SOURCE: "'And it Kept its Secret': Narration, Memory, and Madness in Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea," in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. XXVIII, No. 4, Summer, 1987, pp. 195-209.

[In the following essay, Mezei examines the narrative structure and presentation of Antoinette's madness in Wide Sargasso Sea. According to Mezei, Antoinette's deteriorating mental state is linked to her inability to remember and recount her story.]

Very soon she'll join all the others who know the secret and will not tell it. Or cannot. Or try and fail because they do not know enough…. She's one of them. I too can wait—for the day when she is only a memory to be avoided, looked away, and like all memories a legend. Or a lie…. (Wide Sargasso Sea)

With these vengeful words, Rochester closes his narration, the disturbing story of his marriage in Jamaica to Antoinette Cosway (Mason), the first Mrs. Rochester. Soon enough Rochester has transformed Antoinette from a speaking subject into an object, an other, a locked-away madwoman—a lie. As a character and a narrator, Rochester has committed one kind of narratorial lie, but, according to Jean Rhys, the author of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, had engendered another, equally serious lie:

The Creole in Charlotte Brontë's novel is a lay figure—repulsive which does not matter, and not once alive which does. She's necessary to the plot, but always she shrieks, howls, laughs horribly, attacks all and sundry—off stage. For me (and for you I hope) she must be right on stage. She must be at least plausible with a past, the reason why Mr. Rochester treats her so abominably and feels justified, the reason why he thinks she is mad and why of course she goes mad, even the reason why she tries to set everything on fire, and eventually succeeds. (Personally, I think that one is simple. She is cold—and fire is the only warmth she knows in England). (Letters, 1931–1966)

Rochester's sin was to impose his point of view on both the narrative and Antoinette: Charlotte Brontë's was a narratorial omission: in Jane Eyre, Antoinette (Bertha) is not permitted to speak. Instead, it is Jane who speaks for her when she admonishes Rochester, "you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady … she cannot help being mad." To rectify the situation, Jean Rhys in her novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, allows Antoinette to narrate her own story. Thus, despite Rochester's malediction, Antoinette does "tell it," and the telling of her secret, her memories, and her story mirrors her desperate effort to save herself from a lie.

How, as subject, does Antoinette tell her story? And does her narration hold a clue to her madness? In fact, Jean Rhys was uncertain how best to present Antoinette's point of view:

It can be done three ways. (1) Straight, Childhood, Marriage, Finale told in first person. Or it can be done (2) Man's point of view; (3) Woman's ditto both first person. Or it can be told in the third person with the writer as the Almighty. Well that is hard for me. I prefer direct thoughts and actions.

I am doing (2). (Letters)

As the novel reveals, Rhys decided to begin with Antoinette's narration, then to shift to Rochester's, and finally to close with Antoinette's disintegrating narration, introduced and contextualized by the disembodied voice of Grace Poole.

But, as Rochester feared, there are secrets shadowing Antoinette and her narration. Since the suspense in this essay lies in what I will say about the secrets, not in what they are, let me immediately alleviate the reader's suspense. First, hidden within the narrative is the textual secret representing the hidden or deferred meaning, which is the nature of Antoinette's ultimate "marooning," a secrecy as deep and seductive as the pools she swims in, but as dangerous as the madness in which she finally drowns. This "marooning" is gradually disclosed by the deliberate sequence of her opening narrative. The structural secret, which is the secret the reader must discover as he or she travels through the text, consists of Antoinette's desire (and need) for sequence. Her very sanity is tied to her ability to narrate, and here being "marooned" has consequences for both her narrative and her state of mind.

There is also, finally, the secret shaping the entire narrative—the secret of the narrative. In describing the tales of Henry James, Tzvetan Todorov observed:

we now know that Henry James' secret … resides precisely in the existence of a secret, of an absent and absolute cause, as well as in the effort to plumb this secret, to render the absent present. ("The Secret of Narrative")

Inevitably, the hunt for such a secret initiates, propels, and in effect creates the narrative. Quite simply the secret of Wide Sargasso Sea is Antoinette's valiant, heroic attempt to tell her story. The secret of the narrative is not her descent into madness in the figure of the madwoman locked in the attic, or her lack of madness and conventional society's excess of it, but her reason for engaging in the act of narration. Antoinette and the others "keep" their secret from Rochester (and perhaps the reader), because Rochester does not pause to unravel the story Antoinette is telling: he resists the structures and the function of her narrative, as well as its histoire; he is neither an ideal listener nor an ideal reader.

