My Thoughts on Our Panel Presentation Article

I probably made this pretty clear in class (and in my previous post), but I do not think Antoinette goes insane. She is incredibly sane considering the fact that she's been locked up for years. Her desires are simple: she wants to leave the cold, gray, oppressive house and be free. Yes, by the standards of her society she is "insane." However, are we really that stuck in the past that we can't let go of standards for mental illness that claim that "insanity" is inherited, and characterized by "crazy" actions that are not womanly? A man living during Antoinette's time period would not be expected to be sane while being locked in an attic. A man would not be considered crazy for getting drunk and yelling at his wife. There is definitely a sexual double-standard here, and it unfortunately causes Antoinette to be judged rather harshly--by her society.

However, this is the twenty-first century! Antoinette is from the nineteenth! Why does it make sense to dismiss her as being "insane" when we are supposed to have progressed away from that way of thinking? What really makes her insane? My definition of insanity is being completely incapable of rational thought and rational desires. Antoinette is surprisingly rational in her thoughts and desires, and is even very calm and peaceful when she is not being treated badly by Richard or Rochester. Her relationship with Grace Poole does not seem like a bad one: although Grace views Antoinette as "mad," Antoinette does not act "mad" when she is alone with Grace. She does not give Grace a hard time. All she does is ask to be set free, or ask for food or fire for warmth. Those of you who believe Antoinette is mad, please tell me: what is your definition of insanity, and how does Antoinette fit that definition at all? I think we all agree that she is mentally ill, but we do not classify mentally ill people as insane. Our understanding of mental illness should have progressed enough since the nineteenth century that we understand mental illness does not equal insanity. Even by Antoinette's society's standards, she is not as insane as people believe. People in her society do not understand why Richard angers her so much when he says he cannot legally help her. They do not understand her identity crisis, or the way she has been hurt by Rochester.

Can we really classify anybody as insane or mad? I would argue that we cannot. It is impossible to fully understand a person (unless we have a handy book about them that explains their mind to us perfectly), and unless we really understand how somebody's mind works and whether their thoughts are rational or not, we cannot call them insane. We know that insanity is not hereditary (even in Antoinette's case where her mental illness is a self-fulfilling prophecy, it is not inherited and it did not have to happen), and we know that there are various degrees and intensities of mental illness. We even claim now to understand the human mind better than we did back then, but do we really? If we are still dismissing people as insane simply because they are mentally ill for perfectly legitimate reasons (but still entirely rational), has our thinking about mental illness actually progressed that much?

Given my previous assertion that we cannot call anybody mad or insane, I do not think Rochester is mad. I understand what our author is saying about him having a "mad" quality, and that makes sense to me, but I do not think we can call him mad. Our author was definitely on Antoinette's side and not at all on Rochester's, which would explain her reluctance to sympathize with the latter. I do not hate Rochester. I don't like him in this book (I do overall, when I consider both this book and Jane Eyre, because I like the person he becomes), but I do understand his pride, his frustration at being the "second son," his fear of being the rejected suitor, and his "need" for power because society tells him to be the powerful man. Rochester is a victim of society's sexism just as much as Antoinette is. I do not think that Rochester is mad, just like I don't think that Antoinette is mad: if they were, how could we understand them at all (unless, of course, you want to argue that we are all mad)?

Antoinette Is Not Crazy

I don't think Antoinette is ever out of her mind at all in the entire story. First of all, she has a right to be incredibly angry with Rochester after he deliberately hurts her by so obviously cheating on her. It is only because she is a woman who "should" be quiet and sweet and obedient that Rochester is so freaked out by her drunken yelling at him. She's drunk though--it's easy to view the scene where she's yelling at him as the beginning of her "insanity," but it's not at all the beginning. Everybody's emotions and actions are escalated when they are drunk, and Antoinette has every right to be furious at this point. She's just showing emotion here, and because that's not really "allowed" of her, she can easily be viewed as insane at this point.

There is, of course, the issue of the Antoinette in the attic, who we know from Jane Eyre as Bertha Mason. It is so easy to say that because she tried to attack Richard, she is insane, but she doesn't attack him until he says he legally can't do anything about her situation. She is so frustrated at being so trapped, and her brother, the one person who she hopes will recognize and help her, has failed her and is clearly frightened of her. Yes, at this point, her mental state has definitely spiraled downward, but she is not insane. She has perfectly civilized conversations with Grace Poole, and her thoughts seem rational to me as well (we did not declare Septimus "insane" when we were inside his head, even though he appears insane on the outside!).

