that go into the making of the madness of Antoinette, or Bertha, as she is known inJane Eyre.

In Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette Cosway is a Creole, or a white person born in the West Indies. For centuries her family has enjoyed the fruits of slave labor, but after the Emancipation Act, they fall upon hard times. Race relations in Jamaica are tense, with most local blacks resenting the presence of the Creoles, who once subjugated them harshly. Things come to a boil after Antoinette’s mother remarries and her new husband shifts to the Cosway estate in Coulibri, near Spanish Town in Jamaica. One night, a group of local youths attack the Coulibri Estate, setting it on fire. The family makes a run for it, but Pierre, Antoinette’s younger brother, perishes. Yet, Antoinette’s thoughts, even as she is running away from her burning house, are insistent:

Not to leave Coulibri. Not to go. Not.

Antoinette’s mother has a mental breakdown after her son’s death, and Antoinette is sent to a convent. Soon after, her stepfather and stepbrother arrange her marriage to Englishman Edward Rochester. Antoinette and Rochester honeymoon at Granbois, an estate in Dominica. Accompanying them is Antoinette’s childhood nanny Christophine, a stately woman with “blue-black” skin, rumored to be an “obeah” who is familiar with voodoo. The marriage between Antoinette, whose soul still belongs in Jamaica, and Victorian Rochester exposes his racial and gender-based prejudices. The Caribbean is too much for his senses to take in. He shudders at the fertile landscape around him and at town names like “Massacre,” conveniently ignoring the context of the name, which is a massacre of the local people at the hand of white colonizers.

Everything is too much, I felt as I rose wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near.

Contrast this with the description of Jamaica in Antoinette’s voice:

I lay in the shade looking at the pool ... a bright sparkling green in the sun. The water was so clear you could see the pebbles at the bottom of the shallow part. Blue and white and striped red. Very pretty.

A telling exchange begins when Rochester complements Antoinette on her beautiful dress. She proudly responds that she had it made in St Pierre, Martinique. “You talk of St Pierre as though it were Paris,” he quips.

“But it is the Paris of the West Indies,” she said.

To Rochester’s conservative sensibilities, Paris and West Indies, and white and black, can never mix—thus his discomfort with his pretty, young Creole wife. The gulf between them is as vast as the title's sea-weed covered Sargasso Sea, the part of the north Atlantic Ocean that separates Jamaica and England. Later, Rochester wonders how Antoinette can “hug and kiss Christophine,” since he could never do that with “them.” As their marriage unravels, Antoinette wants to leave her husband, but she can’t because she is penniless; her step-family's marriage agreement with the Rochesters having left her with no legal rights over her own estate. Her husband’s lack of love for her, her financial desperation, and her traumatic past lead Antoinette to a nervous illness, which Rochester labels “madness.”

In the third section, Antoinette is as far from her lush, native Jamaica as imaginable. She is locked up in an attic in a cold English house. No wonder England to her is not a country but a cardboard box. Stripped of the romance of her name Antoinette, she has been rechristened “Bertha.” This loss further disorients her:

Names matter, like when he wouldn’t call me Antoinette, and I saw Antoinette drifting out of the window with her scents, her pretty clothes, and her looking-glass.

What’s worse, Antoinette has a guardian, a stiff, cruel woman called Grace Poole, a sharp contrast to the spirited Christophine. Thus, Antoinette is bereft of every agency and reduced to an infantile state. At this point the events of Wide Sargasso Sea converge with those in Jane Eyre. In Jane Eyre, Bertha is a marginal figure, the Creole first wife of Mr Rochester, kept locked in the attic on account of her madness. Grace Poole has been described as the attendant of the “lunatic” for over twenty years. Mr. Rochester falls in love with the titular character, the young governess who looks after his daughter from a dalliance with a French dancer. Yet he cannot marry her because his violent and deranged first wife is still alive. Heartbroken, Jane leaves his estate, only to get the news soon after that Mr Rochester is now free to marry her since Bertha burnt down his house and then jumped to her death.

The differing portrayals of Mr Rochester, a handsome rake in Jane Eyre, a money-minded schemer in Wide Sargasso Sea, as well as of Antoinette/Bertha show us that every story has a flip side. The cultural dislocation of Antoinette from a Jamaican setting to an English one illustrates the devastating way in which colonial and patriarchal forces work. Yet Antoinette finds a way to expel these forces from her life, even if at the cost of life itself. At the end of Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette is out of her prison, holding a lighted candle in a windy passage, now “knowing what I have to do,” foreshadowing the “happy ending” of Jane Eyre.