To prevent a false telling of her story by others—the lie—Antoinette must tell herself in the first person following the conventions of narrative order. When the narrative disintegrates, as it does in Part Three, so does Antoinette. When the narrative stops, Antoinette dies. By her act of narration, she retains her tenuous fragile hold on sanity, on life itself, since to narrate is to live, to order a life, to "make sense" out of it. If "narrative is a strategy for survival" (Daphne Marlatt, How Hug a Stone), Antoinette survives only as long as she creates narratives.

Although, according to Kenneth Burke, the construction of symbolic actions such as the telling of stories is the "defining feature of human beings," (Language as Symbolic Action) for women narrators, this symbolic action may be a necessary strategy for survival. Antoinette joins Penelope, Scheherazade, the wicked stepmother in Snow White, and countless female narrators whose only form of control is through the weaving of words, the plotting of stories, the constructing of plots, and the telling of their own story in their voice as narrating subject, not narrated object. What is interesting about Antoinette's narration is how desperately and ingeniously she uses narrative techniques such as the "illusion of sequence" (W. J. T. Mitchell, Foreword, On Narrative) and linear chronology to delay the final secret, climax, closure of her story—her descent into madness and death.

As long as Antoinette can remember and order the events of her memories into a temporal or causal sequence, create even an illusion of sequence and maintain a measured sense of space and time, then she can hold her life and self together. Her act of narration becomes an act of affirmation and cohesion, a nod to the world and its conventions, an attempt to prevent herself from dissolving. When, in Part Three, Antoinette lies encaged in Thornfield Hall's dark, cold attic, the threads that hold her to the reality that the world perceives as sanity finally break. These threads are the elements of conventional narrative: linear chronology, sequence, narratorial lucidity, distance. She herself admits at this point that "time has no meaning"; sequence disintegrates into a confusion of present and past and ultimately into a dream which narrates her future. The relation between text-time (récit) and story-time (histoire) blurs, creating anachrony (Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse). She can neither "remember" what has happened in the past, nor what it is she must do in the future. Like her sense of time, her sense of space becomes distorted; "that afternoon we went to England" she says, describing a brief foray from her attic. Her attic is not England, a place, but a configuration of her mind, an enclosure. Finally, no longer in control of her narration, she must end it.

Rhys is a deliberately elusive writer, whose elusiveness differs from the lucid strategies of Joyce or Nabokov. She is also a modernist writer who polishes and hones her texts with a perfectionist's obsessions, and whose modernism is reflected in her method of paring away at authorial presence so that her characters may speak and act without intrusive authorial judgments and commentary. Unlike some of her contemporaries in the 1960s, she is not experimenting with the concept of narrative or narrator; her struggle with point of view and focalization concerns her desire to present a consciousness sincerely rather than to question the structures of presenting consciousness. We need, therefore, to dip and borrow and construct our own approach to her narrative, beckoned as it were by the text itself. With this in mind, we can now turn to narration in Wide Sargasso Sea and its relation to memory and madness.

An earlier version of Part One of Wide Sargasso Sea was published in Art and Literature, March 1964, and this and the endless agonizing revisions of this manuscript that took over ten years to complete, are witness to her search for perfection and purity of presentation. The changes to the earlier manuscript show her building a stronger case to justify Antoinette's state of mind and subsequent actions. Rhys removes verbs like "seem" or "thought" to allow Antoinette to speak directly, and omits "and," "but," and "then" in order to make Antoinette's discourse more disjointed and associative, to undermine the illusion of sequence. Certain deletions are indicative of her intention to allow Antionette to proffer her experiences with a greater immediacy through less commentary, therefore creating the sense of a highly impressionistic, troubled mind. For example, the earlier version had Antoinette commenting on her childhood. "I got used to a solitary life and began to distrust strangers…," which is unnecessary commentary whose signification is more effectively revealed by Antoinette's reactions to ensuing events. Similarly, the final version cuts "but it was understood that she would not approve of Tia," leaving "My mother never asked me where I had been or what I had done" to stand as an even more poignant indictment of her mother's neglect.

Rhys also adds several scenes in her final version—the poisoned horse, the first "forest" dream, a visit to her imprisoned mother, all of which strengthen the case of a troubled past for Antoinette. Despite Rhys' authorial elusiveness, by looking closely at the structures of these narrative acts, we can see how narrative becomes, for Antoinette, a strategy of survival, an attempt to maintain her hold on reality, to constrain dissolution into madness and how, finally, the act of retention helps her to remember what act (other than narration) she must commit in the future.

