U Mad Bro?

We’ve discussed in class how the theme of madness is quite central to Wide Sargasso Sea. The conventional idea, as portrayed in Jane Eyre, is that Antoinette is a completely mad woman, but I would like to argue something else. I think that Rochester is actually the mad one, and Antoinette is perfectly sane.

Why? Well, first, as soon as Rochester arrives in Jamaica, he has very serious paranoia. On the very first page of his narration, he calls his surroundings “sly, spiteful, and malignant” (Rhys 59). He consistently feels like the servants are hiding something from him, or that they’re laughing at him. He has trouble sleeping because he is so scared of the island. Although we as readers know that he is perhaps a little justified in this – there really is tension between the creoles and servants – but his perception of it seems overly paranoid. After all, nobody ever tries to harm him, and doesn’t even have any intention to. He seems paranoid of some sort of serious violence or conspiracy against him, which definitely isn’t very healthy or sane. Paranoia is a big marker of lots of mental illnesses (or, as they would have called it in the book, “madness”), and Rochester seems to be quite on edge.

A very revealing exchange between Antoinette and Rochester is when Antoinette asks him if he can bring along the little boy who wanted to go to Spanish Town with them (in my edition on pages 154-155). If we ignore all the dialogue tags and character descriptions (aka don’t trust Rochester’s narration and opinions when he starts calling her a “mad girl” or calling her eyes “blank”), and just read only the dialogue, it seems like Antoinette is being perfectly normal, rational, and reasonable. She has good syntax, she doesn’t seem too emotional (or unemotional), and it just seems like normal speech. But if we look at Rochester’s words, even without the dialogue tags, they are harsh and seem too angry for the matter they’re discussing. If Rochester is the mad one, could it be possible that Antoinette’s “indifference” that is making him so angry is simply imagined, or blown out of proportion? He doesn’t seem to be reacting very rationally to this entire situation, while Antoinette is.

Another example of when Rochester doesn’t seem to be super sane is when he’s talking to Christophine towards the end of Pare Two, when she "accuses" him of all the things he’s done wrong (in my edition, pages 138-140). The whole passage is very different from the rest of the book. The mood it sets along with the language used is a change from the more mellow calm previous sections. Throughout, Rochester is frantically repeating in his mind Christophine’s words, which definitely doesn’t seem normal.

Not only is Rochester mad, but I would like to claim that Antoinette is not mad at all. That seems like a crazy claim – the narration in Part Three certainly seems like a mad woman speaking – but it important to consider the fact that she was in that attic, totally isolated, for a long period of time. Years maybe. Any person, sane or mad, would go crazy if they were confined to one tiny attic with minimal human contact for supposedly multiple years. But what about the scene in the bedroom when Antoinette bites Rochester and starts screaming and cursing at him? That certainly doesn’t seem sane…or does it? Personally, I think her anger and irrationality were perfectly justified by what was happening at the moment: she had just listened to her husband cheat on her, and she was very drunk on a significant amount of rum. The rum would have impeded her judgment enough to make her act mad, and the anger at Rochester would have only fueled the fire.

Other than those two cases, Antoinette displays no other strange behavior that could be labeled as “mad”, except for what Rochester (unreliably) observes in the last bits of Part Two. So, although Antoinette is definitely not a very standard person and has a very unique way of viewing the world, I think she is totally sane. Unfortunately, in this situation, Rochester is the one with all the money and power, so he is able to control what happens to Antoinette.

My specific edition of the book:

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. Norton, 1982.