As for my confused impressions they will never be written. There are blanks in my mind that cannot be filled up.
IN the previous chapter I suggested that Rhys’s novel poses and answers the question that Judith Gardiner construes as central to feminist criticism: “Who is there when a woman says ‘I am’?” In considering Rochester’s narrative we can ask a similar question: “Who is there when a man says ‘I am’?” How a person tells his or her story can itself provide an answer to the question as it is made historically possible. Rhys chose the first-person point of view and the narrative mode to show how answers to these questions are revealed and to emphasize the difference, as well as the relationship, between the man’s text and the woman’s. In the interweaving of the narrative strategies of each, Rhys not only demonstrates the predominant pattern of the woman’s dream-text but also further emphasizes the importance of our reading of ourselves and others on which the difference between the two texts turns. Rhys has here used the first-person narrative in such a way that it flushes our quarry—the “I” who says “I am”—into the open.
The salient subtext of Rochester’s narrative is the mother-text. In his strenuous rejection of it as a present influence in his life, in his forced and unsuccessful reiteration of its absence, its presence is all the more emphasized, and the pattern of it in his narrative becomes less and less opaque. The further he attempts to thrust the mother-text from him, the closer he comes to an identification with it. Within this subtextual framework, we can also see “Rochester” and Antoinette as distorting and distorted mirror-images of one another.1 The novel may be about the relationship between “Rochester” and Antoinette, and its consequences, but the man’s narrative provides a testing ground for the real combatants, the mother-text and the father-text. His narrative is consistently poised between mother and father, and he tries again and again to opt for the father-text, the “view” he has “always accepted” (p. 85). In his incomplete attempts at emotional and literary transvestism—dressing up in mother’s clothes as well as father’s—“Rochester’s” narrative finally raises more questions than it answers, at least insofar as his own sense of identity is concerned. Unlike Antoinette, Rochester does not find his mirror-image. His text remains, as it begins, without a name.
I will often refer to “Rochester” as “the man,” for in strict adherence to Rhys’s presentation of him, he is not Rochester; he is never named, and it is only with recourse to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre that we presume to call him by that name. We do so “naturally,” so compelling is the designation of a name once we think we know it. We cannot think of him any other way, and I will eventually omit the quotation marks. I cite Brontë’s novel because Rhys’s patterning of the dream-text inevitably weaves the character of Brontë’s Rochester into the narrative identity of the man in her own novel. As we see in the interweaving of Jane Eyre’s dreams into Antoinette’s, so we see the character—indeed, some of the very words and ideas of the fictionally and chronologically older Rochester—in the young man Rhys presents. An outline of the young “Rochester’s” narrative can be found in that of Brontë’s Bochester in Jane Eyre. As we might expect, the latter events described in this narrative furnish part of the structure of events in Antoinette’s final narrative as well, since her text and Brontë’s coincide at that point in Wide Sargasso Sea. Brontë and her protagonist give the floor to Rochester for the express purpose of allowing him to tell “his side of the story” to Jane (Jane Eyre, pp. 268-78). The young “Rochester” whom we read in Rhys’s novel is a creature of Brontë’s Rochester, of his chronological “later” narrative in the fiction, in combination with Rhys’s actually later narration. The line of descent of the man’s narrative moves backward retroactively, from Rhys’s presentation of it to Brontë’s; the line of literary descent, meanwhile, moves forward, and the man’s text becomes irretrievably woven into Rhys’s dream-text through the medium of the two women who are writing him. Both women know, however, that the appropriate vehicle for the man is his own statement of the case, a conscious telling of his tale, which is to say, a traditional narrative. Hence they both allow him his form and give him the space in which he is used to perform.
“Rochester’s” narrative can be interwoven firmly into the dream-text as the warp of the weave in part because of its apparent conservatism, its fixity. When the selvage of a fabric is loosened, the threads that one can peel away are those of the weft, the threads carried by the women’s shuttle. The ghostly imprint of the whole pattern can be seen only in the absence of the threads which, in their absence, already suggest the possibility of recombination elsewhere. The warp is abandoned or orphaned.
In his attempts to adhere to the dictates of the father-text, “Rochester,” and his text, are fixed in the confines of its definition. In the writing of such a text there is only one author, one narrator, the father, until the son accedes to his place, in contrast to the woman’s text, in which the narration is shared. The mother-text offers a direction for movement, for an opening out and expansion, the obverse of confinement. “Rochester” can repeat the text of the father, but, since that text cannot be shared, he cannot find in it even a reflection of himself. The result is his ultimate discovery that he has no text of his own. In disallowing the name that might be derived from the already set text of Brontë’s novel, Rhys points up this lack in his text. She underscores his attempts and his failure to resolve the dilemma in which she places him by confronting him with the text represented by Antoinette.
The inhibited movement of “Rochester’s” narrative itself provides focal points for discussion and an indication of the ambivalence at work in the narrative: his basic childlike ambivalence toward the mother-text (in behavioral psychology, an attitude usually labeled “approach-avoidance”); his preference for the father; his attempt to find the secret of the mother-text, to join with it; and his return to the father-text. These focal points roughly parallel the chronological presentation of events, a fact that emphasizes the basic linearity of the classifiably masculine text. Elements at work here are those that emphasize the means by which the man attempts to maintain the structure of his world and the placing of himself in that world. These elements present themselves to our notice in similarly chronological fashion. First is his willed dependence on the law and on his father, the conflation of the two into what Christophine calls “Letter of the Law.” Second is the feminization, especially the “hysterization,”2 of the man as he goes on the journey into the forest in his attempt to discover the “secret” that the women and all the islanders know. This feminization works in concert with Rhys’s use of the fixed quality reflected in the traditionalism of the masculine narrative. Feminization of a typical, and therefore representative, man becomes analogous to the use of “Woman”—women—fixed in the iconography of hysteria that we have seen epitomized in the narrative attempts of M. Charcot’s Iconographie photographique.
Similarly, Rhys’s use of “the uncanny” here both exploits Freud’s reading of it, which is based on the Oedipal configuration, and inverts the object or prop used in acting out the drama into an opportunity for the woman’s text to show itself, as the doll Olympia is used by the male characters and readers of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story. We can here invert Xavière Gauthier’s dictum, and restore its logic, at least for Rhys’s novel: If there is a madman, then it’s definitely the Man. Rhys achieves this inversion of the question of the madwoman, the hysteric, the immobile woman who cannot “see herself,” as I earlier described the position in which many young women of the nineteenth century found themselves. The feminization of the male text within this framework is a strategy for which Rhys receives her cue from Brontë, as I will describe.
The third element concerns “Rochester’s” displacement of Antoinette as he plots it after his failure to learn the “secret” of the place. He doesn’t recognize himself in what he sees; he becomes frightened, but he doesn’t learn. He becomes his own object (of fear: he might, after all, have learned something), so he looks for another: Antoinette. His plan solidifies then and he sets out to displace her, to make her like the place and the people who have frightened him into almost seeing himself. His text, unlike Antoinette’s, unlike the woman’s text, must stop movement at all costs, lest he see or recognize himself in what he is doing. In his manliness, his apparent control, he is at his most hysterical. He is hysterical because he can’t find a mirror-image. He can only look “inward,” that is to say at his father, the father-text.
This demonstration, the culmination of his narrative, involves the futile conversations with Antoinette and Christophine during which both women attempt to explain their side of the story to him and come to realize, as Antoinette puts it, that “words are no use” anymore (p. 111). His “sanity” is displayed at the last with a pathetic return, not to the specific father-text, but to literary father-texts, ironically and significantly including Brontë’s, a feminine text, a “mother-text.” He has not escaped the mother-text, but he cannot admit or recognize it. Thus he cannot recognize himself either.
“Rochester” recites the father-texts, and he sees nothing, finally. He refuses the “looking-glass.” He will not or cannot recognize himself in another. His text remains the father-book, that single book; and his own text, his “looking-glass” of self, remains empty and without a name of its own. One of the books “Rochester” finds in the “refuge” of his dressing-room at Granbois can be seen as an emblem for the nameless man, “Rochester,” and even that book is inherited from another man. On the last shelf of a “crude bookshelf” over a small writing desk, he finds “Life and Letters of. . . The rest was eaten away” (p. 63).
IN “Writing Like a Woman,” Peggy Kamuf asks us to consider Freud’s restatement of “a fundamental assumption of what we know as culture: that the movement away from the unmediated maternal bond toward the mediated (or hypothetical) paternal bond is the motor of cultural advance.”3 Despite his determination to join in the “fundamental attempt,” Rochester has difficulty taking the “momentous step,” as Freud describes this “turning,” thus “taking sides.”4 “The authority of patriarchy,” Kamuf points out, “relies on our failing to ask the question which Freud implicitly poses, on our refusing to think the absence, at the origin, of an origin.”5
Before continuing our examination of “Rochester’s” attempts, let us consider one of Kamuf’s concluding suggestions: “Reading a text as written by a woman will be reading it as if it had no (determined) father, as if, in other words, it were illegitimate, recognized by its mother who can only give it a borrowed name.”6 The dream-text of Rhys’s novel does not refuse the “question which Freud implicitly poses”; Rhys does not refuse to “think the absence, at the origin, of an origin.” The movement of her text may be generated by the mother-text, but, as I suggest, the mother-text provides a model for movement outward. Her text, the woman’s dream-text, is specifically written as if it had no (determined) father. Rochester’s problem is that he fears the “illegitimacy” of his narrative; the mark of this near-illegitimacy, of his sensed betrayal of the father-text, is that the only name he and his text have is “borrowed.” Betrayal works both ways: he is afraid of betraying the father and also of being betrayed by him.
At the same time, Rochester is placed in this position by Rhys’s inclusion of his text in her own, despite the apparent authenticity of her reading of the man as it is presented in “his” narration. Indeed, to my knowledge there has not been a single critical charge against her on the point of the authenticity of the male narrative. On the contrary, she is praised for her sympathetic rendering of the man.7 What her dual strategy achieves is insistence on inclusion of the man, as revealed in the masculine narrative, in the net of the mother-text, suggesting its preeminence for all of us, despite the “cultural advance,” the “momentous step” that Kamuf rightly observes to be founded in, “lost in,” an “aporia.”8 In Rhys’s use of Rochester’s text, his text of self as it is revealed in his narrative, she asks an even more fundamental question than those with which we started: “Who is there when a woman (or a man) says ‘I am’?” As Hélène Cixous observes, the answer to such questions is not to be found in asking “who,” but in posing the question in terms of “how”:
The quest for origins, illustrated by Oedipus, doesn’t haunt a feminine unconscious. Rather it’s the beginning, or beginnings, the manner of beginning . . . starting on all sides at once, that makes a feminine writing. A feminine text starts on all sides at once, starts twenty times, thirty times, over. . . . A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending: there’s no closure, it doesn’t stop, and it’s this that very often makes the feminine text difficult to read. For we’ve learned to read books that basically pose the word “end.” But this one doesn’t finish, a feminine text goes on and on and at a certain moment the volume comes to an end but the writing continues and for the reader this means being thrust into the void. These are texts that work on the beginning but not on the origin.9
We can use this as a description of Rhys’s novel. While allowing the confrontation of the mother-text and the father-text, Rhys valorizes the bastard text, the text that proceeds “as if it had never known its father.” This kind of text writes itself in the space of the mother-text, which, as Julia Kristeva points out, Plato in the Timeus 52 recognized as “unnameable”: “Indefinitely a place . . . perceptible ... by means of a sort of bastard reasoning; ... it is precisely that which makes us dream when we perceive it.”10
“Rochester’s” narrative clearly goes for the “end,” which is unsatisfactory even for him, the narrator. The man sees “nothing” finally, in contrast to his wife, who sees her entire life, and herself, in the looking-glass of another woman. “Rochester” is offered, and refuses, the same kind of looking-glass. His own reading, of self and others, motivates his attempt and structures, almost literally dictates, his narrative progress. It displays for us how a man answers the question “Who is there when a man says ‘I am,’” just as the feminine text answers the woman’s question in its narrative processes.
The further question, however—one that, as Kamuf observes, Freud implicitly posed—is also one that “Rochester” cannot bring himself finally to ask of his text. His narrative senses the question, draws near, retreats, retrenches, and then “goes mad.” It is his refusal “to think the absence, at the origin, of an origin,” the question that is insured by the continuing presence of the mother-text in his own strategies of approach and avoidance, that might have answered his more basic question: Who is here, in this narrative, trying to say “I am”? The answer might have been “his mother’s child.”
Caught between the two seemingly opposed systems of identification, “Rochester” cannot fully take the “momentous step,” but neither can he endure the bastardization that choosing the-mother-text would imply. He remains used by both mother- and father-texts. Rhys used him as his text by writing him into her woman’s dream-text, catching him in the net of the mother-text as his own narrative reveals him to be. In the story that Rhys’s novel tells, he is used by the father-text, whose dupe he remains at the expense of any achieved sense of self. The counter-balance of the two in his narration is what shapes the narrative itself. Rochester’s narrative is thoroughly haunted by the quest for origins; he is afraid of writing his narrative “as if it had never known its father,” which is to say, finally, even if in a kind of shorthand, “like a woman.”11
THE NAMELESS MAN who begins the narration of Part Two of Wide Sargasso Sea may be, as one commentator describes him, the “most complex and fully drawn male she [Rhys] has ever accomplished.”12 Another writes, he is “more than a type; he is as complex as Antoinette, treated with understanding Rhys earlier extended only to female characters.”13 However, as Rhys presents “Rochester” initially, we can know him only in his reading of himself and others, as his text and in his manner of narration. Commentators often refer to “Rochester” familiarly and, as if to suggest his parity with Antoinette, as “Edward.” In Wide Sargasso Sea, however, even in Grace Poole’s introduction to Part Three (when, if we have read Jane Eyre, we know with a certainty that we are “in” Brontë’s novel and that the two novels meet here), “he” is not named. He remains an individual representative of the generic: “’They knew that he was in Jamaica when his father and his brother died,’ Grace Poole said” (p. 145).
