SOURCE: "Mr. Rochester's First Marriage: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys," in World Literature Written in English, Vol. 17, No. 1, April, 1978, pp. 342-57.

[In the following essay, Thomas examines the narrative structure and psychological dynamics of the relationship between Rochester and Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea.]

Antoinette Bertha Cosway Mason is the mad wife of Mr. Rochester, imprisoned in the attics of Thornfield Hall, cared for and guarded by Grace Poole. In Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys tells her story, from her earliest memories of fear and loss as the Creole daughter of a former slave owner in Jamaica, to her final dream, after uncounted days and years in Thornfield Hall:

Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do. There must have been a draught for the flame flickered and I thought it was out. But I shielded it with my hand and it burned up again to light me along the dark passage.

The book does not require a knowledge of Jane Eyre—a reader who had never heard of Charlotte Brontë or her work could find it a self-contained, haunting, tragic story. But it is nonetheless cross-referenced to Jane Eyre at many points, climaxing with the final lines which precede the catastrophe of fire at Thornfield Hall, the death of Bertha Mason and the blinding of Rochester. At the same time the character of Rochester as Charlotte Brontë drew it is immensely extended by Rhys's study of Rochester in Wide Sargasso Sea. Here we see the reasons for his black bitterness. Here is charted the growth of suspicion and distrust into a tangle of love and hate towards his Creole wife and, finally, into a wild bitterness of damaged pride and vindictiveness that is at least as mad as Bertha Mason's lost desperation. Rochester is a victim of his own Englishness—of the pressure on a younger son to marry well and so to a mass his fortune; of his inexperience and built-in conditioning to despise and distrust blacks and abhor the thought of English blood "tainted" by black; of the attitudes of his time towards purity in women, so confused by the realities of sexuality in both men and women. Most of all he is victimized by his own pride; like Browning's Duke, he "does not choose to stoop," and he becomes both monstrous in vindictiveness and increasingly vulnerable to the torments of jealousy. Finally he is separated from human contact with everyone—and this is the Rochester we first met in Jane Eyre. In Jane Eyre, Rochester appears to the reader as a victim of his wife's tragic madness; in Wide Sargasso Sea there is, finally, no clear decision possible between his madness and hers, though clearly, at the end he is his own victim, motivated by pride and hate, and she is irreparably victimized by him.

Antoinette Cosway, the daughter of a Jamaican slave owner, a Creole—a white-skinned West Indian—has never known anything but fear, loss, and, in even her happiest moments, a pitiful pretense of security. She can't believe in the safety of love, because she has always known betrayal and always expects it—and in this she is proved right over and over again. Yet she knows that a safe love could save her. In the first days of her honeymoon she has it very briefly and she blossoms briefly into a happy woman, but her blood, her birth, and her background all make her a pre-fated victim. When the catastrophe's betrayal comes, from within her marriage and from the outside as well, Antoinette loses all hope of safety forever and, in the friendless hell of her confinement at Thornfield Hall, she does become irrevocably mad. She is finally like a zombi, the West Indian spectre that Rochester, in spite of himself, superstitiously fears: "A zombi is a dead person who seems to be alive or a living person who is dead…. They cry out in the wind that is their voice, they rage in the sea that is their anger."

