The “Porno-tropics” of Wide Sargasso Sea
·
Part
II – narrated largely by Mr. Rochester
·
1st
person, but narrator remain unidentified
·
section
opens post-wedding
“So it was
all over, the advance and retreat, the doubts and hesitations. Everything finished, for better or for worse” (38).
·
note
the language of military conquest applied to marriage “advance and retreat”,
but not clear who the winner is
·
incorporates
the language of the marriage ceremony “for better or for worse”, but used in a
different context, the phrase suggests disappointment and a perfunctory exchange
rather than a union between two individuals
·
The
relationship is threesome from the beginning; Amélie
is mentioned in the second paragraph even before a description of Antoinette.
·
Amélie described as “A lovely little creature but
sly, spiteful, malignant perhaps, like much else in this place” (38)
·
sense
of situation as menacing, ominous; the village is named “Massacre”,
commemorates a filial murder as well as a place where two cultures meet
·
linking
of body with landscape and setting
·
several
times
·
anthropomorphizes
the place as “[n]ot only wild but menacing” (41);
·
Circadian
rhythms are altered:
Not night or darkness as I knew it but night
with blazing stars, an alien moon – night full of strange noises. Still night, not day. (52)
·
for
him, a place of unknown hazards for which he has no map or manual; initially
resists the rhythm of the landscape, of Antoinette
·
yet,
while he anthropomorphizes the landscape, he dehumanizes people: Caroline is
described as a “gaudy old creature” (39)
·
sees
Antoinette as ‘other’:
She wore a tricorne
hat which became here. At least it shadowed her eyes which are too large and
can be disconcerting. She never blinks at all it seems to me. Long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent
she may be, but they are not English or European either. And when did I begin
to notice all this about my wife Antoinette? After we left
·
she
is “a stranger” (41), but “she might have been any pretty English girl” (42);
she is both familiar and foreign
·
notes
that “A cock crowed” (39) – Biblical sign of impending betrayal, associated here
with memory of the wedding night, when
“Antoinette had a room to herself, she was exhausted” (41) and he, waking
alone, sees
The
woman with small hot loaves for sale, the woman with cakes, the woman with
sweets. In
the street another call Bon sirop, Bon sirop, and I felt peaceful. (41) –
·
erotic or sensual memory ; the ‘sweets’ denied
him.
Her
pleading expression annoys me. I have not bought her, she has bought me, or so
she thinks….Dear Father. The thirty thousand pounds have been paid to me
without question or condition. No provision made for he (that must be seen to).
I have a modest competence now. I will never be a disgrace to you or to my dear
brother the son you love. No beggin letters, no mean
requests. None of the furtive shabby manoeuvres
of a younger son. I have sold my soul or you have sold it, and after all
is it such a bad bargain? The girl is thought to be beautiful, she is
beautiful. And yet… (41) ellipses
in text)
·
·
·
sense of economic emasculation coupled with
alienation from language, culture, landscape; her presence reminds him of his
inadequacy on many levels.
·
germ
of paranoia, that he was taken advantage of in the ‘deal’ due to his illness,
desperation and ignorance of culture
·
eventually,
he forgets his caution, his ‘English’ reserve and succumbs to the rhythm of the
place:
·
it is an
One morning soon after we arrived, the row
of tall trees outside my window were covered with small pale flowers too
fragile to resist the wind. They fell in a day, and looked like snow on the
rough grass – snow with a faint sweet scent. Then they were blown away.
The fine weather lasted longer. It lasted
all that week and the next and the next and the next. No sign of a break. My
fever weakness left me, so did all misgiving….
It was a beautiful place – wild,
untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness.
And it kept its secret. I’d find myself thinking, ‘What I see is nothing – I
want what it hides – that is not
nothing.’” (51-2)
·
place
no longer malignant, but beautiful and transient
·
accepts
appearances, and moves into a sense of time that is eternal, rhythmic: “that
week and the next and the next and the next”
·
now exotic, rare, mysterious – could be
describing the place or Antoinette as “wild, untouched” with a “secret
loveliness” or their encounters
·
foreshadowing
of impermanence, of transient beauty which is cyclical like the seasons
·
masculine
encounter with the mysterious feminine power which is both an absence and a
presence;
·
the
feminine holds both generative and destructive power, like the earth
·
·
Antoinette
is also momentarily, less alien:
I watched her die many times. In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in
shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long
afternoons when the house was empty. Only the sun was there to keep us
company. We shut him out. And why not? Very soon she
was as eager for what’s called loving as I was – more lost and drowned
afterwards.” (55)
·
potent
sexuality where they are lost in one another, yet his intense sense of
difference remains:
‘”You are
safe, ’I’d say. She’d liked that – to be told ‘you are safe.’ Or I’d touch her
face gently and touch tears. Tears – nothing! Words – less than nothing. As for
the happiness I gave her, that was worse than nothing. I did not love her. I
was thirsty for her, but that is not love. I felt very little tenderness for
her, she was a stranger to me, a stranger who did not think or feel as I did”
(57).
