Thursday, November 10, 2011

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.

1 comment:

Mitchell said...

The final paragraph puts the issue very clearly: What *would* a "sane" reaction to Antoinette's circumstances have been? This reader personally thinks taking Christophine's advice the first time and running away would have been a good idea (but that option wasn't open to Rhys, with her source text!)--but that would have seemed "insane" by the standards of her time, to walk away from a financially stable marriage (love or happiness aren't necessarily to be expected or required in the 19th century) and live an itinerant life with a former slave in the West Indies. By staying with Rochester, and continuing to hold out hope that he might come to love her again, she's doing the socially expected, "sane" thing for a woman of her class.