Rhys names Grace Poole; Grace Poole names Mrs. Eff and Leah; and Antoinette has already been named (indeed, her name is a major textual problematic) in an extensive departure from the texts of Brontë and “Rochester.” The women are named by one another. Neither Rhys nor Grace Poole (nor even “Mrs. Eff,” who defends him) names the man, and Grace Poole places him in relation to an equally unspecified father and brother. Early in his own narrative he identifies himself as “a younger son” (p. 59). In both instances he is identified by the circumstances of the relationship with the father under the laws of patrimony: he is a younger son who becomes heir to his father. His text remains nameless and not of his own making, as his narration stresses repeatedly. The only thing worse than being “a younger son” is to be a bastard, and that designation also threatens, at least figuratively.
Clearly, the man is uncertain enough of himself to take careful steps in the beginning of his narrative. He knows he is in alien territory. Concerned to locate himself as quickly as possible in his own personal topography of reaction and response, he juggles his acquired sense of who he is, or who he ought to be, with his feeling of insecurity as to who, in fact, he is. In the beginning of the narrative the man’s only initial designation of himself is “myself.” In the progress of a narrative that will reveal him, it is not surprising that he places himself in relation to two women—in contrast to Grace Poole’s description, which puts him in relation to two men. His own narrative, in a time prior to the events of Brontë’s novel, initially places him in relation to the two women, who, in the racially ambiguous context in which he finds himself, figuratively become halves of the same woman: Amélie and Antoinette. If “Rochester” has any identification by name here, it is as Antoinette’s husband, or at least as the man whose “wife” is Antoinette: “There we were,” he says in the third line of the beginning of the narrative, “myself, my wife Antoinette, and a little half-caste servant who was called Amélie” (p. 55). He possesses something, but it does not give him security or confidence.
After placing himself in relation to the two women, the three of them “sheltering from the heavy rain under a large mango tree,” he neatly isolates them from “two porters and a boy,” male servants who, along with the luggage, are “under a neighbouring tree” (p. 55). The first person who speaks in the frame of this opening is “the girl Amélie,” who says, “I hope you will be very happy, sir, in your sweet honeymoon house.” “She was,” the man tells us, “laughing at me I could see. A lovely little creature but sly, spiteful, malignant perhaps, like much else in this place” (p. 55).
Already we are given the configuration of his response to the place. Within this configuration, we can discern muted and dominant texts, although which is which at this point in the novel is moot. Amélie, like Tia, is an alter ego for Antoinette; she is the almost hidden subtext of Antoinette’s narrative. Antoinette does not mention Amélie by name in her own narrative. Only in her climactic, drunken dialogue with her husband—one he reports—does she acknowledge Amélie. Earlier the two women have an altercation in which Amélie’s words and actions recall Tia’s childhood antagonism (pp. 83, 122); even then Antoinette does not call Amélie by name. Christophine takes up Antoinette’s case against “the good-for-nothing” girl; she does not call her by name, either, in her dialogue with Rochester. “Like goes to like,” she says to Rochester, tripling the distorting mirror-image of the three of them (p. 123). She does use her name once in direct address and in defense of Antoinette, and the name is isolated: “Amélie” (p. 84). But “Rochester” recognizes her as Antoinette’s double in terms of his own text, as does Rhys. In “Rochester’s” narrative, Amélie knows from the beginning what’s happening; her expression as the man describes it is “so full of delighted malice, so intelligent, above all so intimate that I felt ashamed and looked away” (p. 57). Already she has taken on the “knowledge” that he fears in Antoinette as their story proceeds, and an “intimacy” he will exploit with both women in different ways. Only one of them can “escape” him within the context(s) of the novel’s story: the half-caste Amélie, who is not bound by prior texts—by Brontë’s actual text or by the cultural text or milieu which has matched the white Englishman and Antoinette, the white Creole woman.
The man then is embarked on his narrative, and Rhys on the weaving of the weft of the woman’s text through the warp of the man’s. His narrative is a process of identification that demonstrates an acute concern for place—his place, where he is, how or why he got there, and how to maintain himself. A notation of whom he notices (pp. 55-58) and how and in what order he describes them is illuminating. It provides a chart, the topography of responses that he registers to place himself. Seemingly imperative components of this construct are located not in the physical landscape itself, but in the people he sees, especially as he describes them in relation to their sex or gender, their responses to him, and finally by their apparent cultural loyalty as it is signaled by the language they use. Women and male children (there are no female children here) are described in their response to him almost exclusively in their manner of looking at him; men are described by what they say and how they say it. The whole is, of course, suffused by his sense of their racial difference from him. But the topography is indeed more “intimate” than that implied in a seemingly reflexive and generalized response to race and gender, as Amélie discerns. The charting is personal, “intimate” in the extreme, and prefaces his attempt at the maintenance—even if unsuccessful—of a constitution of “self” as he understands it.
“How old was I when I learned to hide what I felt?” he asks himself later in the narrative. “A very small boy,” he answers. “Six, five, even earlier. It was necessary, I was told, and that view I have always accepted” (p. 85). After placing himself in relation to the two women, the black male servants isolated from them, the first people he sees in the bleak seaside village (threateningly called Massacre) are three male children. He fixes his attention on one: “three little boys came to stare at us. The smallest wore nothing but a religious medal round his neck and the brim of a large fisherman’s hat. When I smiled at him, he began to cry. A woman called from one of the huts and he ran away, still howling” (p. 56). The “smallest” boy presents the emblems of the aspirant, the protected, and the unformed. No wonder the man, who finds himself persistently (though bitterly) supplicant to the text of his father, tries to signal his recognition of the child. The other two little boys are noted, and two more women appear, serially, at their doors.
Antoinette recognizes the third woman who appears. Attentive to Antoinette’s recognition of the woman, Carolina, “Caro,” the man reconsiders his wife’s racial background, her “long, sad, dark, alien eyes.” “Creole of pure descent she may be,” he observes, “but they are not English or European either.” In the first paragraph of her narrative Antoinette already placed herself for us in this racial framework, but the lines were more clearly, knowledgeably, and poignantly drawn because she speaks from within the experience. The man’s description of Antoinette’s conversation with Caro further emphasizes his identification of Antoinette with the black and colored islanders: “The two women stood in the doorway of the hut gesticulating, talking not English but the debased French patois they use in this island” (pp. 56-57). He invokes then his father’s name and the place of his own origin, thinking “about the letter which should have been written to England a week ago. Dear Father. . . .” He does not continue; the fragment seems a form of prayer.
Turning from the women, the man “went to talk to the porters,” placing himself in relation to the men. “The first man,” who, like Rochester, “was not a native of the island,” remarks conversationally, “This a very wild place—not civilized.” “Why you come here?” he asks (p. 57). We have moved away from the women, who speak a debased language, to the men, who speak English with him. We have also moved from the male children, especially the smallest of them, to a young man with a “magnificent body and a foolish conceited face,” the “Young Bull” who marks his likeness with the Englishman; finally to an old man, Emile, who does not know his own age, a proof of how “uncivilized” the islanders are.
“Ask him how old he is,” the Young Bull suggests, knowing the joke. “Fourteen? Yes, I have fourteen years master,” Emile answers. “Impossible,” the Englishman says. “Fifty-six years perhaps,” Emile offers. “He seemed anxious to please,” Rochester notes. The Young Bull interjects his reiteration that “these people are not civilized.” But Emile asserts his own source of authority: he “muttered, ‘My mother she know, but she dead’” (p. 58).
Rochester’s narrative here invokes and dismisses the mother-text. His own mother is not mentioned in his account in Rhys’s novel, in Brontë’s account of him, or in his account of himself to Jane when he is describing his marriage to “Bertha.” Emile, native to Antoinette’s island, seems to adhere to the mother-text in his brief account of himself. He cannot make a tabulated response to Rochester’s question, but he knows where the answer might accurately be found, echoing Rhys’s story of the little girl in catechism class who, in response to the question “Who made you?,” steadfastly answered “My mother.”
Unerring in his topography of self, the man then notices “the women,” who were “looking at us but without smiling” (p. 58). “Some of the men were going to their boats,” and when “Emile shouted, two of them came towards him. He sang in a deep voice” and “they answered,” presumably in the same “debased patois” that the women use. By contrast, the “Young Bull,” Rochester notes, “sang to himself in English,” glancing up at Rochester “sideways” and “boastfully.”
When Antoinette emerges from Caro’s hut, she takes off her shoes and “balanced her small basket on her head and swung away as easily as the porters,” breaking the isolation from them which Rochester earlier established. She allies herself with the black men as well as with the women, especially with Emile, who, after muttering “My mother she know,” “produced a blue rag which he twisted into a pad and put on his head.”
The last details of the map the man draws for us are introduced by a recollection of the night before, a recollection precipitated by his hearing “a cock [that] crowed loudly.” This motif, the betrayal sign in Christian mythology, reappears as the man’s narrative proceeds and outlines its own kind of internecine betrayal. He recalls that he “lay awake listening to cocks crowing all night.” When he arose early, he saw “the women with trays [. . .] on their heads going to the kitchen” and he heard the women in the streets selling “small hot loaves” and “sweets.”
The introductory section of the man’s narrative ends with the sight and sound of women speaking the “debased patois” the man has intimated he finds objectionable because it is not his own. The concluding words of the account, however, belie the alliances and identifications he has attempted. Against a background of the sight and sound of the island’s women, a people and a language he does not claim as his own, he nevertheless describes himself finally in this way: “In the street another [woman] called Bon sirop, Bon sirop, and I felt peaceful.”
In the next set passage of his narrative (pp. 58-64), the road turns upward into the mountains. The place seems to the man “not only wild but menacing” (p. 58), and his wife “a stranger” (p. 59). He does not even call her his wife: “the woman is a stranger,” whose “pleading expression” annoys him. He now addresses his father bitterly; he continues his prayer, in a letter that he composes as he rides after the woman. Bitter, weary in its expression of what is obviously a long battle with himself, and poignant in its specificity, the spoken letter is also a directly antagonistic response toward himself in relation to his father. He turns that antagonism against Antoinette, reviling himself in her, in the pleading expression he thinks he sees in her face. He turns the mirror-image there against her and speaks through her to his father, about himself. “I have not bought her, she has bought me, or so she thinks,” he prefaces the spoken letter:
. . . Dear Father. The thirty thousand pounds have been paid to me without question or condition [This is the exact amount given in Rochester’s narrative in Jane Eyre]. No provision made for her (that must be seen to). I have a modest competence now. I will never be a disgrace to you or to my dear brother the son you love. No begging letters, no mean requests. None of the furtive shabby manoeuvres of a younger son. (p. 59)
At Granbois he meets Christophine, who was, Antoinette tells him, “my da, my nurse long ago” (p. 61). He “looked at her sharply but she seemed insignificant”; “she looked at me,” he says, “steadily, not with approval, I thought. We stared at each other for quite a minute. I looked away first and she smiled to herself.” Despite his claim that she looks “insignificant,” Rochester apparently cannot help asking Antoinette, “That old woman who was your nurse? Are you afraid of her?” “If she were taller,” he says, “one of these strapping women dressed up to the nines, I might be afraid of her,” he admits. The childishness of this confession is appealing, and we understand that he is “afraid of her.” In drawing his narrative into the dream-text, we can note that among these “strapping women” are “Bertha” and Jane Eyre’s erstwhile rival, Blanche Ingram, as Brontë’s Rochester describes them: “I found her [“Bertha”] a fine woman, in the style of Blanche Ingram; tall, dark, and majestic. . . . [Her family] showed her to me in parties, splendidly dressed” (Jane Eyre, p. 268). The “little boy” is made plain, as naked here as the “smallest” boy in whom Rochester saw himself earlier, and who reacted with fear against him. In reply to Rochester’s question, Antoinette laughs and says, “That door leads into your dressing-room.” Rochester’s only response is that “I shut it gently after me” (p. 62). Do we read him here as a small boy being sent to his room, and gracefully?
Here, in the dressing-room that he recognizes as “a refuge,” he finds the book The Life and Letters of. . . that is his emblem. Immediately, reflexively, he begins the first letter to his father that is actually written. Now, as at the last, he speaks a letter that he does not write, or send, before he writes the formal letter that is intended to speak for him. He never finds the voice he might use to speak in direct response to others, especially in direct response to his father. He can only speak, finally, and find a voice, in writing and in the “Letter of the Law.”
