Who Are You? Who, who? Who, who?

(Quick note: Ridiculous title, I’m sorry. And now I’ve got the opening of CSI (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WseRJMQf1U) stuck in my head. Anyway, this is a completely revised version of my original post. I suppose the original post was fine, but it felt lacking in some regard. I got kind of long winded on this version. If you don’t want to read it, just assume that I wrote Antoinette is a mad, beastly woman and she got what she deserved. You can comment accordingly.)

I hate you blog post five. Well, not really hate, but you certainly made me rethink how to approach this more often than I had anticipated. Spivak, curse you as well. Anyhow, with my outbursts against a block of text and the author of an essay out of the way, let’s move on to the details.

I suppose I should explain what caused some second and third (?) guessing with this week’s post. It’s not so much that I had trouble wrapping my head around things, more that there is so much to touch on that I wasn’t sure where to go and I kept wanting to go back and look at other things mentioned in the essay. Looking at the phrase “other things” and how I ended up approaching this, I suppose one could take that to mean things about the other because I got somewhat fixated on the idea of the other and identity in this instance. This isn’t to say that previous blog posts haven’t been about the other or identity because they all have to some degree. (Isn’t what part of what this class has been about? Who’s who? In what context are we defined and who’s the one coming up with that definition? How does one interact with another to change things?) However, the combination of Spivak’s essay and WSS more obviously laid out the conflict with identity more than any of the other stories we’ve read so far. So this is going to be an amalgamation of Spivak’s points, but they all seem to involve Antoinette’s identity.

I’ll start with things on the third page of Spivak’s essay (242) and kind of jump around from there. Here Spivak explores Antoinette’s sanity, which I agree is intact, and that leads into a discussion about Antoinette’s identity and her belonging in both England and the West Indies. Not only does Antoinette represent the other, but she also represents the other’s other. So, she also kind of represents the self in that regard. In this context I don’t feel that the broader question of whether she was insane or not is the most crucial, but questions regarding what the “insane” outburst might have said about Antoinette, and ultimately the lasting impact colonization has on the colonized population, are important.

As Spivak notes, Antoinette’s attack on Mason was not one of an insane person, but rather one of a competent, yet possibly irrational, person (242). It is not as if Antoinette leapt at Mason as soon as she saw him or immediately after he began speaking. In her recollection of the scene, Grace implies that the conversation carried on for some indeterminate amount of time before Mason said, “I cannot interfere legally” and Antoinette’s subsequent attack (150). This reflects some level of composure, control, or sanity and not unrestrained madness on Antoinette’s part. Spivak and Rhys also note that the attack coincided with Mason’s mention of the term “legally.” Now, this could have been nothing more than a marker word used to show when Mason was interrupted. However, if we continue along Spivak’s line of thought and examine why the phrase “legally” might have set off Antoinette, the argument that this brief episode marked the point at which the repressed part of Antoinette’s psyche was rekindled can be made. Again, not in an unbridled mad manner, but simply that the non-English other that was a critical part of Antoinette finally reached a saturation point (in terms of dismissal and abandonment) and struck out at the idea of English control that Mason represented at that moment. Not only was the imposition of English law preventing her salvation, but she was being abandoned and left to wither in the hands of English (Rochester) control, much like foreign lands/people colonized before. Following the attack we find Antoinette is largely unaware of what transpired. We’ll say she blacked out or something, but that blackout episode further reflects the repression of the other and Antoinette’s forced adoption of Englishness. An interesting aspect of this part of Spivak’s essay is that she is consistently referring to Antoinette in England as Bertha, just like Rochester does in WSS and Jayne Eyre, in order to demonstrate the new identity that Antoinette was coping with. I suppose it also demonstrates the end of Rhys’ original narrative and the interweaving with Bronte’s. However, if this is considered further, it becomes apparent that this blackout episode was less about a blinding rage and more about a situation where there was a fleeting repression of Bertha, which allowed a for a small rebellion against the colonizer and, indirectly, the English self that stood idly by.

Overgrowth

I found the description of the once manicured, but now overgrown estate garden kind of interesting. The paragraph on pages 10 and 11 mentions how the garden was once “large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible,” but now it is “overgrown [with] a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell.” Rhys also writes about the orchids that were so alluring, but unapproachable. At this point in the story it seems like the garden is much like the island itself. The old order is withering, but there’s also a swarm of chaotic energy accompanied by a terrifying allure now that the master is gone. In the moment it seems like it’s something you could interact with and enjoy, but there’s also a sense that it could immediately overwhelm and overpower the senses. It’s a very weird place to find one’s self; in the middle of this transformation and not sure where to go. If we look at Antoinette, she’s got these choices to make because the middle isn’t where it’s at. The middle ground seems to be filled with abandonment, isolation, and alienation.

As a result, we start to see her finding comfort in extremes as the chapter progresses.  For her, those extremes tend to be on the European side. After losing her friend and her mother finds a new husband, Antoinette starts to withdraw from the world outside the estate walls and we start to see her gravitating towards Mason’s unparalleled Englishness. She eats an English dinner with her family even though she typically eats traditional island food alone; she adores a picture of a “lovely English girl with brown curls and blue eyes,” and finds comfort/safety in Mason’s English self-confidence. This move to one extreme and the moment of safety that came with it is immediately thrown into upheaval, but once that passes and some other events transpire she finds herself in another situation where she feels “safe.” This happens when Antoinette enters the convent. The island ways she was used to are replaced by customs of the European church. With the end of the first part of the book, it looks like that her sense of safety is going to be disrupted again.