·
sees her as alien and unworthy of his honesty.
·
·
he
desires her and yet, feels weakened by his experience of her and of the place,
by his infatuation and by his economic dependence upon her
·
see
both his English identification of her as foreign, as ‘other’ as female and
non-English and his exoticization of her and the
landscape;
·
if
this is
Anne McClintock:
“the uncertain
continents – Africa, the
·
·
Daniel’s
letters to
I
hear you young and handsome with a kind word for all, black, white, and also coloured. But I hear too that the girl is beautiful like
her mother was beautiful, and you bewitch with her. She is in your blood and
your bones. By night and by day. But you, an honourable man, know well that for marriage more is needed
than al this. Which does not last. Old Mason bewitch so with her mother and lok
what happen to him. Sir I pray I am in time to warn you what to do (58).
·
Daniel
plants fear of Antoinette having mixed race relations, of Antoinette’s possible
inherited madness, of her lack of virginity (76), of inexplicable female power,
and the fear that appearances can be
deceiving (73) – people might look white, but have African blood; plays on fear
that Rochester and Antoinette might have a dark skinned child, which is again
emasculating for Rochester
·
·
begins
to feel duped:
As I walked I remembered my father’s face and
his thin lips, my brother’s round conceited eyes. They knew. And Richard the
fool, he knew too. And the girl with the blank smiling face. They all knew. (62)
·
Meanwhile,
Antoinette is mocked by the jealous Amélie; Antoinette
sees herself caught between the identities of “white cockroach” and “white
nigger”; rejected as outsider by the black Dominicans and by the English
colonizers
·
narrative shifts to Antoinette, who hears “a cock
crew and I thought, ‘That is for betrayal, but who is the traitor?’” (71)
·
Christophine tells Antoinette that she looks like a soucriant- red eyed, female blood sucking creature
– echoes Jane Eyre’s description of Bertha as “Vampyre”
·
narrative
shifts back to
·
see
the fragile and tenuous relationship between them eaten away by his mistrust
and her fear of rejection and abandonment
·
She [Amélie] was so gay, so natural and something of this gaiety
she must have given to me, for I had not one moment of remorse. Nor was I
anxious to know what was happening behind the thin partition which divided us
from my wife’s bedroom.
In the morning, of course, I felt
differently.
Another complication.
Impossible. and her skin was
darker, her lips thicker than I had thought.
(84)
·
In
sleeping with Amélie,
Rochester’s behaviour mirrors that of
Antoinette’s father; where he previously criticized Antoinette’s family as
having once been slave owners, he has himself now shifted from being purchased,
like a slave, to paying Amélie for sex with “a large
present”(84); uses her to wound Antoinette
letter on page 97 – initially, could be
either Antoinette or
All wish to sleep had left me. I walked up
and down the room and felt the blood tingle in my finger-tips. It ran up my
arms and reached my heart, which began to beat very fast. I spoke aloud as I
walked. I spoke the letter I meant to write.
‘I know now that you planned this because
you wanted to be rid of me. You had no love at all for me. Nor
had my brother. Your plan succeeded because I was young, conceited,
foolish, trusting. Above all because I was young. You
were able to do this to me…’”
·
positions
himself as victim
·
Rochester
writes letter to arrange for a week‘s accommodation in Spanish Town with
discreet servants; the “cock crowed persistently outside” (97-98)
·
he
now conceives of Antoinette as whore and lunatic:
She thirsts
for anyone – not for me…
She’ll loosen her black hair, and laugh
and coax and flatter (a mad girl. She’ll not care who she’s
loving). She’ll moan and cry and give herself as no sane woman would –
or could. Or could.
Then lie so still, still as this cloudy day….
She’ll not laugh in the sun again. She’ll
not dress up and smile at herself in that damnable looking-glass. So pleased,
so satisfied.
Vain, silly creature.
Made for loving? Yes, but she’ll have no lover, for I don’t want her and she’ll
see no other. (99)
·
ironic
description of Antoinette: Rochester accuses her of both infidelity and
fidelity, of deceiving him in bed by pretending sexual pleasure, of being too
passionate, yet he is the one who was unfaithful, who admitted that he didn’t
love her (57) and who feigned his passion in order to play the part and get the
money
He thinks to himself: “She’s
mad but mine, mine” (99) – and
we see his possessiveness and treatment of her as object; ego talking
“ No, I would say – I knew what I would say,
‘I have made a terrible mistake. Forgive me.’
I said it, looking at her, seeing the
hatred in her eyes – and feeling my own hate spring up to meet it [….] they
bought me, me with your paltry money. You helped them to do it. You deceived
me, betrayed me, and you’ll do worse if you get the chance….(That girl she look you straight in the eye and talk sweet talk – and
it’s lies she tell you. Lies Her mother was so. They
say she worse than her mother.) (102
ellipses in [] mine to distinguish them from ellipses in text)
·
use
of the word “nothing” -
·
As
Antoinette says, “’There is always the other side, always’” (77)