<p>I think Rochester in WSS did try to make Antoinette “mad”. Isn’t that what he was doing when he starting calling her “Bertha”? I can’t remember if it was in the book or one of the movies I watched, but somewhere it said calling Antoinette by a different name was an Obeah thing.</p>
<p>Ignatius, with regard to the WSS Rochester wanting to break Antoinette…I think there were a couple of points where things could have gone the other way (not sure), but that her pride understandably got in the way.</p>
<p>The first time was after Christophine insisted that Antoinette not use obeah until she had tried talking to Rochester. Antoinette did talk to him, but he didn’t respond as she’d hoped. (Maybe she didn’t really give him a chance??)</p>
<p>p.122 “After a long time I heard her say as if she were talking to herself, ‘I have said all I want to say. I have tried to make you understand. But nothing has changed.’ She laughed.”</p>
<p>This angers Rochester and he addresses her as “Bertha.” He asks her where she went that morning and she says she went to see Christophine and that Christophine said she should leave him.</p>
<p>Rochester replies (p.123) “Don’t you feel that perhaps Christophine is right? That if you went away from this place – or I went away – exactly you wish, of course – for a time, it might be the wisest thing we could do?”</p>
<p>Antoinette does not even reply to this. Almost immediately afterwards, she proceeds to work the obeah spell on him, as she had made up her mind to do…and of course that really causes things to fall apart.</p>
<p>The other possible turning point was when they were leaving Granbois. </p>
<p>Rochester (p. 154): “I knew what I would say. 'I have made a terrible mistake. Forgive me.”
“I said it, looking at her, seeing the hatred in her eyes – and feeling my own hate spring up to meet it.” </p>
<p>To me, these scenes were so heartbreaking. The circumstances are extreme, yet in some ways they are typical of what can happen when any two people are at odds…and one or the other, or both, are too hurt or too proud to back down from a position they have taken.</p>
<p>^^^ NJTM: I definitely think things could have gone the other way. I do think Rochester stands at a crossroads and makes a choice. That a cruel choice becomes a choice at all is not a compliment to the man - and if things could go the other way, then Rochester knows Antoinette is sane. I don’t hold Antoinette blameless but really Rochester’s actions are beyond the pale. </p>
<p>PATM: I can live with both versions of Mr. R., too. I never really saw one in the other anyway. I also never viewed Jane’s Mr. R. as a romantic hero … right for her, but for me, it stops there.</p>
<p>Jane Eyre as romance novel (2 different discussion/reviews):</p>
<p>[ALL</a> ABOUT ROMANCE (novels) reviews Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte](<a href=“http://www.likesbooks.com/cgi-bin/bookReview.pl?BookReviewId=5517]ALL”>http://www.likesbooks.com/cgi-bin/bookReview.pl?BookReviewId=5517)</p>
<p>[ALL</a> ABOUT ROMANCE (novels) reviews Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte](<a href=“http://www.likesbooks.com/cgi-bin/bookReview.pl?BookReviewId=5517]ALL”>http://www.likesbooks.com/cgi-bin/bookReview.pl?BookReviewId=5517)</p>
<p>^^^</p>
<p>Well, it was supposed to be two different reviews - correction:</p>
<p>[All</a> About Romance (novels): At the Back Fence #165](<a href=“http://www.likesbooks.com/165.html]All”>http://www.likesbooks.com/165.html)</p>
<p>Ignacio’s, I too think the mr r in Rhys novel became mean and abusive, and Antoinette the loving victim. It doesn’t matter that h.e didn’t set out to be mean, he bsegan to distrust her and her past and her values, and her friends, and put a wedge between all of her supports networks. Then he moves her to a cold attic, with a mercenary caretaker, and all his beliefs as Antoinette as a madwoman come true. She was so vulnerable, she didn’t know that she could leave at night, find a solicitor, and prove her rights and needs for her money to set herself up as an independent woman. obviously, such is the theme of so many tragedies.</p>
<p>Because this theme is repeated so often in modern day life, with alternative outcomes, it makes these books classic readings.</p>
<p>Ignatius, you wrote, “…if things could go the other way, then Rochester knows Antoinette is sane.”</p>
<p>I think he did know she was sane. At some point in Jamaica, after he started preventing her from going out, I guess she crossed a line and became very distressed and confused, and at that point it was too late for her. </p>
