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!).