Another question is that of why she burns the house down. This is open to plenty of interpretation, but I do not think she does it as a means of revenge. I don't think that attempting to hurt anybody is really on her mind when she does this. In her dream that made her "realize" what she had to do, the act of setting the fire and killing herself is centered around her. She constantly talks of Coulibri, Christophine, Tia, Aunt Cora, and her childhood. Rochester is involved, and is referred to as "the man who hated me," and he seems to be beckoning Antoinette to stay, and not to jump. He's calling her name (well, he's using the name he gave her anyway), and since he is the one who brought her away from England and her childhood, he seems to be telling her not to jump, and to stay in the world he has created for her. Her choice is to jump into what is the pool in her dream (but what we know will actually be her death in real life), and this seems to be her way of finally escaping Rochester and going back, in a way, to the life that she truly identifies with. She is not an English girl in the end. She is Antoinette, not Bertha.

Does this make her insane? Is she insane to kill herself in order to escape a life that she's not happy living? We didn't denounce Virginia Woolf as insane for committing suicide; we understood it to an extent. I feel like we can understand Antoinette's suicide in the same way. Yes, she is mentally ill to a degree, but this does not make her insane. She is never insane, and her mental illness is absolutely brought on by Mr. Rochester's treatment of her. How "sane" can we expect a woman to be if she is confined to an attic for years? In my opinion, Antoinette is surprisingly sane at the end of the book.

I Remembered Something!

In Nineteenth-Century Novel, while we were reading Jane Eyre, we discussed the idea that Jane and Bertha are doubles. The main idea that I remember was that Jane feels trapped working as a governess for Mr. Rochester, in the same way that Bertha Mason is trapped in the attic. Jane has a free spirit the same way that Bertha does; Bertha's free spirit is just "overly" free, because she is so trapped by society. I thought this idea was very relevant, because of my last post, and parallels I'm noticing between Jane's back-story and Bertha's back-story (or Antoinette's story). It gives my last post about Jane and Antoinette much more meaning.

Antoinette and Jane

While I was reading tonight's section, I could not help but notice many parallels between the lives of Antoinette and Jane Eyre. Both are fatherless when their stories begin, and their mother figure is not the most compassionate. (Although Jane is an orphan, her Aunt Reed is in the position of her mother.) Also, neither of them fits in with their communities. Jane is  hated by her cousins and Aunt, and her uncle who she remembers as being part of a happier time, has died. Antoinette is not exactly English, and the Jamaican people dislike her because her father was a cruel slaveholder.

One specific example of a parallel that I noticed was the point at which Antoinette is being picked on while she walks to school with the girl who smells like hair oil and the boy with red hair. They make fun of her, physically hurt her, and the boy makes an ambiguous threat: "One day I catch you alone, you wait, one day I catch you alone" (p. 50). This reminded me vividly of the scene in Jane Eyre when her older cousin throws a book at her, causing her to hit her head on the corner of a table.

Also, when Antoinette is at school, she is happy, just like Jane is at school. The nuns are nice to her and the one who doesn't have the "starched apron like the others" (p. 52) reminded me a lot of Miss Temple, the head of the school in Jane Eyre. Antoinette clearly looks up to this woman in the same way that Jane looks up to Miss Temple. She describes her beauty the same way Jane describes Miss Temple's beauty, saying, "She had large brown eyes, very soft...Her cheeks were red, she had a laughing face and two deep dimples." Immediately after this scene, the nun sends Antoinette off with another girl, Louise de Plana, who reminded me so much of Helen from Jane Eyre. Antoinette says, "She was very pretty and when she smiled at me I could scarcely believe I had ever been miserable" (52). Of course, unlike Helen, Louise is well-liked by all of her teachers.

Another scene that struck me as being shockingly similar to a scene from Jane Eyre occurs soon after Antoinette meets Louise. Mother St. Justine points out to all the girl the excellent way that the de Plana sisters look. She notes Miss Helene's hair, and Helene takes the praise. This reminded me (in a contrasting way) of the scene in Jane Eyre when one of the teachers is criticizing Helen (Oh look, the names are even similar! Possibly coincidental?) for her appearance, which the teacher claims is not put-together enough.

Another way that Antoinette reminds me of Jane Eyre is in her attitude toward religion. Initially Jane doesn't have much faith in God or in prayer, but once she goes to school and is convinced that "God loves us all" by Helen, she sets more faith in religion. Antoinette doesn't seem to ever reject religion the way Jane does. The way she approaches it worries me a bit actually. She seems terrified of sinning, of thinking bad thoughts, of going to Hell. She finds safety in prayer, but on page 57 she gets terrified of sinning too much, and is comforted by the thought that if she banishes thoughts quickly enough, she will be okay. After this, she notes, she stops praying very much, and is in the same sort of position that Jane is in before going to school. Later, Antoinette has a dream that she is in Hell, so obviously she is still terrified by religion.

So what is the difference between these two girls? Why is it that Jane ends up happy and successful (I would argue that she is happy with herself before she is happy with Mr. Rochester), but Antoinette, as we know based on Jane Eyre, will end up being "the insane woman in the attic?" I'm sure this question will be answered more as I read, but I expect it has a lot to do with the fact that Antoinette's family is not seen as all that respectable (and that her mother was declared insane), and the fact that Antoinette faces much more of an "identity crisis" than Jane does--Jane at least is confident in being "English," whereas Antoinette doesn't fully fit into any category.

