Summary
At Rochester's home in England, the servant Grace Poole
watches over Antoinette in the attic. Rochester's father and brother
have since died, leaving him to inherit the family's fortune. He
has Mrs. Eff, another servant, pay Grace Poole double her wages
if she promises not to speak about Antoinette to the others in the
household. Although Grace is suspicious about the odd nature of
her employment, Mrs. Eff assures Grace that the master of the house
is a gentle and generous man who returned from the West Indies miserable
and pitiable. Only five servants remain in the household, the others
having been dismissed. Grace assumes they were dismissed for spreading
rumors about Rochester and his Creole wife. Grace feels safe and
comfortable in the house, but fears her charge, Antoinette, whom
she finds fierce and unruly.
When Antoinette wakes in the morning, she is cold and
shivering. She wonders why she has been sent to this room. At first,
she thought that it was a temporary arrangement and figured that
she could convince Rochester to free her. But Rochester has never
once visited her. Antoinette sees only Grace, who sleeps with her
in the attic, counting her money at night before drinking alcohol
and falling asleep. The room is sparsely furnished, with only one
window, which is too high for Antoinette to look through. In an
adjacent room hangs a tapestry in which Antoinette believes she
sees her mother. There is no mirror in her attic prison; without
her reflection, Antoinette cannot remember who she is.
The room with the tapestry leads to a locked passageway through
which Antoinette hears Grace speak with another servant, Leah, without
understanding what they are saying. Antoinette is haunted by the
sound of whispering voices. After Grace has drunk herself to sleep,
Antoinette easily obtains the keys, and she walks into an outside
world that she believes is made of cardboard. Walking through the
house, she does not believe she is in England, but instead thinks
that she and the others have lost their way on a long ocean voyage.
Antoinette remembers that, on this voyage, Rochester caught her
embracing a young man who brought her food. She recalls becoming
hysterical, only to be calmed by something that an unknown man gave
her to drink.
Analysis
Throughout the novel, Rhys prioritizes the narrative voice
of the outsider. It is therefore Rochester's voice that takes precedence
over Antoinette's when they are in the West Indies, as he is the
more alien, estranged character in that world. When the action moves
to England, Rochester disappears from the narrative, and Rhys concentrates
on Antoinette's experience.
Rochester's disappearance from the narrative further suggests that
he now hovers over the plot as the mastermind puppeteer,
peering down into what Antoinette thinks of as her cardboard prison. He
seems to be spying on her just as generations of Brontë's readers have
done. This act of watching develops into a kind of pitiless voyeurism
in which we, like Rochester, look in at the madwoman he has created.
Imprisoned, Antoinette overhears the disembodied voices
of Grace and Leah just as she has earlier overheard the gossip of
the Spanish Town ladies and the sexual play between Rochester and Amelie.
Throughout her life, Antoinette gathers information when she is
nearly invisible, either unseen or unacknowledged. She remains on
the outskirts of most interactions, never invited to tell her own
version or share her own opinions. It is this silencing that Rhys
aims to redress with her novel, by giving Antoinette her own narrative
voice.