Part One is Antoinette's narration and the narrating (present) self seems to be speaking from the perspective (place and time) with which her narration closes—the convent, in the early hours of the morning as she falls asleep again. In this case, the narrating and experiencing self merge in the present time with which Part One closes. This first narration covers the period from Antoinette's childhood at Coulibri to age seventeen at the convent just prior to her marriage to Rochester. The narrating self is engaged in an act of memory, creating a pattern like Aunt Cora's colorful patchwork counterpane out of significant moments of her childhood. Although there is little dissonance between the two selves, for the narrating self rarely judges or comments on her younger self, there are several significant occasions in which the narrating self explicitly draws attention to her present state. At these moments, we are made aware of Antoinette's urgency, her hysteria, her desperation as if her world were closing in.

Since Antoinette is a child of silence, to whom communication, words, speech bring only unhappiness and rejection (her mother continually orders the child to leave her alone), it is a heroic effort for her to speak, even to herself. On two occasions—the poisoning of her mother's horse, and Mr. Mason's intimation of the prospect of her marriage—she shows her suspicion of words: "for I thought if I told no one it might not be true." To speak something raises it to the level of concrete reality. On the other hand, it is not her passive silence that causes her the greatest perturbation and the eventual division into two disassociated selves, but the act of being silenced. She is silenced first by her mother, who denies her existence, and then again by Rochester who refuses to be the reader of her story. He "reads" Daniel Cosway's letter-version, but is reluctant to listen to Antoinette's version. As the couple departs from Granbois, he refuses the healing act of communication: "No, I would say—I know what I would say 'I have made a terrible mistake. Forgive me.'" But he never says it, never releases her from her imprisoning silence.

Although Part One is narrated retrospectively in the past tense, it is in the moments when Antoinette slips into the present that we catch a glimpse of the older, narrating Antoinette and the secret of her narrative. The novel opens with the ominous "They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did." Although "say" is in the gnomic present, and functions as a reminder of the outside, anonymous world of clichés, it also serves to remind us that there is a present voice, a narrator who sometimes lapses into the present. Already the troubled presence of the present is felt.

At the beginning of her story, Antoinette describes her mother:

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.

But not any longer. Not any more.

The repetition of "not any" and the slight change from "longer" to "more" implies that the second phrase is spoken by the present narrating self brooding on her loss-of her mother, of feeling "safe" and that, in the narrator's mind, past and present blur, a blurring which occurs repeatedly in Part Three and suggests a disassociated mind. Like conventional narrative, sanity apparently requires clarity of sequence and distinction.

Further along in her narrative, just before the burning of Coulibri, Antoinette slips again into a gnomic present:

There are more ways than one of being happy, better perhaps to be peaceful and contented and protected, as I feel now, peaceful for years and long years.

"As I feel now" probably refers to her sense of the convent as a refuge (or possibly to the attic, where locked in the refuge of her mind, she feels safe). She digresses from retrospection again in that same section when she remarks in the only noticeable judgment of her younger experiencing self "All this was long ago, when I was still babyish and sure that everything was alive."

The most striking emergence into the present occurs as Antoinette describes her sojourn' in the convent, after Coulibri was burned and her mother locked away: "Quickly while I can, I must remember the hot classroom." Why the sense of urgency? Why must she remember? The phrase "must remember" recurs in Part Three and is in fact the secret or hidden figure of her last narrative, her link to sanity, and the motivation of her entire narrative. Must it be told quickly because soon her narrative will be taken over by another narrator and/or because she is in danger of forgetting (losing) her mind?

