...Christophine came in with our coffee on a tray. She was dressed up and looking very imposing. The skirt of her flowered dress trailed after her making a rustling noise as she walked and her yellow turban was elaborately tied. Long heavy gold ear-rings pulled down the lobes of her ears . . .
“Taste my bull’s blood, master.” The coffee she handed me was delicious . . . “Not horse piss like the English madams drink,” she said. “I know them. Drink drink their yellow horse piss, talk. talk their lying talk.” Her dress trailed and rustled as she walked to the door . . .
“Her coffee is delicious but her language is horrible and she might hold her dress up. It must get very dirty, yards of it trailing on the floor.”
“When they don’t hold their dress up it’s for respect,” said Antoinette. “Or for feast days or going to Mass.”
“And is this a feast day?”
“She wanted it to be a feast day.”
“Whatever the reason it is not a clean habit.”
“It is. You don’t understand at all. They don’t care about getting a dress dirty because it shows it isn’t the only dress they have....”
The scene, if one were to visualize it on screen perhaps, would be an amusing one. Picture a black woman in full elaborate Victorian dress in the 1830s West Indies (Dominica in this case) serving breakfast to a honeymooning pair--Englishman and creole wife--speaking scornfully of English madams, all the while dragging yards of dress as she moves. The explanation for her carefree attitude towards her sweeping dress--that she is treating their first day at the honeymoon house as a special occasion, “a feast day,” and / or she is putting on a show of riches for the couple--completes the symbolic-laden scene. We get the full dramatic effect of well-placed irony and contradiction, pretense, and enigma, with Christophine (a black woman) at its center. And though much of the critical discussion of the book--Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966--from which the above “scene” was taken centers around the honeymooning pair, and on the shifted and expanded gaze Rhys gives to Charlotte Bronte’s mad West Indian woman in the attic in Jane Eyre, a more inclusive look, which considers Christophine’s role, might provide deeper insight to Rhys’s handling (re-centering) of a nineteenth-century romance.
But first, the romantic structure of Jane Eyre...
In a 2002 article (which I chose for its clarity and online accessibility), Richard Griffiths sums up Jane Eyre and its romantic parts:
Jane Eyre has always been one of English Literature’s greatest and most popular love stories, offering as it does a first person account of a true love (that of Jane with Rochester) which, despite its complications, conquers all in a touching finale. The problem takes the rather unusual form of Rochester’s living first wife, who is an insane creole, locked in the attic of Thornfield Hall, Rochester’s residence. That Jane only discovers this on the brink of a bigamous marriage adds to the drama. The resolution comes in the form of the wife’s death when she destroys Thornfield with a fire. Jane is reunited with Rochester, her true love, (having previously left him and inherited a large fortune from an uncle). Her love for him is unalloyed despite his blindness and disability caused by the fire. This is presented as fitting punishment for his previous foolhardiness and provides a moral tone to the unequivocal happy ending. (More of Griffiths’ analysis here: http://apsenglishlanglit.edublogs.org/ ).
Griffiths identifies the main features of a romance novel many of us may be familiar with: the pair of (likely or unlikely) lovers, the problem, the drama it creates, resolution and happy ending, and the moral. Add Jane Eyre’s gothic elements to the mix, and we have the complete package of intrigue and grip that has permanently helped establish Jane Eyre as a classic. But what happens when you take that classic English novel into the West Indies? Rhys answers by removing Bronte’s Jane and replacing her with Rochester’s first wife, Bertha, who she renames Antoinette. Once the pair of lovers is set, then comes the problem, which in Rhys’s version is never resolved, though there are many morals to be understood.
Rhys’s Antoinette is a creole born in Jamaica. She is the daughter of slave owners, and as a young girl she experiences her family’s turn from prosperous slave owners to financial ruin, and the death of her father. There is a brief resurgence of prosperity when her mother remarries, but then their house is burned down by newly emancipated blacks and Antoinette loses her younger brother to death, and her mother to mental illness. She is married off to an Englishman (assumed to be the young Rochester figure), and after a brief recollection of being married to him--their honeymoon--she herself succumbs to mental illness. The novel’s main romantic action takes place during Antoinette’s and her husband’s honeymoon, where both share narrative voice, and where the romance officially begins and ends.
In the beginning, the couple react differently to the landscape, and though their differences seem minor, it’s the first indication of a problem. On the way to the honeymoon house, Antionette’s husband, who is never named, assesses the place and his new wife:
Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. And the woman is a stranger . . . Soon the road was cobblestoned and we stopped at a flight of stone steps. There was a large screw pine to the left and to the right what looked like an imitation of an English summer house -- four wooden posts and a thatched roof. She dismounted and ran up the steps. At the top a badly cut, coarse-grained lawn and at the end of the lawn a shabby white house . . . Perched up on wooden stilts the house seemed to shrink from the forest behind it and crane eagerly out to the distant sea. It was more awkward than ugly, a little sad as if it knew it could not last.
