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Jean RhysA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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“Plenty white people in Jamaica. Real white people, they got gold money. They didn’t look at us, nobody see them come near us. Old time white people nothing but nigger now, and black nigger better than white nigger.”
1. Tia, who is a prepubescent like Antoinette when she makes this statement, expresses a precocious understanding of Jamaica’s racial hierarchy. She gives this explanation about the changes in Jamaica after Antoinette loses a bet and calls Tia a “cheating nigger” (14). Tia expresses an understanding that race means nothing, that it was merely a tool that white people used to justify their ability to withhold economic resources from black people. Now that white Creoles have been impoverished, their whiteness means nothing and is no longer an effective symbol of supremacy. In fact, according to Tia, white Creoles are beneath black Creoles because they don’t know how to make a living and are under the false impression that they should not have to.
“Dance! He didn’t come to the West Indies to dance—he came to make money as they all do. Some of the big estates are going cheap, and one unfortunate’s loss is always a clever man’s gain.”
Mr. Mason and Annette Cosway have just married and arrived home in Jamaica from their honeymoon in Trinidad. Antoinette narrates her recollections of local gossip about Mr. Mason’s true intentions in marrying Annette. It is suggested that his dancing is merely a mode of performance to put Annette at ease while he works toward his true aim of profiting off of her land since Coulibri Estates is one of the valuable lands falling into disarray.
“I still called him ‘Mr. Mason’ in my head. ‘Goodnight white pappy,’ I said one evening and he was not vexed, he laughed. In some ways it was better before he came though he’d rescued us from poverty and misery. ‘Only just in time too.’ The black people did not hate us quite so much when we were poor. We were white but we had not escaped and soon we would be dead for we had no money left. What was there to hate?”
Antoinette navigates her relationship to her new stepfather and her position in a reformed Jamaica. She mimics the formerly enslaved blacks by calling him “pappy,” subtly referencing her and her mother’s own subjugation under Mr. Mason. Antoinette’s sense of things being “better” before Mr. Mason indicates that she would be happier to live on the island, even as a poor white. She identifies fully as a West Indian, while Mr. Mason expects her to conform to English ways.
“My stepfather had a plan to import laborers—coolies he called them—from the East Indies […] ‘But the people here won’t work. They don’t want to work. Look at this place—it’s enough to break your heart.’
Mr. Mason wants to restore Coulibri Estate, despite Annette’s reluctance about staying there. Accustomed to slave labor, Mr. Mason will take his future laborers from the existing stock of oppressed people of color in the West Indies. He is irritated by the unwillingness of the formerly enslaved to work, though they would not be working toward their own benefit but toward that of the Cosway-Masons. With this statement, Mason highlights his sense of entitlement.
“Then, not so far off, I saw Tia and her mother and I ran to her, for she was all that was left of my life as it had been. We had eaten the same food, slept side by side, bathed in the same river. As I ran, I thought, I will live like Tia and I will be like her. Not to leave Coulibri. Not to go. Not. When I was close I saw the jagged stone in her hand but I did not see her throw it. I did not feel it either, only something wet, running down my face. I looked at her and I saw her face crumple up as she began to cry. We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass.”
The motif of looking glasses recurs in the novel, but this is the only instance in which Antoinette mirrors another character. It is ironic that the character whom she mirrors is a formerly enslaved black girl. This black girl, however, is also Antoinette’s only friend and peer. Antoinette runs to Tia as Coulibri Estate burns, not realizing that her friend is a part of the mob that wishes to run Antoinette’s family off of the island. Antoinette seeks her friend not only for comfort but also as a point of identification. She determines that she will not conform to Mr. Mason’s notions of whiteness and propriety. Instead, she will be like Tia—a part of the island. When Tia throws the rock, she reminds Antoinette of the impossibility of this dream.
“‘Is it true,’ she said, ‘that England is like a dream? Because one of my friends who married an Englishman wrote and told me so. She said this place London is like a cold dark dream sometimes. I want to wake up.’”