After Mr. Mason hints that he has a suitor for her, Antoinette enters, for the second time, a recurring nightmare where she wanders in a menacing forest, pursued by someone characterized by the fact that he hates her. This dream is narrated in the present tense. It is then an aide mémoire, spoken by Antoinette in the attic, to help her to remember what it is she must do at Thornfield, since the dream clearly shifts from Jamaica to England: "We are no longer in the forest but in an enclosed garden surrounded by a stone wall and the trees are different trees." Or is the narrator, speaking from the convent, shifting from a past dream to a premonition of her future English nightmare? Then she wakes and continues in the present tense to describe Sister Marie Augustine giving her chocolate and their ensuing enigmatic discussion. Her recollection of chocolate causes a digression into the past to her mother's funeral, chocolate being the trigger of this memory. "Now the thought of her is mixed up with my dream." Antoinette's narration concludes as she goes back to bed to sleep, to dream; the last words she hears are the Sister's which lead into the future and into Rochester's narration: "Soon I will give the signal. Soon it will be tomorrow morning." This anticipation of the future is paralleled by the ending of Part Three which propels the reader into true closure only in Jane Eyre. The entire narrative ends with the future which remains, of course, to be narrated. The intertextuality of sequence between Brontë's and Rhys' novels is as significant as the intertextuality of the histoire.

Before we can leave Antoinette's narrative, there remain further secrets hidden in her story and in her telling that call for disclosure. First, her narrative appears to have certain characteristics of a monologue, of what Dorrit Cohn calls the "autobiographical monologue" in which "a lone speaker recalls his own past and tells it to himself—in chronological order" (Transparent Minds), or even of a "memory monologue." In order to describe the memory monologue Cohn quotes Claude Simon's remarks on his novel La Route des Flandres:

this author undertakes less … to tell a story than to describe the imprint left by it on a memory and a sensibility. (Transparent Minds)

Cohn then suggests that the model is not autobiographical communication (telling one's story) but the self-involvement of memory and that this imitation of a solipsistic process imposes not only a fractured chronology but also a fragmentary coverage. Cohn again quotes Simon: "I do not fill in the blanks. They remain, like so many fragments." The movement of the narration is determined not by chronology but by associative memory.

Is then Antoinette's narration not a narrative but a monologue, an autobiographical or memory monologue? I think not. Antoinette has structured her narrative deliberately and, although as we shall see, the sequence of events are connected by associative memory rather than by temporality or causality, Antoinette's narrative is forcibly contained by a motif that determines her memories and her retelling of them. Conversely as stated earlier, she herself is held together by the act of narrating. Therefore, there is a deliberate narrative presentation and strategy. Moreover, as a narrator, she is always seeking to restrain her story within the boundaries of conventional narrative temporality such as sequence, linear chronology, plausible duration. This is why she so carefully sprinkles dates and sets out duration of time throughout her telling: a date of 1839 when she enters the convent, a reference to "the first day I had to go to the convent," and explanation that "During this time, nearly eighteen months my stepfather often came to see me." These are signposts of sanity. To measure time is a measure of how closely one is in touch with reality. Accordingly, Antoinette makes an effort to measure time and to progress from childhood, to school, to marriage. Rochester called her "a lunatic who always knows the time. But never does." Pulling against chronology is her mind's tendency to work by association, to digress to the present, to compress time. After describing how she "knew the time of day when though it is hot and blue and there are no clouds, the sky can have a very black look," she pauses and begins a new section, a new time: "I was a bridesmaid when my mother married Mr. Mason." Surely this is the memory association of a bride who has learned to equate marriage with tragedy and blackness. The narrating self has invaded the experiencing self and imposed her perceptions upon the younger mind. While Antoinette's strategy as narrator is to compose a conventional narrative, the boundaries of the narrative are continually under threat of disintegrating—as is Antoinette herself. For Rhys and her narrator, freedom, iconoclasm, innovation imply danger, isolation, alienation: the tenets of modernism do not hold out liberation for a bound mind, they only release that mind into a further and more horrible entrapment, particularly if that mind is female, and by definition, not free.

A monologue, whether autobiography or memory, is suitable for a mad, rambling, or childish mind that free-associates and thus reveals itself (as Benjy does in Sound and Fury, or Vardaman in As I Lay Dying), but when a narrator like Antoinette makes such a formidable effort to structure a narrative and abide by the rhetorical principles of narrative, the difference between monologue and narrative becomes the difference between madness and sanity.

