Analysis
Rhys has adapted the scene of Richard Mason's visit from Jane Eyre, but
has altered the perspective. No longer is the scene from the viewpoint
of Jane, the young English girl to whom the captive woman is a frightening
monster; instead, Rhys allows Antoinette to speak. Antoinette reveals
just how confused and dislocated she feels. That she does not remember
attacking Richard Mason suggests the extent of her fragmentation:
it seems that she and the raving madwoman are two distinct entities,
locked in combat over the woman's identity.
What troubles Antoinette most about Richard Mason's visit
is that he does not recognize her. Without a mirror in the attic,
Antoinette can no longer view her reflection and confirm her own
identity. She has slowly become Rochester's creation, renamed "Bertha Mason"
and transformed into a madwoman. Richard's non- recognition of Antoinette
recalls Antoinette's own non-recognition of her mother when she
visited her mother at the house of the caretakers. Richard's look
of horror confirms that Antoinette has followed in her mother's
footsteps.
Antoinette's attachment to her red dress is particularly
poignant. She clings to the dress as a reminder of her past, believing
she can smell the Caribbean landscape in its folds. It is by touching
and staring at the dress that she loses herself in to her sensory,
organic world of memories. Significantly, the dress is red—a color
that symbolizes the passion and destruction that led to her current
captivity.
For Antoinette, money and time have no meaning. Never
concerned or interested in money, Antoinette has lost all of her
own wealth ever since Rochester assumed control of her finances.
Rather than buy the knife, Antoinette barters for it with her locket,
reverting to a more primitive system of exchange. Like money, time
has no relevance for Antoinette; she says that it is does not matter.
Both time and money are constructs that have little bearing on her
world of images or on the Caribbean sights and sounds for which
she longs.
In forestalling Antoinette's fatal jump foretold by Brontë's
novel, Rhys grants her protagonist a final moment of triumph. Antoinette appears
active and defiant, about to enact her dream. She is finally allowed
to speak, and Rochester must listen: the fire is her voice of rage.
Rhys's novel suggests that Antoinette's paranoia about
being followed and watched is legitimate. The reader of Jane
Eyre becomes complicit in the watching; Antoinette feels
these eyes upon her, viewing her as a ferocious lunatic. Even Antoinette
watches herself in horror, as she dreams that she looks at herself
in the mirror and sees not herself but a ghost. Rhys thus constructs
a world of scrutiny, as we spy Antoinette from all different angles:
from Grace Poole's viewpoint, from Rochester's, from Antoinette's
own—and also from our own, as readers of Jane Eyre. Like
a mirror reflected an infinite number of times, Rhys's narrative
web continues to grow outward, incorporating a multiplicity of voices
and competing perspectives. She thus confirms Antoinette's anxiety
that eyes are always upon her.
