Wide Sargasso Sea 903and displays aggressive behavior when prevented
from rescuing her parrot from the fire. The con-
nection between the two women and their madness
is made explicit at several points in the novel—for
example: “Look the crazy girl, you crazy like your
mother. . . . She have eyes like zombi and you have
eyes like zombi too.” Both Antoinette and Annette,
moreover, are driven to madness by their English
husbands; as Christophine notes of the latter: “They
drive her to it. They tell her she is mad, they act like
she is mad.” Indeed, it is upon discovering the his-
tory of Antoinette’s family that Rochester refuses to
call his wife by her name—the name she shared with
her mother. More than this, knowledge of Annette’s
madness and Rochester’s fear of the unfamiliar and
exotic—his wife and the island—triggers paranoia
and madness in Rochester’s own mind: “[T]he feel-
ing of something unknown and hostile was very
strong.” Thus, Rochester is unable to assimilate his
wife into the expected female role of angel in the
house, and instead positions her as Other; her femi-
nine, hereditary madness relegating her to the role of
madwoman in the attic.
Occurrences of illness and madness thus weave
throughout Wide Sargasso Sea. Rochester and Antoi-
nette are both afflicted in various ways, their physi-
cal and mental illnesses circumscribing the course of
their relationship, as well as the narrative.
Jessica Gildersleeve
memor y in Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys’s final novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, is con-
cerned with memory in both form and content.
The text at once recalls and foreshadows Charlotte
Brontë’s Jane Eyre, twisting the permutations of
past and future. The narrative’s past tense positions
the events of the novel within Antoinette’s and
Rochester’s memories, only admitting the present
at its conclusion. The circular narrative draws on its
own memories, repeating events and anticipating
its own future; for example, Rochester’s early vow,
“I’d remember her effort to escape,” is confirmed
in the final section. These repetitions are seen with
regard to Antoinette’s mother, whose name lives
on in her daughter, and whom Antoinette cannot
forget though told she “must forget and pray for
[her] as though she were dead.” Wide Sargasso Sea
is also informed by Rhys’s own memories of her
West Indian childhood and the tensions existing
between its divergent populations during the late
19th century.
In this novel, memory preserves the past: “[S]ome
things happen and are there for always even though
you forget why or when,” Antoinette reminds us;
like the stone of her childhood home after the fire,
memory “could not be stolen or burned.” Antoinette
is “not a forgetting person”; sounds and tastes return
to her, and events live on in her mind, “only here
now.” Nevertheless, forgetting and amnesia do work
against the function of memory. Antoinette’s mother
prefers to forget and be forgotten—“a better fate.”
Rochester’s memory becomes increasingly unreli-
able throughout the narrative until his determined
forgetting of Antoinette in the attic of his house:
“She is only a memory to be avoided, locked away,
and like all memories a legend.” Indeed, he “hardly
remember[s]” Antoinette on their wedding day and
on several occasions admits, “There are blanks in
my mind that cannot be filled up.” His fear and
hatred of Antoinette grow when he believes her
to have poisoned him and controlled his ability to
remember. His revenge is to remove his wife from
the memory of others, but to prevent her from the
peace of forgetting, for when Christophine suggests
that their marriage end so that “She forget about you
and live happy,” Rochester is overcome by a “pang
of rage and jealousy . . . Oh no, she won’t forget.
I laughed.” Rochester makes Antoinette, in effect,
dead and forgotten, “a ghost in the grey daylight,”
a specter haunting the halls of his home: the mad-
woman in the attic.
For Antoinette, memory and dream are often
confused, so that she, paradoxically, remembers
the future. For example, her dream of “an enclosed
garden surrounded by a stone wall and . . . different
trees,” of wearing a beautiful white dress and climb-
ing a steep staircase at the end of the first section
anticipates her final imprisonment in Rochester’s
home in England. Later, Antoinette again appears to
remember the future: “For I know that house where
I will be cold and not belonging, the bed I shall
lie in has red curtains and I have slept there many
times before, long ago. How long ago? In that bed I
will dream the end of my dream.” Furthermore, the