902 Rhys, Jean
Similarly, the languages spoken by Antoinette and
her servants are unfamiliar and, for Rochester,
enhance the strangeness of the island and its people.
The island and Antoinette’s femininity become
entwined in Rochester’s mind: Both are foreign
and dangerous. Rochester and Mr. Mason wish to
conquer women in the same way they conquer and
colonize the island: They want “what it hides.”
Antoinette is to him the epitome of strangeness,
Otherness, with her beauty, her “dark alien eyes,” her
unfamiliar language, and her reluctance to believe in
Rochester’s home country: “She was a stranger to
me,” Rochester thinks, “a stranger who did not think
or feel as I did.” He believes her sexual hold over him
to be due to enchantment. Christophine’s power
is also foreign to Rochester; her dark knowledge
of obeah and her maternal hold over Antoinette
become so threatening to his own authority that he
orders her to leave. Rochester comes to believe that
he has been tricked into this marriage when weak
and recovering from fever. He has been betrayed by
the very laws he embodies, but he still repeatedly
appeals to the “rational” systems of British law—the
police, laws surrounding marriage—attempting to
impose them on the “irrational” feminine island.
Rochester fools Antoinette with promises of his
love, just as he had been fooled by their families.
Antoinette’s habit of holding her left wrist in her
right hand as if shackled, imprisoned by her hus-
band’s word, demonstrates his triumph of masculine
law over feminine body.
In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys fuses the unfamiliar
Caribbean island and its strange magic with Antoi-
nette and the power of female sexuality. Rochester’s
attempt to own his wife and her property are mir-
rored in his wish to understand and penetrate the
island, to know its secrets. In this way, Rhys makes
clear the patterns of patriarchal power operating in
Victorian society and the novel.
Jessica Gildersleeve
ILLneSS in Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys’s marginalized narrative of Charlotte
Brontë’s madwoman in the attic in Jane Eyre focuses
on the first Mrs. Rochester’s Otherness—the gen-
dered shortcomings that characterized her as “mad.”
Mental and physical illness recurs in Wide Sargasso
Sea for Antoinette, her husband, and her mother.
Moreover, references to insanity escalate as the nar-
rative progresses, building to Rochester’s climactic
repeated refrain, a phrase born of paranoia: “mad
girl.”
Physical illness in Wide Sargasso Sea often appears
as fever, underscoring the fire and burning through-
out the novel. Illness marks Antoinette’s adolescence
in the convent; similarly, it circumscribes Rochester’s
narrative in the novel’s second section. He attributes
his willingness to marry Antoinette and his failure to
notice her “[l]ong, sad, dark alien eyes” prior to their
wedding to the fever he contracted upon arrival in
Jamaica. He repeatedly recalls this illness, describing
it as having “left me too exhausted to appreciate [the
island] fully,” unable to “think or write coherently,”
and that “I am not myself yet.” Moreover, both
Rochester and Antoinette experience forgetting as
an effect of their illnesses: Antoinette is feverish
and delirious after the fire at Coulibri, and she is
told that throughout this time, she “didn’t know any-
thing.” Rochester, too, is unable to recall anything
from his illness. Similarly, the poison he believes
Antoinette and Christophine to have slipped into
his drink makes Rochester violently ill, but it also
erases his memory of the previous night. He thinks,
“I remember putting out the candles on the table
near the bed and that is all I remember. All I will
remember of the night.” This is one example of the
link Wide Sargasso Sea forms between sexual desire
and madness. Antoinette is addicted, made “drunk”
by her love for her husband, and Rochester views
his passion for Antoinette as a mad thirst he can-
not control; “you bewitch with her,” Christophine
tells him. He sees his eventual dominance over
Antoinette as recovery from his madness; he feels
“exhausted,” as after his earlier fever, and declares
himself cured of his love even though, paradoxically,
it is he who psychotically rants, “I’ll take her in my
arms, my lunatic. She’s mad but mine, mine. . . . My
lunatic. My mad girl.”
While Rochester’s illness is depicted as imposed
on him, Antoinette’s is implied to be hereditary. Her
illness, and those of her relatives, is mental, genetic,
and internal. Much of the evidence for Antoinette’s
psychological instability is attributed to her mother’s
madness: Annette Cosway “talked aloud to herself ”