Waters Cleared

I know that my lack of insightful comments during class implied that I was not caught up on the reading for Wide Sargasso Sea, but I really did keep up. I simply didn't know what to make of the story. I didn't feel like any comment I could have made would have been insightful, and I felt like anything I could have said was already said by someone else in a more insightful manner. For a while, I just didn't know where Rhys was going with the story. Then I read the ending and then it all became clear to me. Rhys was creating a whole back story for a woman from Jane Eyre who was "crazy". For me, the whole story revolves around the very end. It was sort of like in Beloved how the whole story revolved around the incident where the mother slits her baby's throat to prevent her from becoming a slave. Antoinette's (I refuse to call her Bertha) whole story was just a way to show how someone can be driven crazy and question whether or not they really are crazy or if that is simply a label that is put on people we can't quite understand. I may have burned down that house like Antoinette if my life took a terrible turn like that. It was interesting to see how Antoinette tragically developed to be like her mother and repeated the same actions she did. I haven't read Jane Eyre, but if one of the characters was driven to madness and did the same thing Antoinette did, then that would be cool (it wouldn't be cool in real life) because then it would be like a whole tragic cycle.

Forget the whole Tarzan and Jane analogy I made in my previous blog post because I have a better one. Antoinette is like Lucifer from Paradise Lost and Rochester is like God. All Antoinette wanted was to be safe from people who might try to hurt her because of who her father was, which is analogous to Lucifer wanting to be as powerful as God. Now that think about it, Antoinette's father drove both Antoinette and her mother crazy in a sense, but I digress. Her situation has always been precarious, but Rochester had the power to give her Security in England (analogous to Hell), which is analogous to how God had the power to give Lucifer what he wanted. In the end of the book, we see Antoinette go to England, where she is safe from her situation in Jamaica, but her security comes with a the terrible price. This is like how Lucifer was given all of God's power, but his kingdom was Hell (which was detestable even to Lucifer himself). So like the devil himself, Antoinette gets what she wants in its worst possible form. When she lights the house on fire, the flames may hint at Hell.

(sorry this post is late I thought I posted it Saturday)