But for Antoinette, the place is enchanting and she raises a mild challenge to her husband’s obvious disappointment:
“Is it true,” she said, “that England is like a dream? Because one of my friends who married an Englishman wrote and told me so. She said this place London is like a cold dark dream sometimes. I want to wake up”“Well,” I answered annoyed, “that is precisely how your beautiful island seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream.”
“But how can rivers and mountains and the sea be unreal?”
“And how can millions of people, their houses and their streets be unreal?”
“More easily,” she said, “much more easily. Yes a big city must be like a dream.”
Their distinctions for dream and reality in regards to place take on a more concrete reality as their honeymoon lingers on. Except for a few servants (who gradually dwindle in number), the pair is isolated in their unchanging setting, and though Antoinette’s husband grows to appreciate some aspects of their solitude--he likes the silent, reserved mountain people who don’t bother them, and he enjoys “breathless and savage” sex with his wife--he remains emotionally detached from her and place. A change in the monotony of their relationship occurs when he receives a letter from her cousin detailing her family history of mental illness and suggesting that she too will eventually go mad. He says, in reaction to the letter, “I felt no surprise. It was as if I’d expected it, been waiting for it. For a long time, long or short I don’t know...” The letter is indeed the novelistic catalyst that aids the rest of the pair’s unravelling. He has a loud sexual encounter with a servant in the room adjoining hers, and she (as the plot leads us to believe) never recovers from the deceit, and spirals into madness. He leaves for England with her, declaring in an oddly possessive manner, “vain, silly creature. Made for loving? Yes, but she’ll have no lover, for I don’t want her and she’ll see no other.”
Sargasso Sea is full of these odd conclusive moments, which may well be so because (as some critics have noted), it is a very self-conscious reactionary tale. But its clumsiness, persay, in language and plot allows for a valid sweeping assessment of the portrayal of Antoinette. She seems more than a woman, and rather the embodiment of several periodic West Indian-related tragedies: Hers is the tragedy of the impoverished creole in a post-Emancipation West Indies, the tragedy of being alienated and hated in the only place she knows as home, the tragedy of having to pay for ancestral crimes, of having the stigma of a possible hereditary mental illness, and the tragedy of exploitation by her English husband. She is Rhys’s version of a nineteenth-century romantic West Indian ideal gone wrong, at least for the slave owners and their progeny.
Madness, in Sargasso Sea, is the signal for the predicted end of Antoinette’s and her husband’s relationship, and it is also the signal for the collapse of a faulty societal structure. But a more grounded romantic ideal, a fitter structure, so to speak, can be found elsewhere in the novel in the form of Christophine. She is Antoinette’s housekeeper and former nanny and she had been a wedding gift to Antoinette’s mother from her father. In many ways, she is the antitype to what Antoinette represents: She is a wily sort of romantic heroine, who appears to be an outlaw of sorts for practicing obeah; she is an adventurous female black figure in the post-Emancipation West Indies, who has strong ties to both a domestic and a free-roaming land existence; she has survived being taken away from her birth place in Martinique at a young age by using her hands and her wit; she is regarded as different and alienated by the black women in Jamaica, but her alienation isn’t a tragic one, rather, it is an empowering one for her; she wields power which comes from supernatural sources and from her ability to discern truth, in particular, truth about character. When a distraught Antoinette comes to her for marital advice, she tells her, “pack up and go . . . When man don’t love you, more you try, more he hate you, man like that. If you love them they treat you bad, if you don’t love them they after you night and day bothering your soul case out . . . All women, all colours, nothing but fools. Three children I have. One living in this world, each a different father, but no husband. I thank my God. I keep my money. I don’t give it to no worthless man.”
Christophine’s voice and language are the clearest and most forceful in the novel. As she appears to be in the scene I presented in the opening--commanding of our attention and outspoken--she is both an old cultural archetype, and a mocking, shape-shifting new woman. She is, I contend, the novel’s sturdy, sneaky nineteenth-century romantic female ideal.
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If you’d like to receive a copy of Wide Sargasso Sea (Northern Critical Editions), be the first to let me know here in the comments, or by email: signifyinguyana@gmail.com.
If you’d like to receive a copy of Wide Sargasso Sea (Northern Critical Editions), be the first to let me know here in the comments, or by email: signifyinguyana@gmail.com.
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