He concludes the postscript to the letter, “I feel better already and my next letter will be longer and more explicit.” The “small” boy has located himself again in reference to the father; in doing so, he “feels better.” However, the last brief paragraph of the section concludes: “As for my confused impressions they will never be written. There are blanks in my mind that cannot be filled up” (p. 64). His use of the passive voice here suggests that he knows he cannot find his voice, not even in writing. And, in his passivity, he also knows that he lacks the means even to place himself finally where he might not have to be “written,” which is to say, in relation to the mother-text where a single voice, or author, does not confer authority. He cannot bastardize himself; he cannot give himself up to the mother-text, and he mourns its loss. He is still “haunted” by the quest for origins. He has appealed to the father-text at the writing-desk in his “refuge” in the only way he knows how, and it is not enough; he remains poised between the mother-text and the father. It is Rhys who finally “writes” him into her woman’s text, using the inhibitions of his own manner of narration to do so.
In light of my earlier observation that Rochester’s narrative is presented chronologically and linearly as a representative masculine narrative, I must comment on the seemingly minor displacement of chronological sequence represented by the first three sections of the narrative, the first two of which I have just described. This displacement reveals much of Rochester’s character, in the colloquial as well as in the literary sense. The purpose of this displacement I have already intimated: he needs to establish a personal topography to place himself in a new context, and, in particular, to take a reading, as it were, of himself in the balance between mother- and father-texts. His manner of transition to the third section of the narrative, the logical beginning of his story in relationship to Antoinette, supports the reading of insecurity manifested in the topography of the first-placed narrative section (“I am not myself yet,” the man observes defensively [p. 57]), and introduces his more specific need for refuge and re-identification with his father in the second. He is “afraid” of the women who know something he cannot admit to himself, that he cannot know as long as he places himself within the “view” that he “has always accepted.” His responses and reactions to the women of the novel early in the narrative represent the approach-avoidance pattern in relation to the mother-text I have already suggested. Rochester’s own ontological uneasiness, the dis-ease he manifests in his tightrope walking in this place where as old Emile says, “My mother she know, but she dead,” might be summed up in that same phrase, although with a different emphasis.
The mother-text is dead for him; he long ago gave it up, in allegiance to his father, for a placing of himself in the text of his father. He is still “haunted” by it, however, and since he cannot think the “absence, at the origin, of an origin” that would allow him to acknowledge a bond with the mother as well as with the father, he tries repeatedly to deny the mother-text and return, absolutely, to the father, to the single text that offers the seeming certainty of “an origin.” Such a view, however, is at best tautological, as Peggy Kamuf’s analysis points out. Looked at in this way, it is logical that what Rochester discerns, at the first and at the last, is “nothing.” This is the word, and the concept, crucial to Rochester’s text, to its development and to its shaping as he presents it to himself.
Repetition of the word “nothing” and the patterning that turns on it is certainly the core, the literal ending and the figurative beginning of the narrative. This patterning at the heart of the narrative is responsible for the restructured chronology that is Rochester’s only departure from a strictly chronological linear representation. The third section of the narrative (pp. 64-66) returns us to the chronological beginning, moving from the description of the “confused impressions” that cannot be written, the “blanks” in his mind that cannot be “filled up,” to an explicit statement that molds his response.
Rochester’s description of his sojourn on the island begins with the word “it”—the indefinite and impersonal pronoun that takes the entire context of the place and rapidly moves to “the girl,” Antoinette, by way of the word “nothing”: “It was all very brightly coloured, very strange, but it meant nothing to me. Nor did she, the girl I was to marry” (p. 64). Like Rhys’s response to the father-book when she was a child, “it meant nothing to me,” he says. The mother-book, of course, did make sense to Rhys, and to Antoinette; “it meant” something to her, it was something that could be used. The whole book, we can remember, is made up of both books, and of our recognition that there is never only one book, one text. Rochester’s remarks demonstrate his lack of this knowledge and his rejection of the mother-book—the “it,” the island and what it represents, which he finally represents in his text by Antoinette herself. The mother-text, which is “brightly coloured” and “very strange.”
Throughout his narrative, despite Antoinette’s attempts to teach him about her “book” and about the mother-text represented by the island with its heightened colors, even the fire-red signature of herself as we know it from her own narrative (including the sexuality that he finds repugnant precisely to the extent that he is drawn to it), Rochester attempts to return to the single text, the father-text, with its concomitant lack. He attempts, finally, to displace the mother-text represented by Antoinette into the “madness” that proves his “sanity.”
In his description of meeting and marrying the girl his father had “bought” for him, or, as he corrects himself, who “bought” him (for it is her money, not his father’s, that is to provide for him), he tells us, “I played the part I was expected to play.” His “performance,” he surmises, was “faultless” (p. 64). Rochester makes himself a marionette, unlike Antoinette, who at first refuses to “go through with it,” as her stepbrother puts it (p. 65).
In Rochester’s description of his persuasion of Antoinette, two moments are especially important. The first is Antoinette’s initial response to Rochester’s questioning of her to ascertain why she doesn’t want to marry him. “What have I done?” he asks. “She said nothing,” he reports. He speaks more plainly: “You don’t wish to marry me?” “No,” she answers, but “in a very low voice.” We are given a recapitulation of the muted—more, the silenced—half of the dialogue to which Rhys gave voice in the “unspoken” portions of the “fundamental conversation” in Voyage in the Dark. Her final reply to his last question concerning whether or not he can tell her stepbrother Richard that they are proceeding with the wedding returns her to silence, to the gesture of the muted text: “She did not answer me. Only nodded” (p. 66).
We have moved in these two pages from what, to Rochester, “means nothing” to Antoinette’s acquiescence to his proposed desires. He has transferred what means nothing to him, what he prefers to see as “nothing,” to the girl’s demonstrated capitulation: her silent speech. Antoinette is placed now, by him, by Rhys, in the immobility of the living doll that Rochester thinks he has made of “Bertha” at the last. This interchange represents Antoinette’s only attempt to break out of Brontë’s text; it is a gesture that all the more firmly places her in the nineteenth-century context of Brontë’s novel, out of which Rhys finally delivers her.
The directly chronological narration of events is now under way. In the next section (pp. 66-70), the conversation between the two of them establishes Antoinette’s island as a “dream” for Rochester and his England as a “dream” for her (p. 67). In this section, too, the mother-text is introduced and again rejected. Antoinette tells him, in an overtly sexual context, a story of her sleeping in the moonlight “too long,” as Christophine told her (p. 69). “Do you think that too,” she said, “that I have slept too long in the moonlight?” (p. 70). This marks a patent interweaving of Antoinette’s dream-text and Jane Eyre’s dreams and childhood experience with their central image of the mother, the Moon, into the dialogue between the man and the woman. Here Rochester admits the mother-text—in relation to Antoinette, if not in relation to himself—and accedes to the “mother’s” place. He will not do so again:
Her mouth was set in a fixed smile but her eyes were so withdrawn and lonely that I put my arms round her, rocked her like a child and sang to her. An old song I thought I had forgotten:
“Hail to the queen of the silent night,
Shine bright, shine bright Robin as you die.”
“She listened, then sang with me,” and they repeat the last line of the couplet together (p. 70). The Elizabethan pun on “dying” is not lost here, even if (or perhaps especially) in its connection with the mother-text. They drink to their “happiness, to our love and the day without end which would be tomorrow.” As he so often does, however, Rochester abruptly, even violently, undercuts the movement of the narrative passage he has just written. In this case the undercutting is especially brutal, even in its syntax: “I was young then. A short youth mine was” (p. 70). We know that the Rochester of Jane Eyre is about to develop in this young man; we know, even if we don’t know Jane Eyre, that this true and ringing note sets the tone for the story and for the narrative already accomplished in the man’s mind when he begins: “So it was all over[. . . .] Everything finished[. . . .]” (p. 55).
Rochester awakens the next morning to find a woman watching over him. His reaction, however, is quite different from that of the woman dreamer when she wakes: “I woke [. . .] feeling uneasy as though someone were watching me” (p. 70). The watcher, the caretaker whom he will not admit, is of course Antoinette, who, he observes, “must have been awake for some time.”
As the narrative proceeds, the threads of the tapestry are drawn together ever more tightly, with each narrative section offering its precise detail for the progression d’effet that Ford Madox Ford emphasized was so much a part of Rhys’s craft. As the effect and the pattern of the weave intensify—both vertically and horizontally—Rochester reveals himself more, discovering, as we do, “who he is,” whether he likes it or not. Questions of trust and betrayal have begun to intermingle with the others: in Rochester’s early dishonest presentation of himself to persuade Antoinette to marry him (p. 66) and in his later notation to himself, “She trusted them and I did not. But I could hardly say so. Not yet” (p. 75).
Another related thread is introduced into the narrative as his text attempts to shape itself: Rochester’s hope that he can discover the “secret” of the “place,” with its “alien, disturbing, secret loveliness.” “I’d find myself thinking,” he says, “what I see is nothing—I want what it hides—that is not nothing” (p. 73). He has begun his journey into the delusion that he can make “something” out of “nothing.” The secret is offered by the mother-text, which he has already rejected, and his text is on the way to betraying itself.
Rochester betrays himself and Antoinette in describing his sexual passion for her, demonstrating his contempt for himself through her denigration. The word, the unlucky but compulsively chosen verbal talisman for this betrayal is, of course, “nothing”: “’You are safe,’ I’d say. She’d like that—to be told ‘You are safe.’ Or I’d touch her face gently and touch tears. Tears—nothing! Words—less than nothing. As for the happiness I gave her, that was worse than nothing. [. . .] she was a stranger to me, a stranger who did not think or feel as I did” (p. 78). In his sweeping negation he observes, “Nothing that I told her influenced her at all” (p. 78). Palpably, he is unable to influence even himself, especially himself, at least not with the spoken word. The written word is another matter. After the betrayal of himself, of Antoinette, of the act of sex itself as he describes it, Rochester listens to the rain. Unlike the women who dream, he learns nothing, he finds nothing in his kind of sleep: “Drown me in sleep,” he says. “And soon.” He knows there is nothing to which he can wake (p. 79).
Rochester’s response to his dilemma begins to take its final shape as a result of “words,” which, in contemptuous familiarity, he can call “less than nothing.” These words, however, are between man and man and they are written down. With the receipt of the letter from Daniel Cosway, Rochester’s narrative begins to assume a textual shape that he can recognize, a shape in which he can locate himself, as he tried earlier and more tentatively to do. Eagerly he embraces the father-text in the form of the “Letter of the Law” as it is recalled to him by another man, a colored man who also identifies himself in relation to the white father-text.
IN CONTRAST TO Rochester, Antoinette conspicuously lacks a father in the time of her narrative: “My father, visitors, horses, feeling safe in bed—all belonged to the past” (p. 15); “They were all the people in my life—my mother and Pierre, Christophine, Godfrey, and Sass who had left us” (p. 19); as for the stepfather, as Rochester accurately observes, “she always called [him] Mr Mason” (p. 75). This lack seems to concern her little in her own narration’, except for the protection her father’s presence might have afforded her and her mother. In the context of Rochester’s narration, Antoinette speaks specifically of this protection, and of more compelling concerns: “If my father, my real father, was alive you wouldn’t come back here in a hurry after he’d finished with you. If he was alive. [. . .] I loved this place and you have made it into a place I hate” (p. 121).
As her signature, “Antoinette Mason, née Cosway, Mount Calvary Convent, Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1839,” suggests, Antoinette places herself—who she is, where she is—with the formality of the names of the two men. But place is preeminent in her conception of herself, and time is not excluded, either; all are inseparable from her signature, the naming of herself. The color in which she writes her signature (“fire-red”) oversees and blends them all. Just as she accepts her colored “cousins,” also children of her father, so she accepts her father as part of the context of her recognition of herself; he is party to the illegitimate mixing that, rather than frightening her, helps her to place herself. The father is one aspect of her identification; she is not, like Rochester, locked into recognition of a single, legitimate text of self. Granbois, her property and the place she loves, came to her from her mother; it had belonged to her mother, not her father. Rochester, tabulator of such accounts, notes this for us.
Rochester is compelled to seek means to reinforce his own sense of legitimacy, to prevent his text as “a younger son” from tipping over into that mother-space where it would be not only tenuous but bastardized. His own sense of urgency is answered by the “bulky envelope addressed in careful copperplate” that is delivered to him the morning after he has asked to be “drown[ed] ... in sleep.” “’By hand. Urgent’ was written in the corner” of the envelope. Rochester succumbs gladly, although bitterly, to Daniel Cosway’s impugning of his wife’s character and background; after reading the letter he remarks, “I felt no surprise. It was as if I’d expected it, been waiting for it” (p. 82). Rochester’s dependency on the idea of formality, the protocol of law, is exacerbated by his recognition of the way it works around him in this colonial society (doubly colonized: by the French—the Creoles—then by the English), thrown into relief by the “strangeness” of the place, the working out of such laws against a lush, alien background. He readily grasps at and believes the evidence of a breach of this protocol of law and custom, as he understands it, when such evidence is presented by his doubles, his mentors and shadows: authorities, officials, other men of some honor or standing, even Richard Mason, “Richard the fool,” who, he suspects, “knows something he doesn’t; even, or especially, Daniel Cosway; even, finally, the unnamed author of The Glittering Coronet of the Isles. His father overshadows all of these. “Unforeseen circumstances,” Rochester writes in his last letter to him, “at least unforeseen by me, have forced me to make this decision. I am certain that you know or can guess what has happened” (p. 133).