Few novels that I have read answer Henry James's form and content, needle and thread metaphor as perfectly as does Wide Sargasso Sea. The story and the structure become one and inseparable, an interweaving of causality in the story with reinforcing narrative techniques that enhance the story's credibility and make its outcome a tragic inevitability. As the composition of certain paintings can be seen to rest on a solid geometric substructure, so this novel is built on a dramatic substructure that forms Part II of the book, a tragedy in seven scenes, marked off one from the other by asterisks in the text. The structure of this tragic action is perfectly symmetrical: three scenes rise to a betrayal scene and three scenes follow it; scene six is the longest in the book, the climax and catastrophe that, for both Antoinette and Rochester, bring them to their moments of unbearable truth; scene seven is a falling away into despair. The closest dramatic correlative to Part II is Othello. With a reversal in races, Rochester and Antoinette are ruined by a combination of irreconcilable cultural differences, personal insecurities, and the pride, jealousy, and betrayal that destroy Othello and Desdemona. Daniel Cosway is the outside agent of their tragedy, motivated, like Iago, by a malign destructiveness that is complicated, in Cosway's case, by greed. In this central tragic drama of Part II, there are only three major actors, Rochesters, Antoinette, and Christophine, her nurse, though there are many minor parts. Christophine is rock-solid, while the other two sway and break with their passion. In scene six, the catastrophe, it is finally Christophine's voice that dominates, speaking truth, with love for Antoinette and with contempt and accusation for Rochester. The centrality of the tragic hero is removed, however, from Wide Sargasso Sea, since the drama of Part II is enclosed by Antoinette's story in Parts I and III. Part I, Antoinette's childhood, is the prologue to this action; Part III, at Thornfield Hall, is its epilogue.

Built on this powerful dramatic substructure, the success of Jean Rhys's novelistic superstructure lies in her use of narrative voice and point of view. Part I is in the voice of Antoinette; six of the seven scenes of Part II are narrated by Rochester, the seventh by Antoinette; Part III is introduced by Grace Poole, then Antoinette's voice takes over and ends the novel. Rhys has thus set up an alternating current between the voices and points of view of Rochester and Antoinette, holding the reader in sympathy with each one of them and, simultaneously, in tension between them. Grace Poole's voice brings us back to Thornfield Hall and the world of Jane Eyre, to finally enclose the tragedy of Antoinette and Rochester undiminished. For now the reader has experienced their tragedy in their own words and in its own setting. The end of Wide Sargasso Sea, moments before the fire in Thornfield Hall, is finally their release from the circumstantial bond in which, long after the catastrophe of their marriage, they have remained imprisoned.

In Part I Antoinette tells the story of her life and her losses to a time just before she meets Rochester. That time is exactly indicated; it is 1839; Antoinette is recalling her past as she lies safely in bed in the convent after a dream of following a menacing stranger through a forest. This is the second time she has dreamed this dream, a nightmare of fear to her. Sister Maria Augustine has comforted her and put her back to bed: "Think of calm, peaceful things and try to sleep. Soon I will give the signal. Soon it will be tomorrow morning." Her memories begin with her mother, a Martinique girl, second wife to Mr. Cosway, a plantation owner, who like many others has been impoverished by the emancipation of the slaves. Memory begins after Cosway's death, on the rundown Coulibri estate near Spanish Town where she and her mother and her crippled younger brother live, still waited on by three servants who have not deserted them. The destitution encroaching on the lives of these people is not described, but evoked in a series of brief, dramatic memories. Her mother and their neighbour, Mr. Luttrell, were still waiting for the compensation promised by the English when the Emancipation Act was passed. "How could she know that Mr. Luttrell would be the first who grew tired of waiting? One calm evening he shot his dog, swam out to sea and was gone for always." Her mother still planned, hoped, and kept up appearances, riding every morning, "… not caring that the black people stood about in groups to jeer at her, especially after her riding clothes grew shabby (they notice clothes, they know about money)." Then one morning Antoinette found her mother's horse, poisoned. "'Now we are marooned,' my mother said, 'now what will become of us?'"

To Antoinette the Coulibri estate was beautiful even though it had gone wild, the green light underneath the tree ferns, the smell of dead flowers mixed with a fresh living smell, the purple octopus orchid, beautiful but fearsome. "No more slavery—why should anybody work? This never saddened me. I did not remember the place when it was prosperous." But everything else around her was a frightening mystery. Her mother grew thin and remote after the Spanish Town doctor came to see her brother: "… 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 wanted to love and trust Christophine, her black nurse from Martinique, and yet her mother did not trust Christophine. "Christophine stayed with me because she wanted to stay. She had her own very good reasons you may be sure. I dare say we would have died if she'd turned against us and that would have been a better fate." Everyday she played with Tia, the daughter of Christophine's friend. In Antoinette's memories Tia is her "friend," but when they play, Tia tricks her and when they argue, she calls Antoinette "white nigger" and takes her dress: "Old time white people nothing but white nigger now, and black nigger better than white nigger." Surrounded by fear and often afraid herself, when she was still a child at Coulibri Antoinette dreamed her first dream of being lost and menaced in a dark forest.