Rhys, in fact, originally intended to present Antoinette in monologue, but then changed her mind, her story, and as a consequence offered the reader a more complex fiction, a fiction with a secret to be discovered:

The book began with a dream and ended with a dream (though I didn't get the last dream right for a long time). All the rest was to be a long monologue. Antoinette in her prison room remembers, loves, hates, raves, talks to imaginary people, hears imaginary voices answering and overhears meaningless conversations outside. The story, if any, to be implied, never told straight…. I remembered the last part of Voyage in the Dark written like that—time and place abolished, past and present the same—and I had been almost satisfied. Then everybody said it was "confused and confusing—impossible to understand, etc." and I had to cut and rewrite it (I still think I was right and they were wrong, tho' it was long ago). Still I thought "if they fussed over one part of a book, nobody will get the hang of a whole book written that way at all" or "A mad girl speaking all the time is too much!" And anyway there was a lot left to be done and could I do it? I think I was tired. Anyway after a week or two I decided to write it again as a story, a romance, but keeping the dream feeling and working up to the madness (I hoped). (Letters)

Because there is a psychological motivation for narrative, Antoinette's discourse, even if spoken, even if directed to herself (and really to whom else does she ever speak?) must be received as narrative.

Although her narrative unfolds primarily in the past, and although there is the appearance of consonance between the narrating and the experiencing selves, between the young woman of the present and the lonely child of the past, the heavy hand of present consciousness is felt throughout. But this is where Rhys is so elusive. Although in retrospective narratives, the relationship between narrating and experiencing selves varies from primary focalization on the experiencing self (and childhood) as in Great Expectations, to focalization on the present consciousness as it engages in the act of interpreting its past, and analyzing the present in the context of this past (Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu), Rhys' deliberate blurring of the two selves through allowing the present (and disturbed) consciousness of Antoinette to overtly and covertly intrude upon the narration, sows seeds of warning about the precarious state of the narrating consciousness. While Part One is evidently narrated in the past, we in fact learn as much about the present state of her mind. Antoinette's inability at times, particularly in Part Three, to distinguish between her past and present self is simultaneously a sign of her increased disturbance and of the breakdown of narrative presentation.

In Part One, Antoinette succumbs to certain narrative habits that are revelatory of her present disturbed mind. She repeats the adverbs "always" and "never." Within the opening pages, Mr. Luttrell "was gone for always"; Pierre's doctor "never came again"; Antoinette "never went near" the orchid in the wild garden at Coulibri; "The Wilderness of Coulibri never saddened me"; Christophine "never paid them"; "I never looked at any strange negro"; "My mother never asked me where I had been or what I had done." In one sense the use of "always," along with the repetition of "still," ("she still rode about every morning") and "sometimes" ("sometimes we left the bathing pool at midday, sometimes we stayed till late afternoon") is iterative and durative, implying continuity over a certain duration of time in the past. However, the plaintive echo of "still," "sometimes," "usually," "always," and "never" intimates a presentness in that adverbs like "still" reach into the present, and that "always," and more strongly "never" affect the present narrating Antoinette who has suffered the consequences of the string of "always" and "never" in her childhood, and now exists in a state of neverness—always. Moreover the finality and negativity of "never" (and, in the context of her discourse, of "always") imply a continual, progressing closure as her world narrows, closes in on her, and freedom, safety, and happiness are progressively cut off from her.

In other words, the repetition of adverbs (whose very repetition would connote iterativity) in fact implies the opposite—closure, a finality. The frequency and persistence of repetition evokes this sense of finality and desperate sadness.

With similar effect, Rhys often resorts to the verbal auxiliary "would." In reporting angry conversations between her mother and Mr. Mason, Antoinette describes their dialogue by reporting "he would say," "she'd speak,"; "would" is here used in the habitual mode. The impression the reader receives is again iterative—this argument occurred over and over again. Antoinette also creates this effect by remembering that "Mr. Mason always said." This use of the iterative has a psychological effect upon the reader, in that Antoinette's narration takes on a timeless urgency as if it were a universal or apocalyptic tale whose signification extends beyond the narrator and her experience, or to put it another way, the narrator's life and experience are not merely personal but also symbolic.

As Antoinette draws her narrative to its first conclusion, as she falls into her first sleep, and she seems to narrate from a region in which she is either just entering sleep or waking, a pre- or subconscious state where "only the magic and the dream are true," she sounds her most foreboding note. She has just woken from her nightmare, and asks the Sister who tends to her "such terrible things happen I said, 'why? why'?" If the reader reflects back on Part One, Antoinette's narrative has consisted entirely of the telling of "terrible things" one after the other; her narrative is obsessed with safety, her understandable desire to find refuge, the progressive diminishment of any feeling of safety, and conversely her increasing sense of isolation or, to use Antoinette's more poetic phrase, being "marooned." Rejected (and betrayed) by her mother, by Tia, the local blacks, and eventually by Mr. Mason, as first he abandons her to Rochester, and secondly, dies making her abandonment complete, Antoinette becomes increasingly marooned.