Daniel Cosway’s letter is extremely effective rhetorically; he knows his reader, the Englishman. He appeals to that structure of seeming indifference in which Rochester can believe: “God,” and the “truth” of propriety represented by the rigors of reading and writing, and the laws, written and unwritten, of the society to which they both owe whatever position they have, Daniel as the bastard son of a white landowner (Antoinette’s father, he claims) and Rochester as the second son who has a “modest competence now,” his father having “sold” him, having sold his “soul” by arranging for Antoinette to “buy him.”
In describing himself, however, Daniel makes an even stronger emotional appeal. In a conflation and parody of Rochester’s own fears about himself, Daniel writes, “of all his illegitimates I am the most unfortunate and poverty stricken. [. . .]” He continues, “My momma die when I was quite small and my godmother take care of me. The old miser hand out some money for that though he don’t like me. No, that old devil don’t like me at all, and when I grow older I see it and I think, Let him wait my day will come” (p. 80). Daniel has, in effect, written the letter that Rochester could only think to himself. Daniel may claim to be Antoinette’s brother; he here claims Rochester as his double, although he cannot know that. He does know the kind of man to whom he speaks, however, especially in writing.
The laboriously detailed letter begins: “Dear Sir. I take up my pen after long thought and meditation but in the end the truth is better than a lie.” Daniel’s letter is given in full (pp. 79-82); as it reaches its peroration, Daniel again reminds Rochester that he is “telling the truth.” In effect, he is giving Rochester his ultimate credentials:
Sir ask yourself how I can make up this story and for what reason. When I leave Jamaica I can read write and cypher a little. The good man in Barbados teach me more, he give me books, he tell me read the Bible every day and I pick up knowledge without effort. He is surprise how quick I am. Still I remain an ignorant man and I do not make up this story. I cannot. It is true.
I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds—with God’s help I catch some. (p. 81)
The “pen” that Daniel “takes up” and dutifully “lay[s] down” with one last request, is not his, he implies. (Just as Anna Morgan in Voyage in the Dark recognizes when she writes her last letter to Walter Jeffries.) Like Rochester, he cannot “make up” a text of his own. It is “with God’s help” that he will try to “catch” some of the “words [that] fly past him like birds.” He does not “make up this story. It is true.” Poor instrument that he is, Daniel reminds Rochester forcefully that to speak the truth is to adhere to the given text. His own evident investment in the white father-text is itself a kind of reassurance to which Rochester can respond and condescend.
In a kind of postscript, however, Daniel insinuates the ideas that keep Rochester consciously bound for a time to his need to continue the search for his own “truth,” for the “secret” whose text he is still trying to thrust from him. “Ask the girl Amélie where I live,” Daniel writes. “She knows, and she knows me. She belongs to this island” (p. 82). Shortly after receiving this letter, Rochester goes on his search for truth into the forest, where he becomes “lost.” The journey is foreshadowed by Amélie’s remark, soon after he has “folded the letter carefully” and put it in his pocket, that “he look like he see zombi” (p. 83).
After this journey, and while his wife is still on her journey to Christophine to ask for her help, Rochester receives the second letter from Daniel. It is an angry complaint because the first letter has not been answered. This letter applies the pressure that Antoinette and other Rhys heroines know so well, the pressure of what “everyone says.” Daniel’s original pose of one reading-and-writing man to another is gone: “Why don’t you answer? You don’t believe me? Then ask someone else—everybody in Spanish Town know. Why you think they bring you to this place? You want me to come to your house and bawl out your business before everybody? You come to me or I come—” (p. 98). “At this point I stopped reading,” Rochester informs us. He consults Amélie, as Daniel originally suggested he do, to verify what Daniel intimates is common knowledge. Daniel wants money if he is to keep his mouth shut. After this incident Rochester has the only conversation with Antoinette in which she attempts to explain what “they say.” Rochester asks, “Is there another side?” and she answers, “There is always the other side, always” (p. 106).
“The other side” in their conversation is specifically about the literal “mother-text” of the novel, the story of Antoinette’s mother as she tries to tell it, in contradiction to the story elaborated upon by Daniel Cosway in Rochester’s visit to him (pp. 100-104). In their discussion Antoinette corrects Daniel’s name, among other things: “He has no right to that name [Daniel Cosway]. His real name, if he has one, is Daniel Boyd” (p. 106). When Rochester does not want to talk about the “truth” as Antoinette might tell it to him, she says, “fiercely,” “You have no right [. . .] You have no right to ask questions about my mother and then refuse to listen to my answer.” “Of course I will listen,” he replies, “of course we can talk now, if that’s what you wish.” To himself he says, “But the feeling of something unknown and hostile was very strong.” Aloud he says, “I feel very much a stranger here[. . . .] I feel that this place is my enemy and on your side” (p. 107). Antoinette’s answer is a description of the quality of the mother-text, the “other side” of the father-text, the two together making up “God, this strange thing or person”—the whole text, the context, within which we can build our lives: “’You are quite mistaken,’ she said. ‘It is not for you and not for me. It has nothing to do with either of us. That is why you are afraid of it, because it is something else. I found that out long ago when I was a child. I loved it because I had nothing else to love, but it is as indifferent as this God you call on so often’” (p. 107). The last conscious possibility for a capitulation to a text of self that would include the mother-text is recorded in Rochester’s narration of the final moments he recalls when he goes to bed with Antoinette, after she has given him the obeah potion that Christophine, against her better judgment, gave Antoinette: “She need not have done what she did to me,” he says. “I will always swear that, she need not have done it” (p. 113).
At first and at last, Rochester speaks or imagines a letter he might write to his father but does not. He speaks one letter, then writes another, the formal letter that he sends to his father. After the first such letter(s), he wonders—in the innocence of his text and in the irony of Rhys’s—“how they got their letters posted” (p. 64). As Rochester’s narrative continues, it is clear that he has learned precisely how they do so. The letters in the text of his narrative are symbolically as well as structurally and thematically important: they are given in full, and Rochester’s first act upon gaining the “refuge” of his dressing-room with its “small writing-desk” is to complete the formal act of letter-writing.
As a kind of postscript to the initial letter-writing episode, Rochester makes the declaration that constitutes a description of the remainder of his narrative: “As for my confused impressions they will never be written.” What is left out of the letters, what Rochester cannot write, or collaborate in allowing to be written, especially to his father, are those “confused impressions,” the “blanks” in his mind that cannot be filled up. The rest of his narration is a demonstration of all those impressions that he does not, cannot, write to his father. Rochester’s letter-writing, both literal and imagined, is a way of keeping in mind his own place of certifying it and himself, just as Anna Morgan’s unwritten letters to Walter Jeffries in Voyage in the Dark allowed her to keep intact an idea of the context in which she wanted to place herself.
While Antoinette is gone on her second journey to Christophine’s, where Christophine helps her “sleep,” Rochester writes on the third day “a cautious letter to Mr Fraser,” the retired magistrate in Spanish Town. He pretends to be interested in writing a book on obeah in order to elicit information on Christophine (p. 117). “This letter was sent down by the twice weekly messenger and he must have answered at once for I had his reply in a few days,” Rochester tells us, demonstrating that familiarity with “how they got their letters posted” that is essential to the construct he is attempting to put in place. Christophine’s “case” is one that Fraser had insisted on telling Rochester about “at length” during the latter’s original stay with the Frasers before his marriage, as Rochester reported to his father in his first letter to him. Fraser tells Rochester, “I had often thought of your wife and yourself. And was on the point of writing to you. Indeed I have not forgotten the case. The woman in question was called Josephine or Christophine Dubois, some such name.” (Like the men in Voyage in the Dark and like Rochester in this novel, Fraser cannot keep “their” names straight—they might as well remain nameless.) Fraser “did not like the look of her at all, and considers] her a most dangerous person.” Fraser continues the chain of letters that Rochester has begun, a chain that, presumably, his father actually began. “I have,” he assures Rochester, “written very discreetly to Hill, the white inspector of police in your town. If she lives near you and gets up to any of her nonsense let him know at once. He’ll send a couple of policemen up to your place and she won’t get off lightly this time. I’ll make sure of that” (p. 118). “So much for you, Josephine or Christophine, [Rochester] thought. So much for you, Pheena” (p. 118). “Pheena” is, as we know, Antoinette’s childhood name for Christophine.
After Antoinette and Christophine’s return, the dialogue between Christophine and Rochester takes place. Rochester finally plays his trump card in showing Christophine the letter from Fraser. He threatens her with the police, after she has told him the truth as she sees it, in her “judge’s voice.” When she “drew herself up” and said, “Who you to tell me to go? This house belong to Miss Antoinette’s mother, now it belong to her. Who you tell me to go?” Rochester assures her that the house is his and that he will have the men put her off. Christophine replies, “They not damn fool like you to put their hand on me.” When he threatens her with the police, she disdains them as well. It is then that Rochester tells her that he wrote to Fraser: “I wrote to him about you. Would you like to hear what he answered?” He reads “the end of Fraser’s letter” aloud: “I have written very discreetly to Hill[. . . .]” (pp. 131—32).
When, “against his will,” Rochester asks Christophine if she wants to say good-bye to Antoinette, Christophine says, “I don’t wake her up to no misery. I leave that to you.” “You can write to her,” Rochester replies “stiffly.” We know Christophine’s reply: “Read and write I don’t know. Other things I know” (p. 133). Christophine does not participate in that destructive possibility.
Having taken the “momentous step” represented by the “turning from the mother to the father,” the “triumph of patriarchy over matriarchy,”14 Rochester realizes the full significance of what he has accomplished. He feels he is no longer drugged by the pull of the mother-text toward “that which makes us dream when we perceive it,” as Plato describes it.
All wish to sleep had left me. I walked up and down the room and felt the blood tingle in my finger-tips. It ran up my arms and reached my heart, which began to beat very fast. I spoke aloud as I walked. I spoke the letter I meant to write.
“I know now that you planned this because you wanted to be rid of me. You had no love at all for me. Nor had my brother. Your plan succeeded because I was young, conceited, foolish, trusting [all adjectives—except for the first—that he has applied to others, practicing, as it were, minimal and consistent displacements before taking on his final task: Antoinette]. Above all because I was young. You were able to do this to me. . . .” (p. 133)
He breaks off, registering the “momentous step”: “But I am not young now, I thought, stopped pacing and drank. Indeed this rum is mild as mother’s milk or father’s blessing” (p. 133). Inadvertently, he has betrayed the flaw in his reckless construct of himself as he now perceives it. He has effectively orphaned himself, or so he thinks, but one cannot orphan oneself, because the texts of self remain, mother-and father-text. One can no more escape them than one can escape oneself, even if they (“it,” as Antoinette tries to explain to him) seem “indifferent.”
Rochester’s pose of maturity, of accession to independence of mother or father, is just as quickly revealed. “I could imagine his expression if I sent that letter and he read it,” he says, and immediately he gives us the text of the formal letter that he does write. The paragraph that initiates the text is the bald, the naked, the little “I wrote”:
I wrote
Dear Father,
We are leaving this island for Jamaica very shortly. Unforeseen circumstances, at least unforeseen by me, have forced me to make this decision. I am certain that you know or can guess what has happened, and I am certain you will believe that the less you talk to anyone about my affairs, especially my marriage, the better. This is in your interest as well as mine. You will hear from me again. Soon I hope. (p. 133)
In his triumph is his failure. He has written it, again, both in the actual letter to his father and in his narratives; he places the letter he writes side by side with the letter he wants to write but can only speak to himself. He remains within the father-text, his father’s marionette, echoing its voice even as he thinks he has found his own.
Within the letter he explains his failure: “Unforeseen circumstances, at least unforeseen by me, have forced me to make this decision.” Like Daniel Cosway, he claims not to be responsible for what he does. He continues the chain of letters, still posing as a man who has taken control of his life in the world he has chosen: “Then I wrote to the firm of lawyers I had dealt with in Spanish Town” (p. 134).
The betrayal sign appears. “What’s that damn cock crowing about?” Rochester asks the servant Baptiste. The cock’s crow signals Rochester’s betrayal—of himself, of his wife, Antoinette, as well as the attempted betrayal of the father-text, the one desired betrayal he cannot manage to accomplish.
With his wife asleep in the other room (“dormi, dormi,” as he tells Baptiste), using the “debased patois” of the island, the language that is not his, the man makes a drawing, “a child’s scribble” as he himself describes it: “I drew a house surrounded by trees. A large house. I divided the third floor into rooms and in one room I drew a standing woman—a child’s scribble, a dot for a head, a larger one for the body, a triangle for a skirt, slanting lines for arms and feet. But it was an English house” (pp. 134-35). The “smallest boy” has appeared again, and the specific detail of the “child’s scribble” is that of “a standing woman.” No matter that she is, in advance, isolated in that third-floor room. She stands, and it is to her that the child returns, even as the man thinks of England and wonders “if I ever should see England again” (p. 135), even while he has already made plans to do so.
