Question, question. But no kind word, no friends, and her husban’ he go off, he leave her. They won’t let me see her. I try, but no. They won’t let Antoinette see her. In the end—mad I don’t know—she give up, she care for nothing. That man who is in charge of her he take her whenever he want and his woman talk. That man, and others. They they have her. Ah there is no God.
For
Christophine, all that happened to Annette was that “she los[t] herself for a
while.” But instead surrounding her with
kind words, friends, a loving husband, they diagnose her as “mad” and treat her
as such. That declaration of “madness”
is Annette’s doom, for with it, she is discarded by her husband and family and
left in the “care” of strangers who have no interest in helping, only in taking
advantage of a powerless and hurt woman.
And when Rochester won’t be swayed by Christophine’s words to love
Antoinette and nurture her, Christophine declares: “You think me a fool? You want her money but you don’t want
her. It is in your mind to pretend she
is mad. I know it. The doctors say what you tell them to say. That man Richard he say what you want him to
say—glad and willing too, I know. She will
be like her mother.”
When someone
is broken up, she is a sympathetic creature to be healed and made well
again. When someone is “mad,” she is
something to be feared and locked away. “Madness”
is a tool for blameless dismissal of another human being. As if to drive the Christophine’s point home,
once Rochester forces Christophine to leave, he thinks: “She’s as mad as the others.” Boom.
With the one word, Rochester rids himself of needing the consider
anything said to him.
This
distinction between madness and broken up ties in neatly with the novel’s
larger concerns about race, culture, and colonization, since it is the European
men who give the diagnosis of madness like an obeah curse, bringing a
dramatic end to fates of Antoinette and her mother. In the section that follow’s Rochester’s talk
with Christophine, Rochester seems as broken up as Antoinette ever was, employing
broken syntax and passionate outbursts.
But this momentary outburst, not even three pages in my edition, does
not result in “madness” as Rochester regains his composure and determination in
the next section. Both Antoinette and
Rochester suffer the same ailments, but one is bundled off to an attic in
England while the other gets to establish himself as a Byronic hero.
No comments:
Post a Comment