Antoinette
The
character of Antoinette derives from Charlotte Bronte’s poignant and powerful
depiction of a deranged Creole outcast in her gothic novel Jane Eyre. Rhys creates a
prehistory for Bronte's character, tracing her development from a young
solitary girl in Jamaica to a love-depraved lunatic in an English garret. By
fleshing out Bronte’s one-dimensional madwoman, Rhys enables us to sympathize
with the mental and emotional decline of a human being. Antoinette is a far cry
from the conventional female heroines of nineteenth- and even twentieth-century
novels, who are often more rational and self-restrained (as is Jane Eyre
herself). In Antoinette, by contrast, we see the potential dangers of a wild
imagination and an acute sensitivity. Her restlessness and instability seem to
stem, in some part, from her inability to belong to any particular community.
As a white Creole, she straddles the European world of her ancestors and the
Caribbean culture into which she is born.
Left
mainly to her own devices as a child, Antoinette turns inward, finding there a
world that can be both peaceful and terrifying. In the first part of the novel
we witness the development of a delicate child—one who finds refuge in the
closed, isolated life of the convent. Her arranged marriage distresses her, and
she tries to call it off, feeling instinctively that she will be hurt. Indeed,
the marriage is a mismatch of culture and custom. She and her English husband,
Mr. Rochester, fail to relate to one another; and her past deeds, specifically
her childhood relationship with a half-caste brother, sullies her husband's
view of her. An exile within her own family, a "white cockroach" to
her disdainful servants, and an oddity in the eyes of her own husband,
Antoinette cannot find a peaceful place for herself. Going far beyond the
pitying stance taken by Bronte, Rhys humanizes "Bertha's" tragic
condition, inviting the reader to explore Antoinette's terror and anguish.
Christophine
As a surrogate
mother, Christophine introduces Antoinette to the black culture of the
Caribbean and instils in her sensitivity to nature and belief in the practices
of obeah. Significantly,
it is Christophine's voice that opens the novel, as she explains Annette's
exclusion from Spanish Town society; Christophine is the voice of authority,
the one who explains the world to Antoinette and explains Antoinette to the
readers. With her words gliding from a French patois to a Jamaican dialect and
back into English, her command of language corresponds with the power of her
words and her ability to invoke magic. She seems omniscient, intimately linked
with the natural and tropical world and attuned to animal and human behaviour.
Christophine, much
like Antoinette and her mother, is an outsider. Coming from Martinique, she
dresses and speaks differently from the Jamaican blacks. She is a servant, but,
unlike the other black servants who live at Coulibri, she remains loyal to the
Cosway women when the family's fortunes dwindle—an alliance at which the other
servants sneer. Like Antoinette and her mother, Christophine becomes the
subject of cruel household gossip, although she still commands some household
respect because of her knowledge of magic.
A wedding present
from the old MrCosway to Annette, Christophine is a commodified woman, but is
still fiercely self-willed. She provides a contrast to Annette in that she
exercises complete independence from men and implicitly distrusts their
motives. When Mr Rochester arrives at Granbois, he immediately senses
Christophine's contempt, and he associates her with all that is perverse and
foreign about his new Caribbean home and his indecipherable Creole wife. A
threat to Rochester's English privilege and male authority, Christophine calmly
monitors his attempts to assert dominance. She instructs Antoinette that
"woman must have spunks to live in this wicked world." Christophine
adopts an increasingly assertive role in protecting Antoinette when Rochester
begins to challenge his wife's sanity. Ultimately, Christophine advises
Antoinette to leave her increasingly cruel husband, citing her own independence
as an example to emulate. Having had three children by three different fathers,
Christophine remains unmarried, saying "I thank my God. I keep my money. I
don't give it to any worthless man." Christophine's final confrontation
with Rochester establishes her as Antoinette's more lucid spokeswoman.
Mr Rochester
Mr
Rochester, Antoinette's young husband, narrates more than a third of the novel,
telling, in his own words, the story of Antoinette's mental downfall. His
arrival in Jamaica and his arranged marriage to Antoinette is prefigured in the
first part of the novel by the appearance of Mr Mason,
another English aristocrat seeking his fortune through a Creole heiress.
However, unlike Mason, Rochester remains nameless throughout the novel,
referred to only as "that man" or "my husband." In a novel
in which naming is so important, Rochester's anonymity underscores the implied
authority of his account. He is the nameless creator and, as a white man, his
authority and privilege allow him to confer identity on others. For instance,
he decides to rename his wife, calling her "Bertha" in an attempt to
distance her from her lunatic mother, whose full name was Antoinette. Later, he
takes away Antoinette's voice along with her name, refusing to listen to her
side of the story. As he continues to fragment her identity, he creates the new
name of "Marionetta," a cruel joke that reflects Antoinette's
doll-like pliability. He ultimately refashions Antoinette into a raving
madwoman and treats her as a ghost. Having totally rejected his Creole wife and
her native customs, Rochester exaggerates his own cool, logical, and distinctly
English rationale; he asserts his total English control over the Caribbean
landscape and people.
Rochester's
narration in Part Two reveals that he and his estranged wife are actually more
similar than dissimilar. Both characters are essentially orphans, abandoned by
their family members to fend for themselves. As the youngest son, Rochester
legally inherits nothing from his father, who already favors the older child.
Antoinette, who was persistently neglected by her mother in favor of her
brother, Pierre, receives an inheritance that is tainted, at best. She is left
with the burdens of a divided cultural identity, the hatred of the blacks, the
contempt of the whites, and the responsibility of a dilapidated estate. Both
Rochester and Antoinette struggle for some sense of place and identity, and
enter the arranged marriage with apprehension and anxiety. Rhys creates further
parallels between her two antagonists in their bouts with fever and their
twinned experiences with dreamed or actual forests.
No comments:
Post a Comment