Antoinette's mother seems to be saved when she marries Mr. Mason, a rich Englishman, but in fact this marriage precipitates her tragedy. Antoinette hates the people who come to see them, laughing and gossiping behind her mother's back and calling Christophine an Obeah woman, a witch. She rejects her stepfather, although he is kind to her. But the worst is that he does not understand the menace around Coulibri and he doesn't move them away in time, in spite of the angry insistence of Antoinette's mother, supported by her sister, Aunt Cora.

"You have lived alone far too long, Annette. You imagine enmity which doesn't exist. Always one extreme or the other. Didn't you fly at me like a little wild cat when I said nigger. Not nigger, nor even negro. Black people I must say."

"You don't like, or even recognize, the good in them," she said, "and you won't believe in the other side."

"They're too damn lazy to be dangerous," said Mr Mason.

"They are more alive than you are, lazy or not, and they can be dangerous and cruel for reasons you wouldn't understand."

Antoinette's mother is right. The blacks burn Coulibri, Pierre dies of the effects of the fire, and Antoinette is ill for weeks after having been hit on the forehead by a jagged stone thrown by Tia, her "friend." When she is well she finds that her mother is mad and violent, detained in a house with a black man and woman as her keepers.

The convent where Antoinette is sent to school is her refuge after the breakup of her home and family life. Even the streets are filled with menace for her, with children chasing her, calling her crazy girl and taunting her about her mother. When she is seventeen Mr. Mason comes to tell her that she is to live with him and that he has asked some English friends to visit next winter. On the evening of his visit she has her second nightmare. This time the unknown menace has become a man who is leading her in the forest: "I follow him, sick with fear but I make no effort to save myself; if anyone were to try to save me, I would refuse. This must happen." Part I ends with safety in bed and comfort from the nuns—the dream has unlocked the memories that make up the narrative of Part I.

All the elements of Antoinette's tragedy are established here—loss, fear, rejection, betrayal, withdrawal from people, distrust even of Christophine, her nurse, who sometimes is tainted in her mind with the mysterious menace of Obeah. Reconstructed by her memory, the events of her childhood memories move from stagnation to catastrophe because of the arrival of Mr. Mason. He is a controlling and eventually hated figure in her mother's life and, as a rich stepfather, he becomes a controlling figure to Antoinette. She cannot forget the causes of her mother's ruin and degradation though she does not completely understand them. She dreads the same fate for herself but at the same time, in a doomed way, she expects it.

Then, not so far off, I saw Tia and her mother and I ran to her, for she was all that was left of my life as it had been…. When I was close I saw the jagged stone in her hand but I did not see her throw it. I did not feel it either, only something wet, running down my face. 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. (emphasis mine)

Events prove her right. What happened to the mother in Part I will happen to the daughter in Part II, with Rochester the activating agent of her tragedy and with the agony of hindsight on her mother's life added to her sense of helplessness.

Antoinette's memories and her two dreams both introduce and foreshadow the drama of Part II, the story of her uneasily happy honeymoon with Rochester and its catastrophic ending. This section is 110 pages long as against Part I's 60 pages and Part III's 12 pages. In all of its seven scenes the narrators are looking back and remembering from the last despairing moments of Part II when everything is lost. Antoinette is beaten and hopeless, "I know nothing about you, and I cannot speak for you…," and Rochester is cold in his hate of Antoinette and of the land: "I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it."

In scene one, Rochester remembers the beginning of their honeymoon near a village called Massacre in one of the Windward Islands. The house, Granbois, is high up in the hills. It is run-down and lonely, but it had belonged to Antoinette's mother and she loves it as a place of safety and remembered childhood happiness. This scene establishes Rochester's strangeness to everything and everyone around him, and indicates his barely dormant suspicion that he has been duped by Mr. Mason, married to a girl who perhaps has a taint of colour and perhaps madness in her blood. He also has to deal with his own self-contempt, the recognition, that following his father's instructions, he married for money—he was bought.

Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either. And when did I begin to notice all this about my wife Antoinette?… Not that I had much time to notice anything. I was married a month after I arrived in Jamaica and for nearly three weeks of that time I was in bed with fever.

Rochester is weary with travel, half-sick with bitterness towards his father and brother and disgust with himself.

Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green [these are the colours Antoinette loves and always chose to paint with in the convent]…. Dear Father. The thirty thousand pounds have been paid to me without question or condition…. I have a modest competence now. I will never be a disgrace to you or to my dear brother, the son you love…. I have sold my soul or you have sold it, and after all is it such a bad bargain? The girl is thought to be beautiful, she is beautiful. And yet …

Rochester is as damaged by his father's failure to love him as Antoinette is by her mother's, but neither one of them is in the least able to comprehend that about the other.

In scene two, Rochester remembers his brief courtship of Antoinette and their marriage: "I played the part I was expected to play…. Every movement I made was an effort of will and sometimes I wondered that no one noticed this…. I remember little of the actual ceremony." What he does remember vividly is her last minute "I'll trust you if you'll trust me. Is that a bargain?" The word trust is bitterly ironic—neither one of them has any basis of personal security or understanding of the other on which to build trust.

In scene three he recalls, with both longing and bitterness, their brief honeymoon happiness: "It was very late when I poured out two glasses and told her to drink to our happiness, to our love and the day without end which would be tomorrow. I was young then. A short youth mine was." Even on their first morning Christophine's entrance with their coffee, Antoinette's familiar treatment of her, and Antoinette's whims, which to Rochester are so exotic and therefore troubling, bring distrust and suspicion into their idyll.

On its one side, theirs becomes an idyllic honeymoon in an Edenic setting with Antoinette losing her fears by day and confiding them to Rochester by night. On its other side, however, is the constant menace of the strange exotic land, the people he distrusts and something secret that he cannot fathom in Antoinette. Here in his recollections we begin to get signals suggesting a real disturbance in Rochester's mind. What secret is he talking about? How disturbed is he as he remembers their lovemaking?

Die then, Sleep. It is all that I can give you…. I wonder if she ever guessed how near she came to dying. In her way, not in mine. It was not a safe game to play—in that place. Desire, Hatred, Life, Death came very close in the darkness. Better not know how close.

Earlier Rochester has mentioned his "confused impressions"; "There are blanks in my mind that cannot be filled up." Subsequently, Jean Rhys indicates certain blanks in his recollections by four dots, and others by the omission of key words in a sentence. She does not do this often, but sparingly, and because of that the reader is all the more aware of ellipses in Rochester's memories—or in his admission of his memories.

The catastrophe, always immanent, is set in motion in scene four. Its agent is a long letter from Daniel Cosway who claims to be Antoinette's brother, the illegitimate son of her father and a Negress. Antoinette, he says, has "bad blood on both sides." Her father died from drink, "raving and cursing," and her mother is shut away for trying to kill Mason—"madness not being all either." Rochester has been the victim of a plot to marry him to a girl who will certainly go mad as her mother did before her: "Money is good but no money can pay for a crazy wife in your bed." This is the betrayal from outside of two people who are so vulnerable within themselves that they have no hope of withstanding it. Daniel Cosway writes that it is his "Christian duty" to write his accusations to Rochester. Henceforth the image of the cock crowing is used repeatedly in Part II, as Cosway's malicious betrayal of Antoinette is reinforced by Rochester's own accumulating betrayals.