The husband recalls Antoinette asking him about England—a country that is both a subject of fascination and repulsion for her. Dreams figure prominently in the novel and are a mode through which Antoinette revisits memories and explores ideas that are not safe for her to contemplate during her waking hours. Her friend’s description of England foreshadows her own future experience, but there are moments, too, when Antoinette imagines England as a place where she can be free of her controlling husband.
“Do you think that too,’ she said, ‘that I have slept too long in the moonlight?’”
Antoinette is indirectly asking her husband if she is mad. She is basing this comment off of a superstition Christophine has shared with her—that spending time under a full moon can bring on a fit of madness. Antoinette senses her own instability and wonders if her husband senses it, too.
“I love it more than anywhere in the world. As if it were a person. More than a person.’”
Antoinette tells her husband that she loves the island of Dominica more than anything else. Her dedication to the island is a threat to their marriage, both because it was unusual for women at this time to prioritize love for anything above their husbands and because she asserts a stronger connection with the racially ambiguous West Indies than with the white English culture from which her husband hails.
“She often questioned me about England and listened attentively to my answers, but I was certain that nothing I said made much difference. Her mind was already made up. Some romantic novel, a stray remark and her ideas were fixed. About England and about Europe […] Reality might disconcert her, bewilder her, hurt her, but it would not be reality. It would be only a mistake, a misfortune, a wrong path taken, her fixed ideas would never change.”
The husband describes how Antoinette’s romantic sensibilities inform her understanding of England. She listens to his stories about his home country as though he were describing somewhere make-believe. Indeed, her ideas of England have been fashioned from things that she has read, and she prefers her imaginings over reality, which has been shown to be dangerous. Her dreaminess is a kind of self-preservation.
“It was a song about a white cockroach. That’s me. That’s what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders. And I’ve heard English women call us white niggers. So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all.”
Antoinette refers to a song that Amélie sings which mocks Antoinette and other white Creoles. The reference to cockroaches refers to how the white Creoles have survived, despite their relative deprivation. In this quote, Antoinette shows her sense of rootlessness. She belongs neither to emancipated Jamaica, as a member of a bygone caste, nor to England, as someone who has never been and is more comfortable with West Indian mores than English ones. This displacement is exacerbated by the absence of her family, which makes her wonder about the purpose of her existence.
“‘Give my love to your wife—my sister,’ he called after me venomously. ‘You are not the first to kiss her pretty face. Pretty face, soft skin, pretty colour—not yellow like me. But my sister just the same…’”
Antoinette’s husband visits Daniel Cosway who insinuates that Antoinette was not a virgin when her husband married her. In this instance, Daniel plants a seed of doubt in the husband’s mind about Antoinette’s virtue which blooms into complete mistrust and hatred. Daniel contrasts his own skin color Antoinette’s and asserts that she is still his sister, despite her white skin, fomenting racial anxiety in the husband.
“‘She won’t stay here very much longer,’ she mimicked me, ‘and nor will you, nor will you. I thought you liked the black people so much she said, still in that mincing voice, ‘but that’s just a lie like everything else. You like the light brown girls better, don’t you? You abused the planters and made up stories about them, but you do the same thing. You send the girl away quicker, and with no money or less money, and that’s all the difference.”
Antoinette is aware of her husband’s brief affair with the mixed-race servant girl, Amélie. She mocks his anti-slavery stance, deeming him a hypocrite because he cannot stand the actual presence of black people. She is incorrect about him sending Amélie away, however. The girl left of her own volition to join her sister in Guyana.
“‘Justice,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard that word. It’s a cold word. I tried it out,’ she said, still speaking in a low voice. ‘I wrote it down. I wrote it down several times and always it looked like a damn cold lie to me. There is no justice.’ She drank some more rum and went on, ‘My mother whom you all talk about, what justice did she have? My mother sitting in the rocking-chair speaking about dead horses and dead grooms and a black devil kissing her sad mouth. Like you kissed mine,’ she said.”
