I knew how it was going to end all along; I've read Jane Eyre, but even so, I was still shocked at the ending. I think, in the end, there were multiple people and situations to blame for Antoinette's madness.
The first thing is probably her upbringing. Hearing the expectations of others that she was heading in the same direction as her mother was not an auspicious start, and her mother's behavior towards her was definitely close to abuse. This led to an unstable childhood, sure to produce some problems in the future.
The second of these factors is Rochester, of course. His treatment of her in Jamaica was the beginning of her mental breakdown, but locking her in a cold and dark room in his house in England exacerbated the situation. She's basically a prisoner now, and this drives her even more insane.
I think the third factor is Christophine. While she was trying to help Antoinette and her intentions were good, I think that she was highly manipulative and pressuring. Antoinette doesn't want to follow her advice, but she will be on Christophine's side no matter what, and I believe Christophine takes advantage of this. This is more of a feeling that I get rather than something that I can point to explicit examples from the book about, but she just strikes me as wanting to make sure that Antoinette is on her side and not Rochester's.
Finally, just as in my last blog post, I think that the character's environments play a huge role in their mental states and behaviors. Rochester acts peculiarly when he's in Jamaica, and Antoinette acts strangely in England. They both just feel so out of their element and seemingly have no one to guide them through the new situation. This takes a toll on both of them, and it's a reason that Rochester is able to function back in England, and Antoinette probably would have been able to function back in Jamaica.
All in all, this is a really sad book (even though I knew what was going to happen), and I think that a lot of charcters could have done things differently to produce a happier outcome. However, the book is over, people did that they did, and many people were to blame for many things. Let's just leave it at that.
1 comment:
There's a sense of inevitability to Antoinette's "madness" that extends beyond the fact that the ending of the novel has already been written by C. Bronte (in a literal sense, her madness *is* "inherited"--from the previous author). But the environmental factors are a crucial aspect of this "inheritance": it's not just a 19th-century view of madness as something passed on from parent to child, but the fact that Antoinette inherits the tenuous social position that her mother has left for her; she plays out a script that leads to so many echoes of her mother's situation (and both of their "fatal flaw" involves trusting romantic-seeming men who come over from England and woo them).
I'm intrigued by your comments on Christophine, and I wish you'd been able to pinpoint something in the text that leads you to believe that she plays a role in Antoinette's fate. Her suspicion of Rochester, given what she's observed in Annette's life and how things w. Mason played out, makes sense to me; and she tries very hard to warn Antoinette away from messing with the obeah stuff. Especially in her final scene, where she tears into Rochester, I see her as maybe the most reliable moral viewpoint in the whole novel, and I'm moved by her evident motherly concern for Antoinette.
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