In the novel’s last section, in Grace Poole’s introduction to Antoinette’s narrative, Rochester is designated by the pronoun “he.” His words are reported as they are written in a letter to Mrs. Eff. She reads them to Grace Poole. They concern money and the disposition of his own responsibility into the hands of the women. Significantly, his written words are shared by the two women disparately. Mrs. Eff reads half a line to Grace; Grace sees the words on the next page that complete the line. In effect, they speak him to one another in the whole of their conversation, and Grace Poole completes the view of him by spying out the rest: “’[. . .] If Mrs Poole is satisfactory why not give her double, treble the money,’ she [Mrs. Eff] read, and folded the letter away but not before I had seen the words on the next page, ‘but for God’s sake let me hear no more of it’” (p. 145). In her narrative Antoinette calls the England to which Rochester wishes to return “this cardboard house where I walk at night.” By means of the “English house,” the “cardboard house,” which he draws in a “child’s scribble,” Rochester acknowledges and confines the mother-text. He does so in the only way he knows how, on paper, the pen in his hand no more his own than the pen that Daniel Cosway takes up to write the “truth,” and just as dutifully lays down.
The man’s narrative construct of himself remains as insubstantial as the paper he writes it on, and the man, the “smallest boy.” The “child’s scribble” of the mother-text is his last inscription, his only letter to her.
IN THIS SECTION I examine what is perhaps the core of Rhys’s presentation of Rochester’s narrative, if not the core of the character’s attempt to structure that narrative. The metaphor for the masculine text in Rhys’s novel—the warp of the woman’s dream-text—is a particularly apt tool for describing the point in the novel where the radical intertextuality of Rhys’s presentation surfaces the most boldly and prolifically. To adhere closely to the metaphor, we can say that the interweaving of warp and weft has gained such a thickness and a tightness that it is bound by ambivalence; indeed, by multivalence. We are offered so many textual strands thus bound that, in untangling them, we could lose sight of the most expansive, and the most exquisite, patterns of the weave.
The multivalence operative here is actually founded in a basic ambivalence. This ambivalence is the result of the man’s text being poised between mother-text and father-text in Rochester’s own narrative presentation, while the shared text(s) of the women involved in the weave—Antoinette, Brontë, Amélie, Jane Eyre—pass against the substantive portions of his text and through the interstices of it as the narrative’s own ambivalence allows. Christophine remains aloof from this aspect of the patterning, except insofar as she serves Antoinette as continuing caretaker and spokeswoman: she is preeminently Rochester’s formal antagonist. As such, Christophine retains a place in the overall pattern conspicuously aside from any ambivalence.
Rhys, too, has stepped back from the text to direct its movement. In doing so she joins her understanding of her specific, personal text as a woman to the novel that gives it form, allowing her to step back into the weave after she has completed the task at hand. Rochester himself locates for us the vantage point from which he perceives the possibility that Rhys exploits. The revealing episode is Rochester’s journey into the forest. From the window in his dressing-room, he sees “the path” he decides to follow. It is Rhys’s wit perhaps, learned from the “real-life” model of Maudie in Voyage in the Dark, to “turn the tables” on a man bent on his own kind of exploitation. The turned tables are the two configurations or “complexes” that have been at issue from the beginning of Rochester’s narrative and that are at odds throughout the novel. They are the neurotic, misused, and distorted versions of the mother- and the father-texts: the classic Oedipal complex, unresolved, and its correlative, the Olympia complex, which Rhys allows Antoinette to break out of and in which Rochester tries to confine her.
Rhys’s perspicacity allows her to put the man in the place of the woman, exchanging her text of hysteria, of the terror of immobility, for his text of the legitimacy of manhood (the ruse of reason) and the mobility of action. The inverse mirror-imaging involved here is highlighted in several ways. First it cuts across all textual boundaries, beginning with a leap from Brontë’s text, suggested by the episode in Jane Eyre in which Rochester dresses up as the old gypsy woman who tells Jane Eyre’s fortune. He speaks in intimate detail and in disguise in order to reveal himself to her, to speak to her as a man, but not as he might have done in his own shape, or even as his own sex (Jane Eyre, pp. 172-80). The discovery is Jane Eyre’s recognition of herself in him—not so surprising on reflection, but startling nevertheless in its initial context:
“I think I rave in a kind of exquisite delirium [“The old woman,” Rochester says]. I should wish now to protract this moment ad infinitum; but I dare not. So far I have governed myself thoroughly. I have acted as I inwardly swore I would act; but farther might try me beyond my strength. . . .”
Where was I? [Jane responds] Did I wake or sleep? Had I been dreaming? Did I dream still? The old woman’s voice had changed: her accent, her gesture, and all were familiar to me as my own face in a glass—as the speech of my own tongue. . . . And Mr. Rochester stepped out of his disguise. (Jane Eyre, p. 177)
Similarly, Rhys presents Rochester in the part of a heroine from a Gothic novel for the space of time he is lost in the forest, before he is rescued by Baptiste. (“It’s a long time I’ve been looking for you,” Baptiste says. “Miss Antoinette frightened you come to harm” [p. 88].) Rhys’s use of the classic response of effeminacy (or any other parodied inversion) in a man in an extreme and uncomfortable situation is, of course, reminiscent of the way she presents Walter Jeffries in Voyage in the Dark, when she shows Jeffries acting like, and talking like, a stereotypical woman. The implications of this conventional inversion are profoundly explanatory of the relationship not only between the woman’s and the man’s text, but also of the kinds of exploitation that any dominant text or culture is likely to exercise over a muted cultural text. Rochester’s dilemma and his mechanisms of response to that dilemma are by no means restricted to an individual neurotic man’s confused intentions and desires. They are indicative of the impulses and the neuroses of that culture whose advance has been dependent on the “momentous step” that Freud described. As she does with Dora’s dream, Rhys is here undoing several pieces of man’s work for her own purposes and to make her own point.
Finally, we note that Rochester’s journey, and Antoinette’s (the nine-page description of which is given over to her narration), carry us to what is very nearly a midpoint in Rochester’s narrative. Their journeys are synchronous; each represents the last, unsuccessful attempt of each to capitulate to the other’s dream, the other’s text. After that, the collision course is set. The second half of Rochester’s narrative, of “his” section of the book, consolidates his position and his displacement of Antoinette into the text of madness, the making of her into the doll. He replaces her in the confinement of the woman’s text that he himself attempted to engage. Like the disguised Rochester in Jane Eyre, he fears that “farther might try me beyond my strength.” As he found, he might lose himself in the woman’s text, in the “spirit of the place.”
Rochester’s responses and reactions can be illuminated by some of Freud’s observations in his discussion of the “uncanny.” “The German word ’unheimlich’ is obviously the opposite of ‘heimlic’ . . . the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar. Naturally not everything that is new and unfamiliar is frightening, however; . . . Something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar in order to make it uncanny.”15 “It is not difficult,” Freud observes, “to see that this definition is incomplete, and we will therefore try to proceed beyond the equation ‘uncanny’ = ‘unfamiliar.’”16 “What interests us,” he concludes,
... is to find that among its different shades of meaning the word “heimlich” exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, “unheimlich.” What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich. ... In general we are reminded that the word “heimlich” is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight. . . . Schelling says something which throws quite a new light on the concept of the Unheimlich. . . . According to him, everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.17
Grimm’s dictionary further corroborated this seemingly contradictory movement:
From the idea of “homelike,” “belonging to the house,” the further idea is developed of something withdrawn from the eyes of strangers, something concealed, secret. . . .
The notion of something hidden and dangerous . . . is still further developed, so that “heimlich” comes to have the meaning usually ascribed to “unheimlich.”18
Freud’s conclusion, as I noted earlier in an analysis of Freud’s reading of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story, “The Sand-Man,” is that “Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich. Let us bear this discovery in mind, though we cannot yet rightly understand it, alongside of Schelling’s definition of the Unheimlich. If we go on to examine individual instances of uncanniness, these hints will become intelligible to us.”19
Freud’s discussion can be useful in examining the episode in Rhys’s novel in which Rochester encounters the “uncanny,” and her use of it in relation to the project of her text overall. I would bear in mind (as Freud does) that, along with our knowing that unheimlich is in some way or other a subspecies of heimlich, we remember Schelling’s definition: “’Unheimlich’ is the name for everything that ought to have remained . . . secret and hidden but has come to light.” What Rochester attempts to keep “secret and hidden” from himself is the “malignant” influence of the mother-text in his narrative construction of self. At the same time, because of his projection of that influence onto the island and its people, the mother-text also becomes the “secret” that is hidden from him and that he wants, contradictorily, to uncover. “I looked out of the window,” he says. “The silence was disturbing, absolute.” What he sees is “Nothing”; what he hears is “Silence” (p. 86). As he has told us, “What I see is nothing—I want what it hides—that is not nothing” (p. 73).
Rochester becomes emboldened enough to essay a collusion with the mother-text, to discover the “secret” and, simultaneously, to keep his discovery from ever “com[ing] to light.” The failure of the attempt is implicit in the meaning of the word heimlich. The episode itself acts out the meaning of the word, which, as Freud notes, develops in the direction of ambivalence until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. The man does not find the secret of the mother-text in the space at the heart of his journey, and at the end of the path he follows impulsively. The difficulty lies in the “disguise” of which he cannot rid himself, because he cannot exchange it for another: the concept of “father’s time,” the linear concept of his narrative of self. He cannot accept what he experiences as the continued ambivalence of “Father’s time, mother’s space.” Instead, he feels himself in the uncanny, the unheimlich, position of someone who has revealed, or has had revealed to him, “something that ought to have remained . . . secret and hidden but has come to light.” “Father’s time, mother’s species” is James Joyce’s phrase, the shape of which I have borrowed. It serves as the alerting flag for Julia Kristeva’s essay, “Women’s Time.” “[A]nd indeed,” Kristeva observes, “when evoking the name and destiny of women, one thinks more of the space generating and forming the human species than of time, becoming, or history.”20 Joyce’s aphorism serves to describe a masculine narrative and the masculine presentation of self as the man writes it. The man attempts to place himself within the aporia at the base of that contradictory conjunction. It is little wonder that he loses himself, that he gets “lost.”
Knowing that he is drawn to the space of the mother-text, Rochester also knows that he cannot depart from “father’s time,” the linear presentation of himself, and his own place in the lineage, if he is to take the “momentous step” he feels bound to make. His concerns—and Rhys’s—collaborate to stop his narrative’s progress, allowing time, and space, for him to explore the secret of the text that has been haunting him. At the same time—in the same fictional time—Antoinette picks up the narrative to describe her own journey. The synchronicity of the two narratives in the story’s time represents a juncture, however, not a joining. The space each occupies and the time each is allotted are discrete units. The juncture is a kind of pivoting, the turning of the “looking-glass” on its metaphorical hinges. In the dual presentation Rochester and Antoinette exchange concerns and focus. Unlike Antoinette’s narrative in Part III, however, where her text and Brontë’s cohabit the same textual space, these two do not; appropriately, Antoinette’s is the second rendered. The return of the narrative to Rochester is a figurative capitulation signaling his superficial control for the remainder of the space allotted for his narration.
Despite the dual presentation, Rochester’s journey is the centerpiece here, and at the center of the interweaving of his text into the defining pattern of the woman’s text is another explicit inversion. This inversion pivots on the detail of a passage from Brontë’s novel; it centrally interweaves the text of one of Jane Eyre’s dreams into the warp of Rochester’s narration. Like a prism, the looking-glass turns many times in the weave of Rhys’s novel. In the turning, the ambivalence that results from the interweaving of warp and weft in the radical intertextuality of the novel can be seen to assume the multivalence that binds the final weave and reveals its patterns. Just as Brontë’s Rochester steps out of his disguise, admitting that “farther might try me beyond my strength,” and as Jane Eyre sees in the “old woman,” as if she dreamed, what was “familiar to me as my own face in a glass—as the speech of my own tongue” (Jane Eyre, p. 177), so we have here an initial turning of the looking-glass that reveals Rochester to be “like a woman.” When he steps out of that disguise, we see him revealed again as a child—but this time, through the looking-glass, as a girl. The final disguise is that to which he is compelled to return—the little boy in this father’s clothes; his father’s doll, the marionette.
Recall here Alice James’s observations as she contemplated the “head of the benignant pater.”21 So may we see Rochester, confined in the text of the “immutable laws” of the father-text, attempting to keep himself and his narrative construction of that self within the bounds of the proprieties that define it. Like Alice James, he fears “that if you let yourself go for a moment your mechanism will fall into pie.”22 When one stops to consider, it is surprising that the conception of “hysteria” was not applied in the first place to the struggles of men and shaped to their form, as it were, to reflect their “never-ending fight” to keep to the “paved road” of their predecessors, taking momentous step after momentous step.
Rochester’s fairy-tale mission is cast in the “green light” of the forest, a light that is “different.” Even if the light is a reflection of the “hostile” forest, it nevertheless guides the fearful man to the “large clear space” at the end of the path. Here he finds “the ruins of a stone house and round the ruins rose trees that had grown to an incredible height” (p. 86). He has reached the place he had glimpsed before, a “beautiful place—wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness” (p. 73)—the bathing pool, the place toward which Antoinette jumps in response to her mirror-image—“’Tia!’” This place is also “A beautiful place. And calm—so calm that it seemed foolish to think or plan. What had I to think about and how could I plan?” Rochester asks (pp. 86-87).23 He had begun to change in mood and attitude even as he walked along the path (“How can one discover truth I thought and that thought led me nowhere. No one would tell me the truth” [p. 86].) Following the track which was “just visible,” he arrives at the place almost inadvertently. It is given to him: “I stubbed my foot on a stone and nearly fell.”