<p>Rochester made her into his prisoner forever, and she had no access to the kind of support she would have needed to possibly regain any serenity and lucidity. :(</p>
<p>I felt that Christophine played a key role in making a bad situation worse. She caved in to Antoinette and gave her what she needed for the obeah “love potion," although she knew what the outcome would be. “Even if I can make him come to your bed, I cannot make him love you. Afterward he hate you” (p. 113). </p>
<p>In one of those poignant “what-if” sentences, Rochester says later, “She poured wine into two glasses and handed me one, but I swear it was before I drank that I longed to bury my face in her hair as I used to.” After he drinks, however, there is no going back to how it used to be. </p>
<p>I thought that there was a mirror image of this near the end of the book when Antoinette and Rochester are on the boat to England—kind of a “what goes around comes around” moment. Antoinette cannot be controlled, so she is given a drink, presumably under Rochester’s orders:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I disagree about Christophine. She counsels Antoinette to leave Rochester and be a free woman-which would have been the best outcome for Antoinette at that point.
She saw Rochester’s character from the beginning.
Even though Christophine was stronger than Antoinette-Antoinette had the upper position and would do what she wanted to do. I think Christophine genuinly did care about Antoinette. Her and Aunt Cora were truly the only ones looking out for her.</p>
<p>I tend not to blame Christophine, either, PATheaterMom. She loved Antoinette and gave her some good advice about trying to leave Rochester, but Antoinette was terribly adamant. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned…”</p>
<p>As to Christophine seeing Rochester’s character from the beginning, she was a pretty smart cookie and she did say this:</p>
<p>(p. 103) “The man not a bad man, even if he love money, but he hear so many stories he don’t know what to believe. That is why he keep away.”</p>
<p>Right after that, Christophine said that Aunt Cora had turned her face to the wall. Antoinette acknowledged this in her mind (she provided us with a memory illustrating it) and wondered how Christophine knew.</p>
<p>I agree that Christophine loved Antoinette–she was more of a mother to her than her own mother–which made me all the more disappointed that she let a clearly misguided Antoinette have the upper hand when it came to using obeah: “You don’t have to give me money. I do this foolishness because you beg me—not for money.” But I suppose it wouldn’t be the first time that a parent has given in to “foolishness” after being begged by a beloved child. :)</p>
<p>
Don’t forget fire!</p>
<p>I’m sorry I’m coming so late to the discussion, but I’ve really enjoyed all the comments. I remembered Jane Eyre vaguely (as an adolescent, I read it encouragingly as a “plain girl gets the guy after lots of banter” story) so I read WSS first. I am now reading JE, but mostly listening on audio, and I have a short commute, so I haven’t gotten too far 
</p>
<p>I didn’t like WSS very much when I read it. I found it confusing, as others have mentioned: Why did the family need to marry off Antoinette, and pay to do it? !hy did “Rochester” come all the way to the West Indies for an arranged marriage for money to a girl who didn’t want him–at least I think that’s how it happened–and then get angry that he was bought?</p>
<p>But then when I started rereading Jane Eyre I found I appreciated WSS more, and felt an immediate affinity between Antoinette and the young Jane. The connections Rhys was trying to make made more sense. I didn’t think I’d be able to like Rochester at all after reading WSS, but I see those two men as entirely different people.</p>
<p>One comment on JE: I liked the part where the young Jane goes all feminist about women needing a life of the mind, and says it’s narrow-minded for men to think women “ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.” It really made me wish that when Hillary Clinton answered that question 20 years ago about the role of first lady that she hadn’t talked about baking cookies and having teas, but had just quoted Bronte on puddings and embroidery!</p>
<p>Hi buenavista! (I bet Hillary Clinton wishes she had quoted Charlotte Bronte, too. :))</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Yes, fire is so important to both novels.</p>