For Antoinette, her mother's pattern of ruin is beginning to repeat itself. As Coulibri was burned by the blacks who laughed at them poor and hated them rich, so Cosway is burning with envy and eager to destroy the fragile structure of her happiness. "… [T]hey are white, I am coloured," he writes. "They are rich, I am poor…." Her father and mine was a shameless man and of all his illegitimates I am the most unfortunate and poverty-stricken." As for Rochester, it was as if he had been expecting the letter. "I felt no surprise." It was brought to him by Amélie, the coloured maid who had attracted him from the start—"a lovely little creature, but shy, spiteful, malignant perhaps, like much else in this place." Henceforth Amélie is open in her betrayal of Antoinette, and can only be intimidated by Christophine. In the culmination of the ensuing see-saw between Rochester's rage and Antoinette's desperation, he takes Amélie to bed in the room adjacent to his wife's, where she cannot fail to hear them.

What we have been reading in Wide Sargasso Sea is, in contemporary terms, psycho-biography, presented as a reconstruction of the past by the two main characters. There is no authorial voice intervening between their voices and our understanding and, therefore, we increasingly accept their voices as immediate and contemporary to our own. Rhys's swing-back to the classic use of a letter to initiate the catastrophe is a startling and, in context, a brilliant device, pushing us back into the nineteenth century and the world of Jane Eyre where such a letter, at least in literary convention, could indeed wreak such havoc. Furthermore, we have been prepared for the letter convention by the various snatches of letters that Rochester has drafted to his father.

Everything now moves swiftly and inexorably towards the final catastrophe. Having betrayed, Amélie now defies Antoinette and calls her "white cockroach," singing the song that was used to taunt the Cosways on the Coulibri estate. Antoinette, enraged, first attacks Amélie and then repeats a part of the pattern of breakup she saw as a child. As her Aunt Cora had torn her petticoat in strips to bind up the burns Pierre suffered in the fire, so she tears a sheet into strips in an outburst of rage that is also a symbolic preparation for the binding of her wounds. Then she retreats into another pattern of her childhood, shutting herself away in silence. Rochester drinks rum punch and then wanders in the forest. This is the point at which their mutual ruin becomes inevitable—at this crucial point each one of them is impelled to take a further and further diverging path until there is no hope of trustful communication between them. Everything that Antoinette does from now on looks to Rochester like the confirmation of Cosway's accusation: to the reader everything she does is also explained by the knowledge given us of her memories in Part I. The patterns were shown to us then from a time when she was safe and at peace, in no sense mad, though totally vulnerable to her future. From here on, it is only Christophine who is a rock of strength and sanity. Though also, because she cannot be other than herself, a product of her place, her race and her background, she is also unwittingly an activator of further disaster. She leaves Antoinette and goes up to her house in the hills.

Scene five is narrated by Antoinette, desolate and desperate, but not beaten yet. She goes to Christophine for advice and from her she gets the advice she won't take: "You ask me a hard thing, I tell you a hard thing, pack up and go." Antoinette's pride may well be as strong as Rochester's; it may even be stronger than her need for love! "No, I will not, then everyone, not only the servants, will laugh at me." What she also gets, because Christophine loves her and cannot refuse her desperation, is a love potion, a mixture of the Obeah medicine that had always frightened and also fascinated Antoinette. Antoinette still has the will to fight for her marriage, but the means she uses, coming out of the only culture she knows, are doomed to be disastrous.

The 40-page scene six, narrated by Rochester, is the drama's painful climax. Throughout, he swings wildly between love and its gentle impulses and hate and its vindictive ones. Amélie plants more suspicion in his mind about Antoinette's behaviour with her cousin, Sandi Cosway. He goes to see Daniel Cosway who is after money to keep silent and he leaves in rage and disgust. He listens to Antoinette who talks to him as she had promised Christophine, telling him something of her mother's ruin and its causes. But essentially his mind is made up to her madness and his tone is one of cold reason, though he cannot listen without suffering and regret: "I began to wonder how much of all this was true, how much imagined, distorted…. But my heart was heavy as lead." The reader knows that what she tells him is completely true to her memories, but since Rochester has not that corroboration we can also understand his confusion and doubt. He never loses our sympathy to become, simply, a heartless monster. But instead we are given a terrifying record of a man progressively losing his hold on sanity and any capacity for the trust that might have saved them both. After he has listened to Antoinette's story of her mother's ruin he first begins to call her Bertha—for him, Antoinette no longer exists. For her it is troubling and finally terrifying to be called by another name: "Will you come in and say goodnight to me?' 'Certainly I will, my dear Bertha.' 'Not Bertha tonight,' she said. 'Of course, on this of all nights you must be Bertha." From here on the agonizing split in Rochester's mind is made more and more evident. On the one hand is love, pain, and remorse:

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 do…. She need not have done what she did to me, I will always swear that, she need not have done it.