Brontë’s Jane Eyre had also glimpsed her vision of another place that is more fatefully “his.” Like Rochester’s, her vision precedes the later sight of the actual place. The image of the place Jane Eyre had seen before can be compared to that upon which Rochester finally literally stumbles—the house that occupies, in its ruined state, the large, clear space of the mother-text. This is Jane Eyre’s description of the ruins of Thornfield Hall as she, who becomes for a time the “eyes” of the blinded Rochester, sees them: “The front was, as I had once seen it in a dream, but a shell-like wall, very high and very fragile-looking. . . . And there was the silence of death about it: the solitude of a lonesome wild. No wonder that letters addressed to people here never received an answer” (Jane Eyre, p. 374). (The last remark rings the note of its own irony, given Rochester’s “writing” of letters he never sends.) Her description of the dream to which she refers incorporates the very words she uses above to describe the actual ruin of Thornfield Hall. The full text of the dream is worth requoting here for its resemblance to, and inversion of, Rochester’s account of his stumbling walk through the forest. We see how Rhys combines and intertwines here the stories of both Rochester and Antoinette with Jane Eyre’s dream and foreshadows the conclusion of the stories told by each of their narratives:
“I dreamt . . . that Thornfield Hall was a dreary ruin. ... I thought that of all the stately front nothing remained but a shell-like wall, very high, and very fragile-looking. I wandered, on a moonlight night, through the grass-grown enclosure within: here I stumbled over a marble hearth, and there over a fallen fragment of cornice. Wrapped up in a shawl, I still carried the unknown little child: I might not lay it down anywhere, however tired were my arms—however much its weight impeded my progress, I must retain it. I heard the gallop of a horse at a distance on the road: I was sure it was you; and you were departing for many years, and for a distant country. I climbed the thin wall with frantic, perilous haste, eager to catch one glimpse of you from the top: the stones rolled from under my feet, the ivy branches I grasped gave way, the child clung round my neck in terror, and almost strangled me: at last I gained the summit. I saw you like a speck on a white track, lessening every moment. The blast blew so strong I could not stand. I sat down on the narrow ledge; I hushed the scared infant in my lap; you turned an angle of the road; I bent forward to take a last look; the wall crumbled; I was shaken; the child rolled from my knee, I lost my balance, fell and woke.” (Jane Eyre, pp. 248-49)
The reverberations among the several texts, the points of their interweaving, are perceptible at a glance. Among them, “the wild blast” that initiates Rochester’s litany of father-texts in the culminating passages of his narrative (pp. i35ff.) is foreshadowed here, as is the culmination of Antoinette’s dream, “I [. . .] jumped and woke” (p. 155). The child, however (as Jane Eyre earlier describes it, a “very small creature, too young and feeble to walk . . . which shivered in my cold arms and wailed piteously in my ear” [Jane Eyre, p. 247]) is an image whose inversion is worth special note. “The child rolled from my knee,” Jane says. In the inverting interchange between the texts, the child who represents Jane herself in Brontë’s text joins the image of the man Rochester, whom Jane sees “like a speck on a white track, lessening every moment,” with that of the “smallest boy” of “Rochester’s” narrative. The child we read in the texture of the weave here is Rhys’s Rochester, a child who has indeed rolled from its mother’s knee. In so doing he is also the figure who “fell, and woke.”
When Rochester realizes that the “light,” the magical light of the forest that had allowed him to see the “large clear space,” “had changed,” he sees “a little girl carrying a large basket on her head.” “I met her eyes,” he says, “and to my astonishment she screamed loudly, threw up her arms and ran. [. . .] I called after her, but she screamed again and ran faster. She sobbed as she ran, a small frightened sound. Then she disappeared” (p. 87). At the beginning of his narration, it is a boy from whom he seeks a response; here it is a girl. Ultimately it will be a boy again, not the “smallest” but an appropriately older child, who offers him a looking-glass for his recognition of self. This time he will refuse the child; he will refuse the looking-glass.
With this refusal Rochester also refuses the return to a possibility of space—calm, beautiful, clear, unconfining—in which he doesn’t have to think and plan in order to “know.” The “secret,” in fact, has been offered to him; he found in that large, clear space the ability to “think the absence, at the origin, of an origin,” to think, to “write” himself, “like a woman.” By being able to see himself in the looking-glass of an “other,” he could thereby recognize himself—at once like and different from the other.
In this instance the other is a female, a girl-child, and presumably black or colored as well. Antoinette is not the one who “constantly needs to be reassured of her identity” and is thus “linked” to “the looking-glass motif,” as one commentator has suggested.24 On the contrary, it is Rochester who needs such reassurance, and when the little girl whose eyes he “met” responds in terror, he turns from the looking-glass, unable to accept what it reveals, or what his own attempt to look into it implies. He re-commits himself to the path which will return him to the house and to his refuge, where he will have to “think” and “plan” a self. Having almost been lost in the mother-text, he has not retained its secret or learned its lesson.
The questions Rochester brings back with him out of the forest are matters about which Baptiste refuses to satisfy him. About the zombi, Baptiste knows “nothing”; and he “repeated obstinately,” “No road.” Rochester seeks to find the only knowledge he can of the place in the only source to which he has access—a book, The Glittering Coronet of the Isles. The “negroes,” the book tells him, will “refuse to discuss the black magic in which so many believe. [. . .] They confuse matters by telling lies if pressed” (p. 89). At the end of the journey Rochester knows only what his own senses tell him, dulled and disturbed as they are by fear. What he has seen, where he has been, is confirmed by the book, not by what he himself might have made of it. He turns to the chapter “Obeah”: “A zombi is a dead person who seems to be alive or a living person who is dead. A zombi can also be the spirit of a place, usually malignant but sometimes to be propitiated with sacrifices or offerings of flowers and fruit.’ [I thought at once of the bunches of flowers at the priest’s ruined house.]” (pp. 88-89; brackets in original). He has seen both of these spirits: the spirit of the place which was “calm” and “beautiful” that allowed him to realize that “it seemed foolish to think or plan”—the secret he forgets as soon as he becomes frightened; and the other spirit, the figure of the zombi. He has seen himself in the looking-glass of the little girl’s eyes. That is what he recalls: the fear of what he has become, if not of what he is.
There is nothing “uncanny” about Rhys’s presentation of the literal episode of Rochester’s journey into the forest except for Rochester’s own exposition of his response. His use of what he learns in the forest is demonstrated in his next expression of “calm.” He turns the experience to account in his siege against his wife’s identity:
“Will you listen to me for God’s sake,” Antoinette said. She had said this before and I had not answered, now I told her, “Of course. I’d be the brute you doubtless think me if I did not do that.”
“Why do you hate me?” she said.
“I do not hate you, I am most distressed about you, I am distraught,” I said. But this was untrue. I was not distraught. I was calm, it was the first time I had felt calm or self-possessed for many a long day. (pp. 104-5)
The gothic overtones of Rochester’s journey into the forest overcome any real feelings of the uncanny as they might be brought to bear on the reader’s response. Rhys’s presentation of the episode very nearly parodies the conventionalized use of the “uncanny” that attaches itself to that genre.25 The uncanny aspect of Rochester’s narration is revealed in the intertextuality that compels our reading of it—the ambivalence between mother- and father-texts that forces the shape of his narrative attempts to identify himself. Our interest, of course, is that starting point of Freud’s exploration of the “uncanny”: how our literature can reveal its workings, and ours, in our attention to our own responses to it. The Oedipal complex is one explanation of how we understand “who is there when a man says ‘I am,’” or, to put it another way, ‘who is there when he looks in a mirror.’ “26 Which or whose mirror is the next question.
Rhys allows Rochester’s narrative to answer those questions to our satisfaction, if not to his. The father may stand behind the man, looking over his shoulder into the mirror, but it is the mother-text that offers the mirror and the possibility for answering the question without recourse to the man who stands behind and is, in effect, the censor. The woman’s text is not only illegitimate; it is also uncensored in a way that a man’s text apparently cannot be. The uncanny thing about Rochester’s presentation is the transvestism of his text, the near illegitimacy of the act that allows him dress up in mother’s clothes for the time that he inhabits the large clear space in the forest, even as he discovers that he cannot see himself without father looking over his shoulder. He cannot brazen through the discovery that, even in mother’s clothes, he is seen to be what he has already tried to make of himself: the “zombi” that the little girl thinks she sees in the ruins of the priest’s house. Rochester cannot hold onto the image of himself that he has uncovered. He looks into the girl’s mirror, accepts her terror, and moves quickly to cover this new nakedness. He accepts himself as the creature of his father, the zombi the little girl thinks she sees.
Rochester has served to represent the man who is a typical case of the unresolved Oedipal complex. At the same time he shows that the lack of such resolution is founded in a dual allegiance that it is not in his best interest to resolve in favor of the father. The woman in the man is freeing, not inhibiting. The inhibition lies in acceptance of the father-text as the only mark of legitimate identity. In accepting this premise the man, in effect, loses himself. The uncanny and not surprising aspect of this loss is that the terms of its negation, the mark of full acceptance, is to become the marionette, the doll, that each man, in acceding to his father’s text, is pleased to consider the mark of the woman. To better the woman in her obedience to the confinement imposed by the father-text becomes the mark of the man. He betters her in his more willing acceptance of the role, a “faultless performance” of the kind Rochester shows himself capable in his early presentation of himself to his bride and her family. At the time he marveled at his “own voice [. . .] calm, correct but toneless, surely” (p. 64). The man displaces the woman, perhaps more completely than he knows or intends. He finds himself in her place, in a space marked out for her (and by her?) more readily than he or his explanations of himself can bear, “farther” indeed, as Brontë’s Rochester explains, than his “strength” might allow.
If we compare the description of a “zombi” given to us, and to Rochester, in The Glittering Coronet of the Isles with Freud’s description of the “uncanny effect of automata,” of seeming “living dolls” like Olympia, we note an almost “uncanny” resemblance: A “zombi” is “a dead person who seems to be alive or a living person who is dead”; the “uncanny” effect of automata or dolls like Olympia arises from our doubts “whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate.” The lines of intersection and conjunction make for a reading that emphasizes the absence of firm grounding for the kind of speculation that men like Freud and his predecessor in the study of the “uncanny,” Jentsch, the physician-in-charge of the Salpêtrière, Charcot, or, for us here, Rochester, appear to accept in “placing” women and other muted cultural groups, but not in placing themselves: that the effect of the “doll” is similar to the effect of the epileptic “fit,” which is much “quieter” than the “hysterical fit,” as Charcot pointed out; that the manifestations of “insanity” are similar to the effect of the doll. All of these effects draw the “spectator’s” attention to the “automatic, mechanical processes at work behind the ordinary appearance of mental activity,” as Freud observed. The “spectator” is, of course, at the center of any such speculation. Her eyes or his make for the point of view that recognizes, and places, such “manifestations” and registers their “effects.”
In a climactic moment in the dialogue between Rochester and Christophine, which Rochester is narrating, the following exchange takes place:
I said loudly and wildly, “And do you think that I wanted all this? I would give my life to undo it. I would give my eyes never to have seen this abominable place.”
She laughed. “And that’s the first damn word of truth you speak.” (p. 132)
After this outburst, and Christophine’s response, Rochester turns away: “She’s as mad as the other, I thought, and turned to the window” (p. 132). The fixing place, the summation of the final arguments in the emotional exchange between Rochester and Christophine, is indicated in Rochester’s wild and loud lament that he would give his eyes to undo what he never wanted in the first place.
We are returned to Freud’s reading of Hoffmann’s story, “The Sand-Man.” Rochester’s fate, as we know it from Brontë’s text, is to receive that “punishment,” the fear of which forms the basis for Hoffmann’s story: the boy-child’s fear of castration by the father, represented by the loss of his eyes. Rochester’s punishment is exactly that: he is blinded, although, in the domestic epilogue to Jane Eyre, Brontë recants and his sight is restored. Only through the humbling experience of figurative castration are Rochester and Jane Eyre able to overcome the oppositional and contextual clashes within which their story is cast. Both Rhys and Brontë insist on this failure of Rochester’s, a rendering of the man who is conflicted precisely because of his inability to perceive, to know, to see, and to act upon the knowledge that is seemingly available to the female protagonists, to their authors, and to men of another culture. The positing of the Olympia complex in Rhys’s novel is integral to the imagining of her heroine-narrator’s possibilities as well as those of her text. And, in its inversion and application to the masculine text, the Olympia complex offers the structure through which Rhys reveals the man’s motivations and constructions.
Rochester has, then, found a kind of truth—the truth that Christophine calls “the first damn word of truth you speak.” He would give “his eyes,” the mark of his manhood; he would submit to figurative castration by the father to resolve the masculine complex and allow him, by implication, to enter as fully as he might into the mother-text. But he has seen himself in the girl’s eyes. What she saw is what he has become, and she/he does well to be frightened by it. Naturally, he “would give his life to undo it. [. . .] never to have seen” it. He is his father’s creature, just as Olympia was the creature of her two fathers, Spalanzani and Coppola. Like her, he does not have “his own eyes.”