<p>In Jane Eyre, Rochester tells Jane, “To live, for me, Jane, is to stand on a crater-crust which may crack and spue fire any day” (p. 150).</p>
<p>His bed is set afire by Bertha, and in their final confrontation, he does stand at the precipice—the “crater-crust,” so to speak—as he reaches out for Bertha.</p>
<p>Rochester uses this same imagery when he teases Adele about how he will take Jane to the moon: “Fire rises out of the lunar mountains: when she is cold, I’ll carry her up to a peak, and lay her down on the edge of a crater” (p. 186).</p>
<p>For Jane, fire seems to represent good things. There are many times where she draws herself up to the fire for warmth or conversation. She often describes it as “genial, “generous” or “reviving.” She loves the sunset behind Thornfield looking like a “fire lit,” and Rochester calls her a “fire-spirit.” When she stumbles to the Rivers home in a state of exhaustion, one of the first things that attracts her is “the redness and radiance of a glowing peat-fire” (p. 233). When she is trying to extract information from a reticent St. John, she tells him “…I am hot, and fire dissolves ice” (p. 270). </p>
<p>In looking for fire references, I found something interesting. At the beginning of the novel, Mr. Brocklehurst tells a very young Jane of the “lake burning with fire and brimstone” and tells her that she is in danger of falling “into that pit, and to be burning there forever.” At the end of the novel, St. John Rivers, fearing for Jane’s soul, reads to her: “the fearful, the unbelieving, &c., shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death” (p. 294).</p>
<p>Very different men, very similar theology. And Jane soundly rejects them both, the first time with dislike (Brocklehurst) and the last time with affection (St. John). It’s as if Jane has come full circle.</p>
<p>Buenavista, I think the family married off Antoinette because: </p>
<ul>
<li><p>Back then, it would have been unusual for a girl not to be married. All the members of her immediate family were gone. Aunt Cora was infirm. It probably would not have been appropriate for her to live in the Masons’ household; that’s one reason they boarded her at the convent when Aunt Cora went to England.*</p></li>
<li><p>With the collapse of slavery there would have been very, very few eligible young white men remaining in Jamaica any more. Probably a lot of families had left, and young man were no longer coming to Jamaica to make their fortune from agriculture, because with no slaves available there were no longer fortunes to be made. There was “old money” like Antoinette’s around, but not much new money.</p></li>
<li><p>Society would have looked askance at a white creole girl like Antoinette marrying a colored or a black guy.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Rochester was a younger son without prospects for inheritance – or so he thought. He was obliged to do what his family said, and he didn’t want to be a burden on them…or be unable to live the lifestyle he was accustomed to. So he did what they wanted, and he followed the money and married Antoinette.</p>
<p>It wasn’t so much that the Rochester of WSS was angry that he was bought. He felt so much more out of place than he expected. He had little in common with Antoinette. The black servants liked Antoinette but he felt alienated by them…even threatened. Antoinette sometimes seemed arrogant about being a part of an environment that he was so at sea in. And then he started to hear shocking stories about his new wife.</p>
<p>*If it had been a modern story, the Masons might have sent Antoinette off to college in England! Alas, such options did not exist back then.</p>
<p>Thanks, NJTheatreMOM! Your thoughts on why they had to marry off Antoinette make a lot of sense. How old was she? I was imagining her as young, and thus wondering what the hurry was. But I suppose it was easier to marry off a young girl than an older one.</p>
<p>When I referred to “Rochester” in WSS as angry, I think I was remembering his thoughts toward Antoinette as they were leaving Granbois :
</p>
<p>I agree, Mary, that Hillary Clinton probably wishes she’d quoted Bronte! Those sentiments of Jane seem very modern. In retrospect, I think it was probably the willingness of Jane to speak her mind and assert that her intellect was important that made the book appealing to me as an adolescent.</p>
<p>Antoinette was no more than 18 when she was married, I believe. I can’t find the reference in the text at the moment. Sparknotes says:</p>