On the other hand there is his pride that makes him hard, the self-contempt that makes him harder still and his suspicions, by now extending to everyone around him. He makes love to Antoinette one last time but wakes up sick, full of self-disgust and sure that he has been poisoned. He takes Amélie to bed but wakens the next morning "… satisfied and peaceful, but not gay … no, by God, not gay." "And her skin was darker, her lips thicker than I had thought."

From this time onward Rochester is outwardly invulnerable, but inwardly well along in the process of disintegration. Amélie he pays off—her betrayal has worked for her as she hoped and she now has the money to go to Rio. She also has pity for both her victims: "As she was going I could not resist saying, half longing, half triumphant, 'Well Amélie, are you still sorry for me?' 'Yes,' she said, 'I am sorry for you. But I find it in my heart to be sorry for her too.'" Rochester, however, is beyond compassion for Antoinette, Christophine, or most important, for the blundering humanity in himself. He arms himself with power over Christophine by soliciting and receiving a letter from Mr. Fraser, an English magistrate: "[I] consider her a most dangerous person…. I have written very discretely to Hill, the white inspector of police in your town. If she lives near you and gets up to any of her nonsense let him know at once." When Antoinette returns, distraught and drunk on the rum that Christophine has given her to deaden her despair, Rochester is drinking rum too. But he chooses to see and judge his wife only by the fact of her drunkenness, not its causes. When she accuses him, in taking Amélie, of being as bad as the old slave owners he pretended to despise, he slips away into cold abstraction. "'Slavery was not a matter of liking or disliking, 'I said, trying to speak calmly. 'It was a question of justice.'" When Antionette says of Amélie, "Is she so much prettier than I am? Don't you love me at all?" he says, "'No, I do not.'" Always, now, he calls her Bertha, or "my wife," and he remembers, when Christophine accuses him, that in the cold passion of his last lovemaking he called her "Marionette." "'That word mean doll, eh? Because she don't speak, You want to force her to cry and to speak.'"

The climax of scene six is Christophine's confrontation with Rochester, when she accuses him and pleads for Antoinette. Here we see the strength of Christophine. Though Antoinette's love for her has always been mixed with a superstitious fear, Christophine's love for Antoinette is strong and without a trace of self-interest or betrayal. This is a powerful and a disturbing scene, as evocative of pity and terror as Lear on the heath or Othello in his torment of jealousy. Outwardly Rochester maintains a calm and supercilious superiority as she accuses him and pleads for Antoinette.

"… Nobody is to have any pride but you. She have more pride than you and she say nothing.

… Everybody know that you marry her for her money and you take it all. And then you want to break her up, because you jealous of her. She is more better than you, she have better blood in her and she don't care for money—it's nothing for her. Oh I see that first time I look at you. You young but already you hard. You fool the girl. You make her think you can't see the sun for looking at her."

To himself, Rochester admits that it was like that. He listens to "her judge's voice" telling him what he has done and what he should do now to win her back, but inside he is convinced it is all hopeless: "I should stop this useless conversation, I thought, but could only listen, hypnotized, to her dark voice coming from the darkness."

Finally, however, Rochester is enraged by Christophine's suggestion that Antoinette might, if free, marry again. He is also alerted and hardened to his course by her talk of money. Christophine talked to Antoinette about money, too, and by now we, the readers, know that she is innocent of self-interest—but all Rochester's resentment of Cosway's attempt at blackmail springs alive, as well as all of the self-interest which made him marry for a fortune, which he admits but despises. About money, Rochester is always defensive. Therefore he becomes "alert and wary, ready to defend myself," dismisses Christophine with contempt, "you ridiculous old woman," and threatens her with the police unless she leaves.