In his own madness, as the culminating passages of his narrative reveal, Rochester tries to take on the voice of indifference, a distorted retrieval of the “spirit of the place.” These “spirits,” as The Glittering Coronet of the Isles describes them, “cry out in the wind that is their voice, they rage in the sea that is their anger” (p. 89). The child has rolled off the woman’s knee; it is alone with the father. The man who is still the child can do nothing except take on the disguise of the father, the voice that is the spirit of the father’s space, where he is imprisoned. When he is offered the looking-glass, again, at the close of the events he has described, he sees the “nothing” with which he started.
“[A]ll my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it,” he says near the end of his narrative (p. 141). “I hated the place. [. . .] I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. [. . .] its indifference” (p. 141), that indifference which Antoinette tried to explain to him. He was not able to learn the lesson of the place in which his “fever weakness” and “all misgiving” left him, in which the “weather,” as he puts it, “was fine” and “lasted all that week and the next and the next and the next” (p. 73). The modality of mother’s time, the repetition and recurrence of it, is what he had lost before he found it, a possibility that resides in that large clear space. In mother’s time and in mother’s space, the man might have been able to find his own voice if, indeed, he had learned how to write himself as if he were a woman.
IN THE return to “the other side of the looking-glass,” Rochester shows all the manifestations of madness, an exaggerated manliness that is the sign of the man who has seen himself and cannot bear to look upon what he sees. Like Jane Eyre, who cannot look her mad double in her fiery eye, Rochester retreats from his own image, assuming the mantle of “indifference” that he thinks he finds in the remnants of the classic father-texts of his culture, especially in Shakespeare, the father of them all for white anglophones. With the assumption of these grand paper figures he thinks he can assume a shape worthy of his own specific, familiar father-text. But he is caught in the woman’s dream-text, just as Jane Eyre and Charlotte Brontë are caught, in part, in the father-text. Of all the characters central to Rhys’s novel and to the dream-text, the man is the only one who is an object in the dream, rather than a participant in its shared narration. He is being dreamed; he is not a dreamer. His role is the passive one that needs to be “written” for him; he cannot write it himself. He serves in this capacity as the hinge or copula between and among the texts of the women, Brontë’s and Rhys’s preeminently. In Brontë’s text he also serves as object—the destination of Jane Eyre’s desires. In both capacities he serves to complete the “woman’s sentence” that I earlier described.27 His service as warp of the dream-text is the expansion of that metaphor. The aspect of Jane Eyre that mirrors Rochester is the aspect that oils the hinge of the pivoting looking-glass and facilitates the interweave of the texts of the two women’s novels. The conjunction, Jane Eyre/Rochester, allows the most basic inversions and the pivoting in place that firmly binds the warp of the man’s narrative into the women’s weave.
The first swing of Rochester’s return is to the parent-text of his original creator, Charlotte Brontë, to the point in Brontë’s novel at which Jane Eyre refuses to live with Rochester. The words she uses to describe the reasons for her refusal might have come from the mouth of Rhys’s young “Rochester”:
“I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad—as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth—so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane—quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot.” (Jane Eyre, p. 279)
Her “madness” is met with his own:
Mr. Rochester, reading my countenance, saw I had done so. His fury was wrought to the highest: he must yield to it for a moment, whatever followed; he crossed the floor and seized my arm, and grasped my waist. He seemed to devour me with his flaming glance: physically, I felt, at the moment, powerless as stubble exposed to the draught and glow of a furnace—mentally, I still possessed my soul, and with it the certainty of ultimate safety. The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter—often an unconscious, but still a truthful interpreter—in the eye. My eye rose to his; and while I looked in his fierce face, I gave an involuntary sigh: his grip was painful, and my overtasked strength almost exhausted.
“Never,” said he, as he ground his teeth, “never was anything at once so frail and so indomitable. A mere reed she feels in my hand!” (And he shook me with the force of his hold.) “I could bend her with my finger and thumb: and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her? Consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it, defying me, with more than courage—with a stern triumph. Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it—the savage, beautiful creature! If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage will only let the captive loose. Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate would escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its clay dwelling-place. And it is you, spirit. . . that I want: not alone your brittle frame.” (Jane Eyre, pp. 279-80)
If Jane Eyre’s statement of her stance seems to mirror the young “Rochester’s” conscious motivations, the response of Brontë’s Rochester offers a model—one of the father-texts—for the young Rochester’s assumed attitude in the opening pages of his culminating narrative in Rhys’s novel. The immediate cue for his opening is the narrative description in Jane Eyre of the night when Rochester makes the decision to return to England and bury his wife, her identity, and her connection to him “in oblivion” (Jane Eyre, p. 272): “it was a fiery West Indian night; one of the description that frequently precede the hurricanes of those climates . . .” (Jane Eyre, pp. 270-71). In Wide Sargasso Sea, his narrative reads:
The hurricane months are not so far away, I thought, and saw that tree strike its roots deeper, making ready to fight the wind. [. . .] The bamboos take an easier way, they bend to the earth, and lie there, creaking, groaning, crying for mercy. The contemptuous wind passes, not caring for these abject things. (Let them live.) Howling, shrieking, laughing the wild blast passes.
But all that’s some months away. It’s an English summer now[. . . .] Yet I think of my revenge and hurricanes. Words rush through my head (deeds too). Words. Pity is one of them. It gives me no rest. [“Words,” Antoinette had said, fall “to the ground meaning nothing.”]
Pity like a naked new-born babe striding the blast.
I read that long ago when I was young—I hate poets now and poetry. [. . .]
[We know, as other of his comments have made us aware, that this is the “older” Rochester, Brontë’s Rochester, who has been writing his younger self in the narrative of the man in Rhys’s novel. The younger has always been implicit in the older man, and inversely, the younger in the older, despite “Mrs. Eff’s” defense of him, as both older and younger sons are implicit in the father, and the father in the sons.]
Pity. Is there none for me? Tied to a lunatic for life—a drunken lying lunatic—gone her mother’s way. [. . .] [. . .] I could not touch her. Excepting as the hurricane will touch that tree—and break it. You say I did? No. That was love’s fierce play. Now I’ll do it. [. . .]
The tree shivers. Shivers and gathers all its strength. And waits.
(There is a cool wind blowing now—a cold wind. Does it carry the babe born to stride the blast of hurricanes?) (pp. 135-36; italics in original)
The interweaving of Brontë’s text into Rochester’s narration, as well as Rhys’s continuation of the detail of the weave here, are too numerous to trace exhaustively. I will indicate some that can be recalled in the framing contexts that Brontë sets both before and soon after Rochester’s narration. His narration is designed in the hope of eliciting “pity,” which she proffers: “—Jane, you don’t like my narrative . . .—shall I defer the rest to another day?” “No sir,” she answers, “finish it now: I pity you—I do earnestly pity you” (Jane Eyre, p. 270). Her refusal—not to pity, but to marry—follows the continuation of his narrative; it is upon the refusal that he enacts the “madness” demonstrated in the passage quoted above. The continuation of the narrative by means of which he hopes to gain her pity provides a lengthy section that could be inserted almost verbatim into Rhys’s novel at this point:
“One night I had been awakened by her yells—(since the medical men had pronounced her mad, she had of course been shut up)—it was a fiery West Indian night; one of the description that frequently precedes the hurricanes of those climates; being unable to sleep in bed, I got up and opened the window. The air was like sulphur-steams—I could find no refreshment anywhere. Mosquitoes came buzzing in and hummed sullenly round the room; the sea, which I could hear from thence, rumbled dull like an earthquake—black clouds were casting up over it; the moon was setting in the waves, broad and red, like a hot cannon-ball—she threw her last bloody glance over a world quivering with the ferment of tempest. I was physically influenced by the atmosphere and scene, and my ears were filled with the curses the maniac still shrieked out; wherein she momentarily mingled my name with such a tone of demon-hate, with such language!—no professed harlot ever had a fouler vocabulary than she: though two rooms off, I heard every word—the thin partitions of the West India house opposing but slight obstruction to her wolfish cries.
“‘This life,’ said I at last, ‘is hell! this is the air—those are the sounds of the bottomless pit! I have a right to deliver myself from it if I can. The sufferings of this mortal state will leave me with the heavy flesh that now cumbers my soul. Of the fanatic’s burning eternity I have no fear: there is not a future state worse than this present one—let me break away and go home to God!’
“I said this whilst I knelt down at and unlocked a trunk which contained a brace of loaded pistols: I meant to shoot myself. I only entertained the intention for a moment; for, not being insane, the crisis of exquisite and unalloyed despair which had originated the wish and design of self-destruction was past in a second.
“A wind fresh from Europe blew over the ocean and rushed through the the open casement: the storm broke, streamed, thundered, blazed, and the air grew pure. I then framed and fixed a resolution. While I walked under the dripping orange-trees of my wet garden, and amongst its drenched pomegranates and pine-apples, and while the refulgent dawn of the tropics kindled round me—I reasoned thus, Jane:—and now listen; for it was true Wisdom that consoled me in that hour, and showed me the right path to follow.
“The sweet wind from Europe was still whispering in the refreshed leaves, and the Atlantic was thundering in glorious liberty; my heart, dried up and scorched for a long time, swelled to the tone, and filled with living blood—my being longed for renewal—my soul thirsted for a pure draught. I saw Hope revive—and felt Regeneration possible. From a flowery arch at the bottom of my garden I gazed over the sea—bluer than the sky: the old world was beyond; clear prospects opened thus:—
“’Go,’ said Hope, ‘and live again in Europe: there it is not known what a sullied name you bear, nor what a filthy burden is bound to you. You may take the maniac with you to England; confine her with due attendance and precautions at Thornfield: then travel yourself to what clime you will, and form what new tie you like. That woman, who has so abused your long-suffering—so sullied your name; so outraged your honour; so blighted your youth—is not your wife; nor are you her husband. See that she is cared for as her condition demands, and you have done all that God and Humanity require of you. Let her identity, her connection with yourself, be buried in oblivion: you are bound to impart them to no living being. Place her in safety and comfort: shelter her degradation with secrecy, and leave her.’” (Jane Eyre, pp. 270-72)
Antoinette’s (“Bertha’s”) life with Rochester, as his narrative in Jane Eyre depicts it, is the life from which Rhys wanted to rescue her by “writing a life” for her—and for Brontë and Jane Eyre in part as well, since Brontë’s treatment of Bertha does not vary in its particulars from those provided by Rochester’s self-serving and ethnocentric narrative. In contrast, Rhys’s writing of “Rochester’s” narrative in Wide Sargasso Sea is very much the life that had already been written for him by another woman, Charlotte Brontë, especially as his story of his life, the narrative that Brontë allows Rochester originally, reflects herself to some extent—the woman Brontë within her own historical context. This context, of necessity, compelled Brontë to locate some important aspects of her own constitution of self within the confines of the father-text. Brontë’s novel is remarkable, however, and continues forcefully to engage us to the degree that she and it transgress the borders of the father-text. Rochester’s text, both then and now, is not capable of such a transgression. Rhys’s Rochester consciously constructs his narrative to reflect the “spirit of the place” described by The Glittering Coronet of the Isles, the spirits that “cry out in the wind” and “rage in the sea.” But Rochester’s description of himself in the parent-text of Jane Eyre has already given him the image that is confirmed in his youthful experience of himself: “A wind fresh from Europe blew over the ocean and rushed through the open casement: the storm broke, streamed, thundered, blazed, and the air grew pure. I then framed and fixed a resolution” (Jane Eyre, p. 271).
In the overt return to the parent-text of Jane Eyre we see the dependency of “Rochester’s” narrative on that of his “older brother,” the Rochester of Jane Eyre. Rhys does not depend on the single authority of such an “origin,” however. The man’s overt return to literary father-texts, especially Shakespeare, signals not only his allegiance to “England,” “his” place, but also his place in Antoinette’s dream, and her break from his narrative as well as from Brontë’s text. Rhys also gives her Rochester a specificity and a simplicity in his longing for “England”; Brontë’s Rochester puts it more encompassingly in his reiteration of the “Europe” to which he longed to return. He opposes the old world to the new more sweepingly than does his “younger brother,” Rhys’s Rochester. (Lesser known literary father-texts are also invoked here, but they are almost “hidden” in his general invocation and offer, in at least two instances, what amounts to a clue to the name of the man who has remained without one throughout his narrative.)28 Rochester invokes the father-text, but he places himself first of all in Brontë’s dream of him, a dream that Rhys has already opposed in a single detail of her interweaving of Antoinette’s dream with Brontë’s. In so doing, she opposes the literary father-texts as well.
The “wild blast” that figures so prominently in Jane Eyre’s dreams, in Rochester’s narrative in Jane Eyre, and in Shakespeare’s King Lear (in whose story the unlucky talisman “nothing” serves in a capacity similar to its use here and in which the mother is similarly and conspicuously absent; in which legitimacy, loyalty, and betrayal are all at issue, as are the brutal bonds of patrimony) is negated in a single phrase, a half-sentence, in Antoinette’s description of her second dream: “[. . .] and there is no wind.”
