‘There is always another side’ says Antoinette to her husband. ‘Always’. In Jane Eyre, Bertha Rochester is an inhuman lunatic. Not only a madwoman, but a foreign one, the cause of Bertha’s madness might be partially narrated by Rochester, but it is neither investigated nor sympathised with. Betha’s main roles in Jane Eyre were as alter ego to Jane, a ghoulish warning of the dangers of animal passions, and as a rather clunky Gothic plot device, wheeled out to elongate the story and force Jane to leave Thornfield, and then to bring it to a close with her final destructive act, and occasionally to bite things, tear them up or set fire to them. As such, she needed neither personality nor psychological investigation. By her author and readers, she was critically consigned to the attic, and remained there. This is the other side.
How was an alienated reader like Jean Rhys, Creole, sexually promiscuous, and unsympathetic to Janes’s doctrine of rigid self control (in other words, like Bertha, Jane’s complete opposite) to respond to Jane Eyre? By answering back. Bertha may be silent, but Jean Rhys had a voice. Here, unlike in Jane Eyre and also unlike in Rhys’s other novels, the causes of Antoinette’s psychological turmoil are traced back to childhood, investigated, and questioned. She is almost entirely governed by emotion, irrational, introspective, odd, repeatedly rejected, terribly fragile, and immensely sympathetic: the central point of identification for the reader, even as she remains strangely opaque and impenetrable, as Rochester is to find her.
For there are other sides, even to the other side. For much of the book, the disproportionately large second section, it is Rochester, not Antoinette, who speaks. He is never named as such, and his lack of name is as mysterious and disorientating as is Antoinette’s profusion of names. It is he who is responsible for Antoinette’s final descent, he tells us this much, even if he does not realise what he is telling, but he also shows himself as victim too: a man who is able to experience the emotion and loss of control incurred by Antoinette and by the strange country he finds himself in, but who fears it so much that he must shut it down, control it, imprison it. A man with normal emotional needs crippled by a Victorian upbringing that will not allow him to accept these emotions, and who retaliates by crippling those who make him feel them. A man who, as a Victorian man should, has separated sexual desire from love to the extent where his sexual desire for his wife possibly destroys the possibility of his love for her. A man, who, by the end of his narrative, seems madder than his supposedly mad wife. The villain of the piece, perhaps, but also just a man, ‘not the best’, but ‘not the worst’ either.
What they both speak of is a riot of imagery: mountains, pools, rocks, colour, scents, flora in constant bloom. The Caribbean landscape looms large in Wide Sargasso Sea. Too large for Rochester: ‘Everything is too much...too much blue, too much purple, too much green’ (not so coincidentally, Antoinette’s favourite colours). The reader may well sympathise with him, the effusion of colour, scents and flora alien to the Western reader are vivid to the point of confusion, the text speaks of strange practices and local events that are not fully explained - obeah, the complex history of race relations in the Caribbean, ancient earthquakes, obscure biblical references – and which seem designed to disorientate the reader. The narrative, itself built around a gap in the narrative of Jane Eyre, is full of gaps: jumps in time, place and narrator – again, with no explanation. It is almost more like a prose poem, as Joyce Carol Oates and others have suggested, than a novel. The language is dense, elliptical, and heavy with symbolism. Almost everything that occurs is an echo of another incident within either the book itself or Jane Eyre. It is often through these symbols, allusions and echoes, not from the narrative arc, that meaning often emerges.
‘Such terrible things happen, ’ Says Antoinette to Sister Marie Augustine, ‘Why?’ As with all truly great literature, Wide Sargasso Sea opens up many questions, but resists closing them down with answers. Is Anoinette’s madness predestined? She herself suggests as much: ‘I would make no effort to save myself; if anyone were to try and save me, I would refuse. This must happen’. It is suggested in her name, such a close copy of her mother Annette’s, driven mad by her son’s death, and by her physical resemblance and physical mannerisms that so painfully echo Annette’s. In a sense she is: Jane Eyre is already written, and its fame so great that we already know Antoinette’s fate - to become Bertha. If we know Jane Eyre, we cannot read Wide Sargasso Sea without knowledge of that fate, however much we may wish it away.
But yet, as they wait to leave the now-hated honeymoon house, Rochester recants: ‘if she [...] weeps, I’ll take her in my arms’, but Antoinette has already been warned by Christophine that crying won’t work, and Rochester doesn’t tell her what he wants. The reader knows them intimately as they do not know each other: both expect much from the other without adequately expressing themselves and they constantly miscommunicate. Rochester’s love might save Antoinette, and, if he doesn’t love her, he certainly has the potential to, but he is thwarted by his own fears and by these miscommunications. Opportunities for connection appear tantalisingly and are thwarted: Antoinette’s fate is not inevitable, a fact which makes it all the more tragic.
Is Antoinette actually mad at all, and if so, when does she become mad? Is she mad when she returns from Christophine’s after Rochester has slept with Amélie? She looks and acts like Jane Eyre’s Bertha, ‘her hair hung uncombed and dull into her eyes which were inflamed and staring, her face was very flushed and looked swollen’. But is this permanent madness or temporary grief? And anyway, we are seeing her through Rochester’s eyes, and he has never been able to see her properly. What is madness anyway? In the case of Antoinette, is it not what your husband and the doctors say you are, rather than anything intrinsically felt within the self?
And what are we to make of her end? Rhys said she imagined it as ‘triumphant’. Like a zombie of black Caribbean folklore, she seems to see the promise of a return to her homeland in her death. But it is a death, and, in the context of Jane Eyre, it does not even provide revenge, if revenge is in any way its aim, but only serves to reunite her husband with her rival. And if it is a triumph, it is only because her life has been so miserable – once you have died your first death, the sooner the second comes, the more merciful. Consolation perhaps, not victory.
Of course, Antoinette does not actually die in Wide Sargasso Sea. As Carol Angier says, ‘the end of Antoinette’s story [...] is in Jane Eyre’. She dreams her jump from Thornfield’s towers, and knows what she has to do. So too does the reader, if they know Jane Eyre. Antoinette dreams a glorious jump, Bertha smashes to the floor.
But Rhys’s victory is clearer. If Wide Sargasso Sea in some ways relies on Jane Eyre for its meaning, it has also changed its source text. It is almost impossible for a reader of Wide Sargasso Sea ever too look at Jane Eyre in the same way they once did. Bertha poses a problem in ways we did not notice before: it is no coincidence that Wide Sargasso Sea closely predates 1970s second wave feminism’s interest in reassessing Bertha’s character. The madwoman breaks out of the attic and into our consciousness.
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