This scene of confrontation is so dramatically powerful that one hears and sees it all as one reads, the black woman, the white Englishman, the chasm between them in cultural identity marked by accent and attitude, Rochester outwardly strong but inwardly disintegrating and Christophine—"her eyes were undaunted." It ends with Christophine's summary accusation—he wants her money but not Antoinette, he will say she is mad, her brother, Richard Mason, will corroborate him, and she will indeed become like her mother.

… "You do that for money? But you wicked like Satan self!"

I said loudly and wildly, "And do you think that I wanted all this? I would give my life to undo it. I would give my eyes never to have seen this abominable place!"

She laughed, "And that's the first damn word of truth you speak. You choose what you give, eh? Then you choose. You meddle in something and perhaps you don't know what it is." She began to mutter to herself. Not in patois. I knew the sound of patois now.

This final chilling foreshadowing of the future blinding of Rochester is spoken by Christophine when, transformed by rage and pain for Antoinette, she has taken upon herself the mysterious and prophetic Obeah woman role.

After she leaves Rochester turns to rum for solace and he rages in torment between vindictive jealousy and agonized loss:

She'll not laugh in the sun again. She'd not dress up and smile at herself in that damnable looking-glass….

… Made for loving? Yes, but she'll have no lover, for I don't want her and she'll see no other.

At the very base of this passion there is his torment that he never knew Antoinette, was always separate from her: "I could not touch her. Excepting as the hurricane will touch that tree—and break it." Even now if she would capitulate to his drive for power and mastery over her by so much as one tear, he would relent, he swears: "She's mad, but mine, mine…. Antoinette—I can be gentle too. Hide your face. Hide yourself but in my arms. You'll soon see how gentle. My lunatic. My mad girl." The terrible recognition that builds in the reader through Part II and is finally confirmed in this climax is that of all the chasms between them, the differences in culture are deep, but sexuality is deeper still. Rochester cannot cope with either Antoinette's sexuality or his own. He can only tolerate a relationship in which he is the master. A mutual delight in free sexuality is beyond him. Since he has not been able to dominate Antoinette's own sexuality, he will either condescend to keep and enjoy her as his mad girl, or he will shut her away from all loving and possibilities of loving.

In scene seven, as he recalls their final departure from Granbois, there is no trace of such a sign of submission from Antoinette. Her whole life's experience has been a preconditioning to this ruin, and furthermore, as Christophine has warned him, she in her way is at least as proud as he in his. As for Rochester, he swings wildly in his mind from love and regret to hate and revenge, "Again the giddy change, the remembering, the sickening swing back to hate," until finally the hate irrevocably takes over:

… My hate is colder, stronger, and you'll have no hate to warm yourself. You will have nothing.

I did it too. I saw the hate go out of her eyes.

I forced it out. And with the hate her beauty. She was only a ghost.

But with that last exercise of his will in hate, Rochester has also forced everything out of himself. His mastery is empty, because he, too, has become like a zombi, one of the living dead. When the young boy cries at being left behind, Rochester speaks one last line out of his own emptiness: "Who would have thought that any boy would cry like that. For nothing. Nothing."

