The “Porno-tropics” of Wide Sargasso Sea

· Part II – narrated largely by Mr. Rochester

· 1^st 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 Rochester describes landscape or events as “sad” (38), (41); (42)

· 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 Spanish Town I suppose. Or did I notice it before and refuse to admit what I saw? Not that I had much time to notice anything. I was married a month after I arrived in Jamaica and for nearly three weeks of that time I was in bed with fever” (39)

· 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)

· Rochester plays himself in the position of the purchased slave, yet he is the one with the money having purchased a ‘birthright’ denied him as the second born son

· Rochester’s sense of rejection from father; insecurity about his “competence”, he can hold up his head, but at what price? Rather than being able to offer Antoinette financial security and a home, she has provided the money in his wallet.

· 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 Eden, “as if all this had never been breathed before” (43).

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

· Rochester is awed and frightened; wants to demystify it

· 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.

· Rochester projects his sexual desire onto Antoinette and on to the landscape

· 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 Eden, then she is Eve

Anne McClintock:

“the uncertain continents – Africa, the Americas, Asia – were figured in European lore as libidinously eroticized… [and] long before the era of high Victorian imperialism, Africa and the Americans had become what can be called a porno-tropics for the European imagination – a fantastic magic lantern of the mind onto which Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears” (Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, 22).

·

· Daniel’s letters to Rochester manipulate him, play on Rochester’s fears of further emasculation, of being humiliated in front of the English society of Domenica

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

· Rochester thinks to himself of the letter: “I felt no surprise. It was as if I’d expected it, been waiting for it (59).

· 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 Rochester (71)

· see the fragile and tenuous relationship between them eaten away by his mistrust and her fear of rejection and abandonment

· Rochester sleeps with Amélie in the room next to his wife’s:

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 Rochester thinking:

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” - Rochester’s value system is not the same as the Dominican’s (51, 57, 104)

· As Antoinette says, “’There is always the other side, always’” (77)