[. . .] Now we have reached the forest. We are under the tall dark trees and there is no wind. “Here?” He turns and looks at me, his face black with hatred, and when I see this I begin to cry. He smiles slyly. “Not here, not yet,” he says, and I follow him, weeping. [. . .] We are no longer in the forest but in an enclosed garden surrounded by a stone wall and the trees are different trees. [. . .] I touch a tree and my arms hold on to it. “Here, here.” But I think I will not go any further. The tree sways and jerks as if it is trying to throw me off. Still I cling and the seconds pass and each one is a thousand years. “Here, in here,” a strange voice said, and the tree stopped swaying and jerking, (p. 50)
The route of escape from Brontë’s text, and from Rochester’s, lies in the half-sentence “and there is no wind.” The other intersections are plain here. We see Antoinette encounter the mother-space as Rochester saw it in the forest. We see her climb the wall of the ruin that Jane Eyre climbed in her attempt to catch a glimpse of Rochester’s departing figure; all three of them have “stumbled.” Like Jane Eyre, she hears the mother’s voice, but it is Antoinette alone who finally wakes from the dream in which they have all been interwoven. Rather than Antoinette’s being broken by the “hurricane” that Rochester claims “will touch that tree—and break it,” “a strange voice” speaks to her, even as the mother, the Moon, speaks to Jane Eyre, and Antoinette makes her escape to “write” a text, her narrative, that opens itself to others. She does not “weep” here, at the last, as in the early dream; Rochester assures us of that (p. 137).
In contrast, Rochester retreats into the paper figures of the father-texts, including the “father”-text that is his ultimate authority, the “mother”-text of Jane Eyre. In the interweave of the novel’s narratives, Rhys allows him to take up the voice of the man in Antoinette’s dream. The words the man speaks in the dream elide into and are regenerated in the mother’s voice as Antoinette looks for her escape in her version of the dream, indeterminate though it is. But here Rochester picks up where the man in the dream left off. “Not here, not yet,” the man in the dream says. “Now I’ll do it,” Rochester says here in his final narrative, as if he has made up his mind.29
The patterning of Rochester’s final narrative is very nearly the “word salad” of schizophrenics. He assumes numerous disguises and roles and his verbal presentation is composed of “the poets” he “hates now,” their characters and figures (Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, even the “mad” Ophelia); the previous arguments and conversations he has had with himself, with Antoinette, and with Christophine; his review of his experiences of near-capitulation to Antoinette and to the space of the mother-text; the songs and music of the island, which he also “hates” now. Even “swaggering pirates” are enlisted in his attempt to stave off the effects of his continued vacillation and to prepare him for the final disguise of “sanity,” whose veil he rends in the closing paragraphs of the narrative.
The most brutal and brutalizing of the roles is derived from one of the almost “hidden” father-texts, a reference that amounts to a kind of coded footnote to his text. Rhys may not have intended to mark Rochester’s identity—his name—as explicitly as it may be construed; however, if the role and the reference find themselves here in Rochester’s narrative through Rhys’s “intuition” alone, they nevertheless are in keeping with the tone of rage that the narrative attempts to present. I include the reference here in order not to evade the vein of coarseness that is as much a part of the character as his more sympathetic aspects.
A “Song” by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, is not unlike the ribald verse and limericks of other men, many of them nameless, that might serve to substantiate Jane Eyre’s response to Rochester’s narrative in Brontë’s novel. Rochester says, “But, Jane, I see by your face you are not forming a very favourable opinion of me just now. You think me an unfeeling, loose-principled rake: don’t you?” “I don’t like you so well as I have done sometimes, indeed, sir,” she replies (Jane Eyre, p. 274). It has been suggested that Rochester’s name in Jane Eyre is “apparently an allusion to the dissolute Earl of Rochester,” an allusion associated with the man’s feelings of “male sexual guilt”30; so Rhys would seem to have identified one aspect of Rochester’s confused feelings of guilt and envy, as well as one of his borrowed attitudes. One of the Earl of Rochester’s “Songs,” bowdlerized in some editions (the last stanza omitted) but found entire in others, is composed of these unpleasantly misogynistic and “classist” stanzas:
Love a woman? You’re an ass!
’Tis a most insipid passion
To choose out for your happiness
The silliest part of God’s creation.
Let the porter and the groom,
Things designed for dirty slaves,
Drudge in fair Aurelia’s womb
To get supplies for age and graves.
Farewell, woman! I intend
Henceforth every night to sit
With my lewd, well-natured friend,
Drinking to engender wit.
Then give me health, wealth, mirth, and wine,
And, if busy love entrenches,
There’s a sweet, soft page of mine
Does the trick worth forty wenches.31
This reference coincides too neatly with the other “hidden” reference to Rochester’s name to be dismissed or ignored, although Rhys’s own wit in this instance is so attenuated as to be the joke that counters the ill will of the masculine attitude just delineated. In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One (Act II, Scene 1), two “carriers” exchange observations in a setting designated as “Rochester. An inn yard.” The first carrier replies to Gadshill’s “I prithee lend me thy lantern to see my gelding in the stable” with “Nay, by God, soft! I know a trick worth two of that, i’ faith.”32
We may put these references with two of Rochester’s observations to himself, the first in connection with the carrier’s remark: “she’s drunk so deep, played her games so often that the lowest shrug and jeer at her. And I’m to know it—I? No, I’ve a trick worth two of that” (p. 136). The second, only a few lines removed from the first, continues the envy and attempt at degradation implicit in the first:
[. . .] She’ll not dress up and smile at herself in that damnable looking-glass. So pleased, so satisfied.
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, (p. 136)
In a sense, the man has been named here, but it is a poverty of naming, offering little scope for generosity toward the character, the reader, or the writer. It is not a joke at which we can laugh with any pleasure, nor is the discovery of the place of his naming an occasion for any sort of congratulation, as, one expects, Rhys knows. The next line of his narrative reads, “The tree shivers. Shivers and gathers all of its strength. And waits.”
In the later moments of the narration, when, according to Rochester, Antoinette is “waiting” to “join all the others who know the secret and will not tell it” (pp. 141-42), Rochester adds himself to the list of the mad, those “who know the secret and will not tell it. Or cannot. Or try and fail because they do not know enough.” “They can be recognized,” he says: “White faces, dazed eyes, aimless gesture, high-pitched laughter. The way they walk and talk and scream or try to kill (themselves or you) if you laugh back at them. Yes, they’ve got to be watched. For the time comes when they try to kill, then disappear. But others are waiting to take their places, it’s a long, long line. She’s one of them. I too can wait—for the day when she is only a memory to be avoided, locked away, and like all memories a legend. Or a lie. . . .” (p. 142). He might be describing himself and the verbal display he has offered in the introductory passages of his closing narrative. He does, finally, settle into what he calls “sanity” out of sheer exhaustion. His sensibility has seesawed wildly as if to find the balance that has been missing in his presentation from the beginning. These passages represent the crisis of ambivalence between mother-text and father-text, a crisis that the man tries to resolve by the most extreme measures.
Baptiste speaks to him “in his careful English” about the servant Hilda leaving, a matter of no importance. But Rochester feels the “same contempt” in Baptiste’s voice that he had in Christophine’s offering to him: “‘Taste my bull’s blood.’ Meaning that will make you a man. Perhaps. Much I cared for what they thought of me! As for her [Antoinette], I’d forgotten her for the moment. So I shall never understand why, suddenly, bewilderingly, I was certain that everything I had imagined to be truth was false. False. Only the magic and the dream are true—all the rest’s a lie. Let it go. Here is the secret. Here” (p. 138). The words that Rochester uses echo those of Antoinette’s dream, in yet another continuation of the voice in that dream. But this time he speaks in the mother’s voice, the voice that is later revealed to Antoinette as her own, that “strange voice” of the dream, in which the man’s voice was originally subsumed. He repeats the answer, in the voice, that saves Antoinette: “Here, in here.” His own ambivalence offers him the “secret” once again. But Rochester can no longer be “saved.” In recollecting the possibility he refuses it again: “(it is lost, that secret, and those who know it cannot tell it)” (p. 138; italics in original). Again he counters himself, swinging back and forth in his continued ambivalence: “Not lost. I had found it in a hidden place and I’d keep it, hold it fast. As I’d hold her.” He looks to Antoinette, as if she could still tell him something.
I looked at her.[. . .] She was silence itself.[. . .]
[. . .]—I knew what I would say, “I have made a terrible mistake. Forgive me.”
I said it, looking at her, seeing the hatred in her eyes—and feeling my own hate spring up to meet it. Again the giddy change, the remembering, the sickening swing back to hate, (pp. 138-39)
The giddy change, the remembering—the ambivalence he cannot control. What he can control is his wife; he is legally empowered to do so. Mobility, action, and law are plainly his. What are usually called humanity, sanity, a responsible and responsive attitude toward others are just as plainly Antoinette’s, even as he calls her a “ghost”: “She lifted her eyes. Blank lovely eyes. Mad eyes. A mad girl. I don’t know what I would have said or done. In the balance—everything. But at this moment the nameless boy leaned his head against the clove tree and sobbed. Loud heartbreaking sobs. I could have strangled him with pleasure. But I managed to control myself, walk up to them and say coldly, ‘What is the matter with him? What is he crying about?’” (p. 140).
Antoinette had followed him, to give him his answer. She is not too “mad” to explain to Rochester why the boy is crying. Rochester, however, “scarcely recognized her voice. No warmth, no sweetness. The doll had a doll’s voice, a breathless but curiously indifferent voice” (p. 140). The “doll” is certainly sane enough to make this explanation, to pity someone else: “‘He asked me when we first came if we—if you—would take him with you when we left. He doesn’t want any money. Just to be with you. Because—’ she stopped and ran her tongue over her lips, ‘he loves you very much. So I said you would. Take him. Baptiste has told him that you will not. So he is crying.’”
The “indifference” in her voice is not, we may note, the same indifference that Rochester displays toward the boy. The “nameless boy” loves Rochester despite Rochester’s indifference—his disguise—in much the way that Antoinette explained such possibilities to Rochester early in their relationship. Rochester cannot, however, recognize the success of the disguise he has assumed. He refuses to consider taking the boy with him. “He knows English,” Antoinette says pointedly, although “still indifferently.” “He has tried very hard to learn English.” “He hasn’t learned any English that I can understand,” Rochester replies. “What right have you to make promises in my name? Or to speak for me at all?” (pp. 140-41). His “name,” his language: Antoinette does well to reply: “No, I had no right. [. . .] I don’t understand you, I know nothing about you, and I cannot speak for you. ...” (p. 141). After Antoinette’s good-byes to those who stand there, the man thinks she “would cry then,” but “No, the doll’s smile came back—nailed to her face.”
Rochester has shifted the burden of his emptiness, his lack, the “nothing” that he sees in himself onto the woman: “You will have nothing.” “Nothing left but hopelessness,” he says of the “ghost,” the “doll” who speaks in her voice of indifference. He leaves off his present disguise for a few moments, for the formal closure of his narrative: “I was exhausted. All the mad conflicting emotions had gone and left me wearied and empty. Sane” (p. 141). Then follows a litany of hate, a child’s list of externally located objects upon which to project his own dissatisfaction: “I was tired [. . .] I disliked [. . .] I hated [. . .] I hated [. . .] I hated [. . .] I hated [. . .] Above all I hated her.” What he is “tired of” is “these people.” What he dislikes is “their laughter [. . .] their tears, their flattery and envy, conceit and deceit.” He hates “the place [. . .] the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain [. . .] the sunsets of whatever colour [. . .] its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know [. . .] its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness.” The child has not been left behind; he peeps out from the assumed mantle of the exhausted man.
“SO WE rode away and left it—the hidden place. Not for me and not for her. I’d look after that. She’s far along the road now” (p. 141). The man echoes and inverts Antoinette’s words, her attempt to help him learn, in his habitual mode of expression: the echo and the displacing inversion. “It is not for you and not for me,” she had told him. “It has nothing to do with either of us. That is why you are afraid of it, because it is something else” (p. 107).
They rode away, bound for Massacre, where Rochester began his story, where a “carriage was to meet us [...]. I’d seen to everything, arranged everything,” Rochester tells us (p. 137), affecting the tidiness of the traditional narrative ending. But there is a break in the neat package of the “sanity” of his narrative closure.
The break is that passage to which I have already alluded, the passage whose description includes Rochester but in which he attempts to set himself apart from “them”—from Antoinette, who is “one of them”; from all the “others who are waiting to take their places,” the terrifying “they” who have to “be watched,” the “long, long line” of them. The man is demonstrating the “terrified consciousness” of the “colonizer.”33 However, Rochester’s terror is compounded of more, or less, than that, as he made clear in the beginning of his narrative. It is seeing the image of himself there that terrifies him and his narrative returns to the intimate, individual text of his own masculinity. He both emphasizes and rejects the alliance of the several texts of difference that he has attempted to condense into one (the black, the colored men; the black, the colored, the white women—crucially, for his concerns, the women) even as he had just surrendered to it. The “nameless boy”—black or colored; it is never specified—offers the mirror to the white Englishman. It is the looking-glass of likeness, as well as of difference.
The white Englishman, “Rochester,” has already uttered “the first damn word of truth” that he speaks aloud and crucially in the whole of his narrative. He returns to its corollary, his one-word evaluation of himself, which he speaks again, twice, at its closing: “That stupid boy followed us, the basket balanced on his head. He used the back of his hand to wipe away his tears. Who would have thought that any boy would cry like that. For nothing. Nothing. . . .” (p. 142).
“Who would have thought that any boy would cry like that.” We know the boy who would, if he were able. Rhys has shown him to us in the man.