<p>“When Antoinette is seventeen, Mr. Mason announces on his visit that friends from England will be coming the following winter. He means to present Antoinette into society as a cultivated woman, fit for marriage.”</p>
<p>That was a common age for marriage back then. </p>
<p>Don’t forget, Jane Eyre was also quite young…18 when she arrived at Thornfield.</p>
<p>In the “leaving Granbois” passage you quoted from above, Rochester does mention being bought. But he knew he was being bought when he entered into the marriage. I don’t think he would have minded it so much if he had not become so upset about other things.</p>
<p>He feels that he was betrayed by Antoinette’s family – that they tricked him by buying him as a husband for a woman from a messed-up family. He also knew that she had come to hate him, and he was more than ready to hate her in return.</p>
<p>Music: For Stevie Nicks’ fans: [WIDE</a> SARGASSO SEA LYRICS - STEVIE NICKS](<a href=“http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Wide-Sargasso-Sea-lyrics-Stevie-Nicks/C722A7CD37826995482578AA00118666]WIDE”>http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Wide-Sargasso-Sea-lyrics-Stevie-Nicks/C722A7CD37826995482578AA00118666)</p>
<p>(Don’t get too excited, it’s no “Landslide.” :))</p>
<p>Art: I couldn’t find a painting called “The Miller’s Daughter” that would have been completed around 1830 or earlier and that matched Antoinette’s description of “a lovely English girl with brown curls and blue eyes and a dress slipping off her shoulders” (p. 36). Since the painting appears at the beginning and the end of the book, it must be meaningful. Tennyson’s poem The Miller’s Daughter, written in 1833, was an idyllic view of wedded bliss in pastoral England, so some online literary critics have suggested there might be a little irony in the fact that “The Miller’s Daughter” was Antoinette’s favorite painting.</p>
<p>I suppose we could imagine it looked something like this (except that the artist [Louise </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The date’s not right but …</p>
<p>[‘Tis</a> better to have loved and lost Victorian Wolverhampton](<a href=“http://victorianwolverhampton.■■■■■■■■■■■■■/2009/08/04/tis-better-to-have-loved-and-lost/]‘Tis”>http://victorianwolverhampton.■■■■■■■■■■■■■/2009/08/04/tis-better-to-have-loved-and-lost/)</p>
<p>Regarding “The Miller’s Daughter,” I found one piece of literary criticism that suggests that the painting represents one possible alternate image of herself that attracts Antoinette, but which she can never achieve…and Tia represents another such elusive “mirror image.”</p>
<p>[Becoming-Bertha:</a> Virtual Difference and Repetition in Postcolonial ?Writing Back?, a Deleuzian Reading of Jean Rhys?s Wide Sargasso Sea (Lorna Burns) - Academia.edu](<a href=“(PDF) Becoming-Bertha: Virtual Difference and Repetition in Postcolonial ‘Writing Back’, a Deleuzian Reading of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea | Lorna Burns - Academia.edu”>(PDF) Becoming-Bertha: Virtual Difference and Repetition in Postcolonial ‘Writing Back’, a Deleuzian Reading of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea | Lorna Burns - Academia.edu)</p>
<p>^ That makes sense. While browsing, I’ve read several references to Antoinette’s split identity, and both Tia and the painting appear in Antoinette’s final dream before she sets Thornfield on fire.</p>
<p>Thank you for the link, which expands on that dual-image theme. As the author points out, “a lovely English girl with brown curls and blue eyes and a dress slipping off her shoulders” is reflected in Antoinette wearing the white dress that “had slipped untidily over one shoulder” (p. 127). Antoinette’s mirroring of this image, says the author, is “a misunderstood attempt to conform to Rochester’s cultural values, to project an image of what, to her limited understanding, ‘a lovely English girl’ should look like.” </p>
<p>Tia appears as Antoinette’s mirror image on the night Coulibri burns: “We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. If was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass” (p. 45).</p>
<p>And along those lines…I remember that earlier in the story, Tia and Antoinette exchange dresses (or rather, Tia steals Antoinette’s dress, leaving her with no choice but to put on Tia’s). In the end, though, it is neither the white “lovely English” dress nor Tia’s dress that is on her mind; it is her red dress: the dress she wore the last time she saw Sandi (a combination of both races).</p>