Antoinette disagrees with her husband’s stance that ending slavery was a matter of justice. She forces him to take into account the way in which her mother was left destitute and slowly went mad as a result of the Emancipation Act. Antoinette is unable to recognize how dependent her mother was on a system that degraded her, but she is correct that justice was an idea that could be used to cloak ulterior, selfish motives.
“Everybody know that you marry her for her money and you take it all. And then you want to break her up, because you jealous of her. She is more better than you, she have better blood in her and she don’t care for money—it’s nothing for her. Oh I see that first time I look at you. You young but already you hard. You fool the girl. You make her think you can’t see the sun for looking at her.”
Christophine tells the husband what she truly thinks of him. Like Aunt Cora, she can see his greed and knows that he feigns his affection. Christophine’s mention of Antoinette’s “better blood” challenges the husband’s sense of her being tainted due to racial admixture.
“However much I paid Jamaican servants I would never buy discretion. I’d be gossiped about, sung about (but they make up songs about everything, everybody. You should hear the one about the Governor’s wife). Wherever I went I would be talked about.”
The husband, who narrates the last section of Part Two, is preparing to move to Spanish Town with Antoinette. Though he wishes that the Jamaican servants would practice the same level of discretion that he expects from English servants, he knows better. Gossip, he now understands, is part of how people on the island communicate with and inform each other.
“She said she loved this place. This is the last she’ll see of it […] I’ll listen…If she says good-bye perhaps adieu. Adieu—like those old-time songs she sang. Always adieu (and all songs say it). If she too says it, or weeps, I’ll take her in my arms, my lunatic. She’s mad but mine, mine [….] Antoinetta—I can be gentle too. Hide your face. Hide yourself but in my arms. You’ll soon see how gentle. My lunatic. My mad girl.”
The husband takes Antoinette away from Dominica—the place she has claimed to love above anything or anyone else. This act forces her to take the subordinate wifely position that he expects from her but could not realize as long as she remained tied to the island, which allowed her to engage in traditions beyond his understanding and to speak languages he didn’t understand. Taking her away, he forces her to adapt to his world.
“Yes, I will listen to the rain. I will listen to the mountain bird. Oh, a heartstopper is the solitaire’s one note—high sweet, lonely, magic. You hold your breath to listen…No…Gone. What was I to say to her?”
The husband looks at Antoinette, who is staring vacantly out at the water, and quietly wishes that his wife would sing the song that she taught him about the sounds of the island. In this instance, the solitaire, a bird, could be a substitute for Antoinette, who also embodies loneliness and who only knows the songs of the island. Her eerie silence suggests that being removed from the island has rendered her mute.
“If I was bound for hell let it be hell. No more false heavens. No more damned magic. You hate me and I hate you. We’ll see who hates best [….] My hate is colder, stronger, and you’ll have no hate to warm yourself. You will have nothing [….] I saw the hate go out of her eyes. I forced it out. And with the hate her beauty. She was only a ghost. A ghost in the grey daylight. Nothing left but hopelessness.”
The husband resolves that he and Antoinette will live out the remainder of their marital years in mutual resentment. However, he will not give his wife the satisfaction of a passionate hatred—instead, he will become cold toward her by ignoring her. He feels empowered when she realizes what he will do: He will pretend that she doesn’t exist.
“‘No, I had no right, I am sorry. I don’t understand you. I know nothing about you, and I cannot speak for you….’”
Antoinette responds to her husband’s anger after she reveals that she once told a servant boy that, when she and her husband left the island, they would take him with them. The boy now weeps, knowing that he will be forced to remain in Dominica. She is apologetic but also confounded by her husband’s anger. Here, she realizes that she has married a man who lacks empathy and whose approach to language is markedly different from her own.
“I was tired of these people. I disliked their laughter and their tears, their flattery and envy, conceit and deceit. And I hated the place. I hated the mountains and hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.”
The husband confesses the source of his resentment toward his wife and the island that has entranced and enraged him. He admits to his misunderstanding of their mores but also reverses himself on his past admiration for the island’s natural beauty. The island becomes a metonym for Antoinette—he gives the island all of the characteristics that he would likely ascribe to his wife, who also remains a mystery to him. He longs to know her but lacks the will to develop real understanding. This is the closest that he will ever come to true desire for his wife.
