Just finished Wild Saragossa Sea, Jean Rhys's prequel to Jane Eyre, written about 120 years after Jane Eyre. It is the story of the the early life and marriage of Antoinette Bertha Mason. Antoinette - known as Bertha in Jane Eyre - is the mad woman living in the attic at Thornbury. The book has 3 parts. The first, her childhood, takes place in Jamaica. The second part relates Antoinette and Rochester's honeymoon in her mother's edenic, but run-down estate in Martinique. The last part describes Antoinette's (now called Bertha) life in England.
Spoiler Alert --
The story of Antoinette is dreamlike with elements of a nightmare that allude to her family's madness. There are two types of death, she says. The first is death to the world, the second is death of the body. She is aware that she may follow her mother and namesake into madness. And as we know, this does happen. What is not clear is if the madness is preventable. Antoinette is fragile. Madness is in her genes, but it appears that the traumatic events of her life are the actual causal agents. Her youth is spent in poverty. Her family is now poor, hated by the Creoles and bullied by them. She finds respite from this hatred in a Catholic boarding school in her teens after her mother marries a wealthy man. At 17, Antoinette is given (unwillingly) to Rochester as bride in a prearranged marriage. Surprisingly, during their honeymoon in Martinique he wins her over and she is happy for the first time in her life.
Rochester is brusk but not unkind. He is a product of Imperialistic England, bred to be a leader as opposed to a culturally aware individual. He comes to Jamaica to take a bride and her wealth. He understands that he must care for her and use her riches to her good. He wants to do this and to win her love in the process. That he is unable to follow this plan compassionately is due to his naivete and to the hostile environment they live in. Rhys peoples her book in Jamaica and Martinique with poor Creoles who are as fiery as the heat. They are only just-freed from slavery and hate the English. The honeymoon is set far from urban areas in a dilapidated house with Creole staff and neighbors who taunt the couple and offer Rochester mean advice. When trouble arises, there is no one that Rochester can trust, and so he falls back on lessons gained from his English upbringing to give him insight. It is an imperfect method in this Creole world.
On their honeymoon, Antoinette comes alive to him as a vibrant, sexual being that he is both attracted to and afraid of. Local people insist on telling him of her mad mother, drunken father as well as about the sexual affair she had with her cousin. This destroys the bit of love that had been building in Rochester. He rejects her and sleeps in his dressing room. He cannot get past the ideal of the prudish English women that he was raised with and he cannot see her in her own context. He begins to interpret her gayness and lust for him as madness and will not listen when she or her former nurse try to provide perspective. As he takes his own counsel, he puts in place events that will have tragic outcomes for both of them.
Having failed to communicate with Rochester, Antoinette moves into silence. We hear words from her again only when she is in her attic room in England.
In what could have been a potentially good ending for this story, Antoinette's nurse begs Rochester to take half of the money and head to England, leaving Antoinette behind with the other half of the fortune. He never comprehends this alternative as viable - and in his time and world, it may not have been for he would have been disgraced in the eyes of his father and brother. But as it turns out, his father and brother are both dead upon his return to England. The Ending of Jane Eyre is fixed. Rhys cannot change it. And so we are left to mourn the irony of these events and the pieces of their lives.
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