While Antoinette's narrative appears to follow a linear sequence, its deep structure is not linear but associative. Conscious of the need to present her story convincingly (even to herself), she appears to maintain a chronology, the illusion of sequence. Yet, if we look carefully at the sequence of events, we see their connexity is associative rather than temporal or causal, and that the associations are based on Antoinette's obsessions—her fear of the loss of safety, her sense of desertion and isolation—so that each episode she narrates becomes an amplification of these obsessions. She begins her story with an oblique reference to the Emancipation Act, "when trouble comes close ranks," continues with the anecdote of Mr. Luttrell's suicide, then recounts the poisoned horse incident (each episode "marooning" them further), and moves on to Pierre's feebleness, and a description to the wild garden. Eden destroyed. Safety for Antoinette implies evasion, burial, escape, enclosing oneself away from the world by assigning signs of safety to parentheses "(My father, visitors, horses, feeling safe in bed—all belonged to the past)." For a time, she feels safe in her bed, Coulibri, the convent, and Granbois. Gradually, however, each refuge is progressively destroyed: the safety of her bed and Coulibri ruined by fire and by her mother's marriage to Mr. Mason and the invasion of the blacks, the sanctuary of the convent by the imminent arrival of a suitor and another invasive marriage which, like her mother's, culminates in fire and madness. Her final evasion is within her own mind, disassociated from time, from people, even from her own self of which the attic, dark, cold and lightless, is a perfect sign.

Antoinette's narrative in Part One ends as she falls into sleep, and another narrator, Edward Rochester, who remains unnamed although his personal signature is strongly stamped on his discourse. Rhys wanted a "cold factual" narrator to contrast with Antoinette's "emotional" account (Letters); she also felt sympathy for Rochester's plight and gave him a chance to justify himself. His narration then, unlike Antoinette's is not a confession or a matter of survival, but a self-justification, an attempt at a rational, analytic explanation of the breakdown of his marriage and of his wife. It is appropriate that the narrative now falls into his hands since, at the point when Antoinette closes her narrative, she is experiencing greater and greater distress and disassociation. Like her mother, she is suffering a division of the self where she undergoes what she calls the real death, the death of the mind, and becomes blank, doll-like, inhuman, in waiting for the second death, the death of the body. Since she is now outside herself, her story, appropriately, is told from the outside by an outsider. Rochester has married her, taken possession of her, and made her his wife, and so he now tells her story and the story of their marriage which has become his story and no longer hers. Instead of narrating her own story, Antoinette becomes a character in his narration. She does, however, resist complete marital and narratorial possession by Rochester for on two occasions she breaks into Rochester's narrative to present her point of view.

In contrast to Antoinette's narrative, Rochester's narrating self (and his narration takes the shape of a letter to his father that he will never send) is close in time to his experiencing self, and the immediacy of his language reflects the shocks suffered by his experiencing self. He speaks of "this morning" as he begins, slipping into the present because there is so little temporal distance between his two selves: "So this is Massacre," "Everything is too much." Despite Rochester's intention of presenting a reasoned explanation of the events, he is overwhelmed by the magic and sensuality of Granbois and his wife and crushed by his sense of betrayal by his own family and Antoinette's in saddling him with a mad wife. As a consequence, his mind loses its apparent clarity. His discourse, which in the beginning, although reflecting his unease, was at least ordered, becomes by the end of his narrative disjointed, wild, fragmented, impressionistic. "The tree shivers. Shivers and gathers all its strength. And waits." Unlike the Antoinette of Part One, he loses control of his narration and the structure of his narrative presentation disintegrates. This loss of control is manifested through Antoinette's invasion of his narration, first in what Rhys calls the interlude, but more pointedly, into his thoughts, her invasion is delivered in italics, between parentheses."

(I lay awake all night long after they were asleep, and as soon as it was light I got up and dressed and saddled Preston. And I came to you. Oh Christophine. On Pheena, Pheena, help me).

If to narrate is a sign of lucidity, who then has lost his mind?