“So we rode away and left it—the hidden place [….] Very soon she’ll join all the others 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. White faces, dazed eyes, aimless gestures, 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….”
The husband and Antoinette sail away from Dominica. He refers to her island as a “hidden place” that harbors a “secret,” though the island is neither hidden nor a secret. Instead, it is a place he has never understood and that possesses a beauty he never fully acknowledged. Antoinette’s ability to understand what eludes him—and to be enchanted by it—convinces him that she is mad. In this passage, he constructs her as a madwoman, imposing an identity upon her that she accepts.
“There is no looking-glass here and I don’t know what I am like now. I remember watching myself brush my hair and how my eyes looked back at me. The girl I saw was myself yet not quite myself. Long ago when I was a child and very lonely I tried to kiss her. But the glass was between us—hard, cold and misted over with my breath. Now they have taken everything away. What am I doing in this place and who am I?”
Antoinette now lives in England, where her husband keeps her locked away. She has memories of the young woman she once was but has no means of knowing if she still bears any recognition to her former self. Rhys uses the motif of looking-glasses in several instances in the novel, both to demonstrate the great value that Antoinette has been taught to place on her beauty and her feeling of being confused about who she is without knowing what she looks like. This confusion is compounded by her being in a strange place, among people whom she doesn’t know, kept hidden by a husband who despises her.
“Then I open the door and walk into their world. It is, as I always knew, made of cardboard. I have seen it before somewhere, this cardboard world where everything is coloured brown or dark red or yellow that has no light in it. As I walk along the passages I wish I could see what is behind the cardboard. They tell me I am in England but I don’t believe them. We lost our way to England [….] This cardboard house where I walk at night is not England.”
Antoinette describes her disorientation. Walking out of her room, she feels that she has stepped into a realm of make-believe. The colors and shapes that she sees in her husband’s home do not resemble the England that she has imagined. Her belief that she and her husband never made it to England implies that she took complete flight from her senses on the voyage across the North Atlantic. Like her mother, she has retreated into memory and can no longer distinguish the real world from her imagination.
“‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘only I know how long I have been here. Nights and days and days and nights, hundreds of them slipping through my fingers. But that does not matter. Time has no meaning. But something you can touch and hold like my red dress, that has a meaning. Where is it?’”
Imprisoned without even a looking-glass, Antoinette loses all sense of time’s passage. Without the mirror, she cannot look at her face to discern how many years have gone by. Her isolation from the world makes time irrelevant. What matters to her, instead, is holding on to items that connect her to her past, such as the red dress.
Then I turned round and saw the sky. It was red and all my life was in it. I saw the grandfather clock and Aunt Cora’s patchwork […] I saw the orchids and the stephanotis and the jasmine and the tree of life in flames. I saw the chandelier and the red carpet downstairs and the bamboos and the tree ferns, the gold ferns and the silver [….] I saw my doll’s house and the books […] I heard the parrot call as he did when he saw a stranger […] and the man who hated me was calling too, Bertha! Bertha! The wind caught my hair and it streamed out like wings. It might bear me up, I thought, if I jumped to those hard stones. But when I looked over the edge I saw the pool at Coulibri. Tia was there. She beckoned to me […] I heard her say, You frightened? And I heard the man’s voice […] All this I saw and heard in a fraction of a second. And the sky so red.”
Rhys uses one of the most pivotal events in Jane Eyre—Bertha setting fire to Thornfield Hall—and reverses the evil, destructive act of a madwoman, turning it, instead, into a woman’s attempt to free herself. The red in the sky, an image that appears in this dream of Antoinette’s, mirrors the red of her dress, thereby reconnecting her to Coulibri Estate. The sights and sounds of her former home become clear to her. This clarity within her dream resolves her to leave her room and set the house on fire, which is where the novel concludes.
By Jean Rhys