I'd like to note that I loved Jane Eyre, and the first time I read it, I read an abridged version because I was pretty young (sometime in elementary school), and I was terrified of Bertha Mason because there was a very horrifying picture of her in the attic: she had long, wild, black hair and a crazed expression. Since then, that has been my impression of Bertha Mason, and when I reread the book in Nineteenth-Century Novel, I was able to dispel that impression a little bit, but it was always in the back of my mind. I'm excited to be reading her side of the story now, and I'm surprised at how much her story seems to mirror Jane's, and by how similar their characters are. It will really change the way I read Jane Eyre in the future (although I'm positive I will always love both books!).

Dear Joey and Annie

First of all I would like to say that your presentation was very good, and I agreed with what you both said.

However, when you mentioned there being an "arc" in the books we're reading, my first thought was that it had to do with character. Yes, philosophies on life and death is an arc as well, and perhaps character is part of that arc, but I had actually been paying a lot of attention to portrayal of characters as representations of human beings.

Nicholson Baker encouraged us to focus on every little moment. He only paid close attention to one character, and during the course of an escalator ride, he was able to flesh out his character so much that we knew Howie very, very well. Woolf's style was similar to Baker's in that she did flesh out characters a lot over a short period of time. However, Woolf took it to the next level by fleshing out (nearly) every single character in her novel. She made it impossible to really hate anybody. After spending so much time reading Woolf, her writing has really impacted the way I've read other books in this course. While reading Hemingway, I was constantly searing for what was underneath the surface, because I was so used to that being very important in Woolf's writing. This was obviously also important in Hemingway's, and I was very glad we had read Woolf first because it made it much more obvious that I had to look beneath the surface while reading Hemingway. Gregor's transformation in The Metamorphosis was like one huge metaphor not only for the awful family dynamic, but also for Gregor's insect-like personality. While reading The Stranger, our sympathetic view of characters was challenged by a character who seemed incredibly inhuman to us. We looked as hard as we could for human traits in Meursault, but it was difficult to find any at first. We even called him a psychopath. Once his trial began, however, and he started to change as a character, we began to like him because he was showing emotion for the first time we had seen. Now that we're reading Wide Sargasso Sea, I'm not sure what it will do for our perception of human nature and character, but I expect it to tell us something important as well.

I agreed with the points you two made during your presentation, but I wanted to offer an alternate "arc" that these books are forming, at least for me.

"I had only to wish...that they greet me with cries of hate."

By the end of The Stranger, this is what Meursault wants; however, during his trial when he realizes that everybody hates him, he wants to cry. His desire to cry is significant because it is the first real emotion he has shown during the entire book. It seems to me that by that point in his trial, his life has caught up with him, from his failure to completely college to his entire personality being judged as wrong in some way.

Meursault is generally a go-with-the-flow kind of guy. He doesn't care who his buddies are, who he gets married, or even whether or not he gets married. The one thing he does seem to care about is what other people think of him, or at least what his boss thinks of him. Although he may not care much about the thoughts of the other people at his mother's funeral, he cares a great deal about what his boss will think about him missing so much work. He also clearly cares what the jury think of him. When his entire life is set out to be judged, he questions himself. Until now, most people like him (although I'm not sure why, especially in the case of Marie). Being a people-pleaser who is all of a sudden judged as inhuman by other people is something that is very difficult for Meursault to face.

When Meursault receives the death sentence, he changes yet again. Initially, he reacts as anybody would. He hopes desperately for some way out, even though he knows that escape is impossible. However, he soon realizes that everybody must die eventually, and whether he dies now or later, it will amount to the same thing. He is then able to say he is ready for death and he hopes "for me to feel less alone...that they greet me with cries of hate." What snaps in Meursault to make him go from wanting to cry at the thought of being hated to hoping that people cry out at him in hatred? Just before making this profound statement, he reflects on his mother's death, noting that so close to the end, she must have felt free and tried to live as much as possible, which would explain why she "had taken a 'fiance.'" He states that nobody had the right to cry over her. Perhaps this is because he sees her as having been happy at the end? Or he believes that nobody could have possibly understood her? It would make sense that nobody can understand what it truly means to be mortal unless they know they are close to death. Meursault seems to recognize this, and because of it he feels that nobody has the right to cry over people when the die (or maybe just his mother?). At this point, he is certain that he is feeling what his mother was feeling. He does not feel alone in the world. I would even say that he feels that anybody who knows they are going to die feels the way he does. For that, he does not feel alone. He hopes that he will be greeted with hatred on his execution day because he doesn't think anybody has the right to cry over him, since they don't really understand him. Perhaps there is a part of him that hopes people are truly upset that he killed someone. Perhaps he values human life a little bit more now. But this doesn't seem to be about the Arab. It seems more like he's stronger as a person now, and he can take the hatred, because he finally knows that he is not really alone.