After the power and the passion of Part II, Part III locks Wide Sargasso Sea into the final action of Jane Eyre. The pathos of the lost girl in the attic is acknowledged by Grace Poole, who pities her and who is the first speaker in Part III, gossiping to Leah, the maid. But Grace Poole needs the double salary she is paid for being wardress and besides, to Mrs. Fairfax who hired her, Rochester is the one who has been wronged: "Don't ask me to pity anyone who had a hand in that." As for Antoinette, she is Bertha to the few who know of her existence. The madness that she feared, that Rochester thought he saw in her, has now been forced upon her by her confinement. Her only tangible link with Antoinette and the islands is her red dress: "The scent that came from the dress was very faint at first, then it grew stronger. The smell of vetivert and frangipanni, of cinnamon and dust and lime trees when they are flowering. The smell of the sun and the smell of the rain." The thoughts and memories of Antoinette as she gives them in Part III are not lucid and consecutively ordered as they were in Part I. They are snatches and fragments and when she has been violent, as when Richard Mason comes to see her, she does not remember. Constantly she is troubled by one question, "Why have I been brought here?" and "What must I do?" Her third dream gives her the answer, the ending to the two dreams she remembered in Part I. The flight of steps and the terrifying stranger lead to this room with a lighted candle and her keeper asleep beside the gin bottle. Antoinette takes the candle and goes out into the hall: "I shielded it with my hand and it burned up again to light me along the dark passage." Just as Coulibri, her home, was destroyed by fire long ago, so must she now burn Thornfield Hall, her alien prison.

Sociologically, Wide Sargasso Sea is a novel about the tragic effects on individuals of mass cultural conditioning among peoples and between sexes. It can be read as a parable about the terrible damage that an imperial power, by asserting its drives and values as unalterable law, does to its own and its colonized people. It is a novel of cultural determinism—both Antoinette and Rochester are caught in a limbo between two cultures, helpless to move, change, or understand each other. Only Christophine knows exactly who and where she is. She warns Antoinette, who has always had a fantasy dream of England, even a foreshadowing of her final loneliness there. England is alien, it is a "cold thief" place, and Christophine doubts its existence: "If there is this place at all, I never see it, that is one thing sure." Behind the culturally-trapped individuals, money is the activating evil in the novel. Rochester does marry for money, Antoinette is, effectively, sold for money, Daniel Cosway betrays for money as does Amélie, Grace Poole is enticed to Thornfield Hall for money, Antoinette's ruin is complete because, once married, her fortune is Rochester's. And when Rochester thinks wrongly that Christophine is after money, he becomes adamant, to "defend himself," as he says. He seals Antoinette's ruin and his own.

The novel is also a study in environmental and climatic determinism. Jean Rhys's sense of place is very strong and she evokes the sights, sounds, and scents of the islands with haunting power. Antoinette's love of the islands must also be the author's remembered love, but Rhys also understands and communicates Rochester's uncase in a landscape which, because it is strange to him, he takes to be hostile. Antoinette loves the blues, greens, and purples that are the colours of the Jamaican hills, and the brilliance of the flamboyant tree: "If you are buried under a flamboyant tree, your soul is lifted up when it flowers, Everyone wants that." She cannot imagine snow, except as torn pieces of white paper or floating white feathers. To Rochester, on the other hand, the islands are all too much: the hills are menacing and an "extreme green"—"that green menace. I had felt it ever since I saw this place." He soon tires of the sunsets and waits for night, but the night is still foreign, with "strange noises" and "an alien moon." Where Antoinette sees a familiar village, he sees desolation, "the sad leaning coconut palms, the fishing boats drawn upon the shingly beach, the uneven row of whitewashed huts." Many, many such examples of contrasting reaction to environment occur throughout the text.

The name, Wide Sargasso Sea, takes its reference from the terrible, overpowering conditions of culturally-imposed separation that effectively paralyze the wills of individuals trapped within them. It is a haunting title, with strong echoes of Arnold's "salt, estranging sea" of course, but beyond that it signifies the vast, dead centre to which Rochester and Antoinette drift and from which they have not the power to escape. One of the O.E.D.'s citations for Sargasso is this definition, from Maury's Physical Geography of 1855: "There is in each ocean a Sargasso into which all drift matter finds its way." The line could well serve as an epigraph for Jean Rhys's novel.

Technically, Jean Rhys set herself an enormous challenge in writing this novel. To build a contemporary work into another, classic novel of the nineteenth century is to invite a hypercritical approach from readers and critics who are consciously or unconsciously defensive about a trespass into familiar and protected territory. She succeeded because her depth of concern for, and understanding of, her characters was complemented by a stunning achievement in narrative technique—and also (constantly at work within her narrative), because of the dazzling success of her ambivalent evocation of place.