Antoinette's story begins when she is a young girl in
early nineteenth- century Jamaica. The white daughter of ex-slave
owners, she lives on a run-down plantation called Coulibri Estate.
Five years have passed since her father, Mr. Cosway, reportedly
drunk himself to death, his finances in ruins after the passage
of the Emancipation Act of 1833,
which freed black slaves and led to the demise of many white slave
owners. Throughout Antoinette's childhood, hostility flares between
the crumbling white aristocracy and the impoverished servants they
employ.
As a young girl, Antoinette lives at Coulibri Estate with
her widowed mother, Annette, her sickly younger brother, Pierre,
and gossiping servants who seem particularly attuned to their employers' misfortune
and social disrepute. Antoinette spends her days in isolation. Her
mother, a beautiful young woman who is ostracized by the Jamaican
elite, spends little time with her, choosing to pace listlessly
on the house's glacis (the covered balcony) instead
of nurturing her child. Antoinette's only companion, Tia, the daughter
of a servant, turns against her unexpectedly.
One day, Antoinette is surprised to find a group of elegant
visitors calling on her mother from Spanish Town, the island's version of
a sophisticated metropolis. Among them is an English man named Mr.
Mason who, after a short courtship, asks for Annette's hand in marriage.
When Mr. Mason and Annette honeymoon in Trinidad, Antoinette and
Pierre stay with their Aunt Cora in Spanish Town.
In the interim, Mr. Mason has had the estate repaired
and restored to it to its former grandeur, and has bought new servants. Discontent,
however, is rising among the freed blacks, who protest one night
outside the house. Bearing torches, they accidentally set the house
on fire, and Pierre is badly hurt. As the family flees the house,
Antoinette runs desperately towards Tia and her mother. Tia throws
a jagged rock at Antoinette, cutting her forehead and drawing blood.
The events of the night leave Antoinette dangerously ill
for six weeks. She wakes to find herself in Aunt Cora's care. Pierre
has died. Annette's madness, which has revealed itself gradually
over the years, has fully surfaced after the trauma of the fire.
When Antoinette visits her mother, who has been placed in the care
of a black couple, she hardly recognizes the ghostlike figure she
encounters. When Antoinette approaches, Annette violently flings
her away.
Antoinette then enrolls in convent school along with other
young Creole girls. For several years, she lives at the school with
the nuns, learning everything from proper ladylike deportment to
the tortured histories of female saints. Antoinette's family has
all but deserted her: Aunt Cora has moved to England for a year,
while Mr. Mason travels for months away from Jamaica, visiting only
occasionally.
When Antoinette is seventeen, Mr. Mason announces on his
visit that friends from England will be coming the following winter.
He means to present Antoinette into society as a cultivated woman,
fit for marriage. At this point, the end of Part One, Antoinette's
narration becomes increasingly muddled, jumping from present- tense descriptions
of her life in the convent to muddled recollections of past events.
Antoinette's husband, an Englishman who remains nameless, narrates
Part Two. After a wedding ceremony in Spanish Town, he and Antoinette
honeymoon on one of the Windward Islands, at an estate that once
belonged to Antoinette's mother. He begins to have misgivings about
the marriage as they approach a town ominously called Massacre.
He knows little of his new wife, having agreed to marry her days
before, when Mr. Mason's son, Richard Mason, offered him £30,000 if
he proposed. Desperate for money, he agreed to the marriage.
When the couple arrives at Granbois, Antoinette's inherited estate,
the man feels increasingly uncomfortable around the servants and
his strange young wife. Hostility grows between the man and Christophine,
Antoinette's surrogate mother and a servant who wields great power
in the house. The man soon receives a menacing letter from Daniel
Cosway, one of old Cosway's illegitimate children. Venomous in tone,
letter warns of Antoinette's depravity, saying that she comes from
a family of derelicts and has madness in her blood. After reading
this letter, the man begins to detect signs of Antoinette's insanity.
Antoinette, sensing that her husband hates her, asks Christophine
for a magic love potion. Christophine grudgingly agrees. That night,
when the man confronts Antoinette about her past, they argue passionately.
He awakes the next morning believing he has been poisoned, and he
later sleeps with the servant girl, Amelie, who helps him recover.
Sitting in the next room, Antoinette hears everything.
The next morning, Antoinette leaves for Christophine's.
When she returns, she seems to be totally mad. Drunk and raving,
she pleads with the man to stop calling her "Bertha," a name he
has given her without explanation. Antoinette then bites her husband's arm,
drawing blood. After she collapses and falls in bed, Christophine
rails at him for his cruelty. That night, he decides to leave Jamaica
with Antoinette.
Antoinette narrates Part Three from England, where she
is locked away in a garret room in her husband's house, under the watch
of a servant, Grace Poole. A hidden captive, Antoinette has no sense
of time or place; she does not even believe she is in England when
Grace tells her so. Violent and frenzied, Antoinette draws a knife
on her stepbrother, Richard Mason, when he visits her. Later she
has no memory of the incident. Antoinette has a recurring dream about
taking Grace's keys and exploring the house's downstairs quarters.
In this dream, she lights candles and sets the house ablaze. One
night, she wakes from this dream and feels she must act on it. The
novel ends with Antoinette holding a candle and walking down from
her upstairs prison.