It is in Rochester's narration that the author's presence as manipulator and organizer is most strongly felt since Rhys permits Antoinette to interrupt Rochester's narrative and tell her story. After Rochester receives Daniel Cosway's incriminating letter condemning Antoinette and her mother to madness, Rochester turns against his wife. At that point, Antoinette wakes from one of her sleeps and temporarily takes on the telling of her own story. Here there is dissonance between the narrating and experiencing self; this narrating Antoinette is speaking from her English attic since, in a digression, she refers to England, focalizing on her experiencing self: "I will be a different person when I live in England," but then quickly reveals her knowledge of England, a knowledge that can only come from living there and thus from the narrating self: "Summer. There are fields of corn like sugar-cane fields, but good colour and not so tall. After summer the trees are bare, then winter and snow." Thus, the narrating self asserts its disturbing and disturbed presence. As she closes her interlude, it is the narrating Antoinette speaking in the present from her attic room, with its one window high up, who observes:

but now I see everything still, fixed for ever like the colours in a stained-glass window. Only the clouds move.

Rhys also ensures that Antoinette's point of view and voice are heard even in the midst of Rochester's narrative, through extended passages of dialogue between the two that allow Antoinette to explain her past and clarify the sequence of events of her own life. Rochester reports one of their dialogues ("'Now come for a walk,' she said, 'and I will tell you a story'" in which Antoinette describes her dream of the watching rats and her moonlight sleep to explain her present state of mind.

Rochester's narration of their dialogues also becomes a mode for her clarification of sequence:

"… Is your mother alive?"

"No, she is dead, she died."

"When?"

"Not long ago."

"Then why did you tell me she died when you were a child?"

"Because they told me to say so and because it is true. She did die when I was a child. There are always two deaths, the real one, and the one people know about."

In a disturbed, fragmented state of mind, Rochester simultaneously concludes his own narrative (and Antoinette remains forever silenced and absent) and leaves that place with "its beauty and magic and the secret I would never know" (172). Antoinette's mind is broken (to use Christophine's phrase) and Rochester vows:

I too can wait—for the day when she is only a memory to be avoided, locked away, and like all memories a legend. Or a lie….

His vow is prophetic, for in the end all Antoinette has is her memory which becomes her life line, her death, and almost the death of Rochester. Antoinette as a remembering consciousness absorbed not in retrospection, but in the act of recollection, acts out of that memory to burn Thornfield to the ground, and to die she has become another of the heroines killed into art, noted by Gilbert and Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic. Once she has recollected the past (those moments that she wants and needs to recollect)—retention, and recollected the future (that which she must do next)—protention, Antoinette transforms memory from a passive to an active mode.

In Part Three, after a brief narrative by Grace Poole, which brings the reader to England and into the darkness, prison, or shelter where Antoinette dwells, Antoinette once again takes up her own story. In contrast to her earlier narration, she now speaks in the present, digresses into the past (analepsis), and into the future through a dream (prolepsis) that foretells the events that follow after the narrative concludes, for a narrator presumably cannot describe her own death.

As she begins this her final narrative, she says: "In this room, I wake early and lie shivering for it is very cold." The present tense indicates that the judicious distance of her first narrative is obliterated. She has lost all sense of measured time and place for she refuses to believe "this is England," and of self for she does not recognize the woman with streaming hair, surrounded by a gilt frame as herself. The structures of narrative have broken down and she is faltering, shivering, an absence. Her memory which gave her a tenuous connection to reality and her narrative its surface structure, also eludes her. An Antoinette who can no longer remember is no longer Antoinette; she has lost her true self, her centre no longer holds. The narrating self has dissolved into a completely experiencing self. She had told Rochester "I am not a forgetting person." But here, in the attic, she has forgotten.

Her last narrative act is the story of her struggle to remember, and the phrases "to remember" and "must remember" recur continually. At first she remarks: "and to wonder why I have been brought here. For what reason? There must be a reason. What is it that I must do?" Then, "when I got back into bed, I could remember more and think again." Slowly, in a disjointed manner, she makes a tremendous effort to remember, to disclose the secret locked in her past, and to complete her story; her mind works again by feverish association—"Looking at the tapestry one day I recognized my mother …"; "I remember watching myself"; "We lost our way to England. When? Where? I don't remember, but we lost it." Since her state of wakedness only seems to confuse her, she sinks into dream and when she wakes from it, she finally remembers: "Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do." Through dreaming and submission to her subconscious, her memory has been restored. Now, by jumping to her death, she commits one of her few acts, other than narration, and closes her life and her story.

Deprived of light and warmth and love, she has made the supreme effort of will in sleeping, in dreaming, and in waking to narrate her own story, and to bring it to conclusion herself. The secret is thus told and the telling is the secret.