Damaged Inner-Child: Antoinette’s Infertility
by Lawrence Harvey
As an author Jean Rhys is both subtle and meticulously calculated. Consequently her novel Wide Sargasso Sea is infinitely precise in its understated historical allusions, and many of its metonymies would be nigh incomprehensible to the commonplace reader without the aid of an extensive glossary. The novel introduces the reader to Antoinette Mason née Cosway, the essential marginalized literary character, whose ostracism is multifaceted and thoroughgoing: the descendent of slave owners in a recently emancipated region of the Caribbean, she is despised by island locals, the black West Indians, whose relatives were forced into thraldom by her family; and, born in the Caribbean she is likewise shunned by the English, of whom she says “we were not in their ranks” (WSS 9). Indeed, “they are not English or European either” thinks her unnamed husband, critical of those whites born in the West Indies. Furthermore, as a woman, Antoinette enjoys no legal privileges. Before the dawn of the 20th century marriage was a virtual enslavement of women, a state of legal bondage in which they enjoyed no rights or protection and occupied a social position “worse than that of the slaves” (footnote, WSS 66). Thus, Wide Sargasso Sea paints Antoinette into an asperous world from which she never finds relief or derives happiness. Further analysis of this book highlights the afore-mentioned multidimensional depth to Rhys’ writing, a depth that does not seem to allow for coincidental implications. This fact acknowledged, one can only deduce that the abundant imagery connoting infertility in Antoinette is deliberate. This composition seeks to prove that Rhys intended, in addition to her race and gender, a predominantly unrecognized facet to Antoinette’s reclusion: as an infertile woman, Antoinette is unable to fulfill the quintessential female role—that of the mother.
In the early pages of the novel the description Antoinette’s childhood home of Coulibri explicitly evokes the Bible, as if to ephemerally call to mind the image of a childhood paradise; Antoinette’s “garden was large and beautiful as that in the Bible”. Yet from the onset the reader learns that this paradise has been perverted, as was Eden; that “all Coulibri Estate had gone wild like the garden, gone to bush” (WSS 10-11). The metaphor of the Garden of Eden is rich in gestative symbolism, for “the Hebrew God’s first commandment to his new creations in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, was to be ‘fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth’ (Gen. 1:28)” (Call 54). Coulibri, however, elicits another myth1 with its account of “orchids [that] flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched”—the myth of Tantalus, who fed his children to the Gods of Olympus and was subsequently condemned to an eternity in Hades in which, each time he reached for fruit to eat, vines would twist out of his reach. The ideas of birth and the death of the child are thus juxtaposed even at this early stage in the novel.
Antoinette experiences a friendless childhood save for her brief relationship with Tia. However even this does not last long and ends in a scene in which Tia ridicules Antoinette for failing to turn a somersault underwater. Literary critic Elizabeth Dalton says of this attempted feat that “immersion in water, as in baptism, signifies the death of the old self and the birth of the new”, and that “if Antoinette could do the somersault… perhaps she would emerge from the pool cleansed of her alienating whiteness, reborn black like her friend” (Dalton 433). Hence, Antoinette’s inability to turn the somersault translates to her inability to be reborn black. Worthy of note at this juncture is that Antoinette is performing (or attempting to perform) an active endeavor—a somersault—in order to attain a passive goal—being reborn. If, otherwise phrased, her objective is to actively achieve a birth, is this enterprise not maternal in orientation? And thus, is not Antoinette’s a duplicitous failure? I assert that in this scene Antoinette is both the subject and the object of her misadventure: she is unable both to be reborn and to birth a black girl; thus this scene can also be interpreted as a testimony to Antoinette’s infertility.
One cannot help but also notice of Antoinette’s childhood a very fragmented and confused exposure to members of the opposite sex: Mr. Lutrell, the family’s male neighbor, commits suicide early on in the novel; their male horse is poisoned, an event which to her mother marks the true beginning of their social exclusion, their being “marooned” (WSS 10). Antoinette tells us that “all the people in my life… [were] my mother and Pierre, Christophine, Godfrey and Sass who had left us” (WSS 13). Godfrey, their old deaf servant, can hardly serve as a figure of manhood for Antoinette; and Sass, we learn, began his tenure at Coulibri “a little skeleton”, but “now he’s growing into a big strong boy and away he goes” (WSS 12). Antoinette’s childhood is also marked by the abandonment of her family by her father who, with his countless extramarital affairs and illegitimate children, seems to embody masculinity and virility in the novel. He deserts her, however, taking with him Antoinette’s sense of security.
Most noteworthy among the gelded males of Antoinette’s young life is her brother Pierre who, mentally impaired and feeble, “staggered when he walked and couldn’t speak distinctly” (WSS 10). After describing Antoinette’s “desire to resurrect the dead father… [and] the magic formula—peace, happiness, security” (Wickramagamage 32) with which, in her mind, he is associated, critic Carmen Wickramagamage goes on to say that “Pierre, Antoinette’s brother, is of course the antithesis of this… image” of manhood. Interesting conclusions can be drawn from the character of Pierre: if we subscribe, as critics have in the past2, to the theory that Antoinette’s real mother is in fact Christophine and not Annette (which is not unreasonable due to Annette’s almost complete neglect of Antoinette in favor of Pierre; and, of course, Antoinette would not be the first child of her father and a black woman), then we can infer that Annette’s one parturition is born with significant defects. Does Annette herself possess a disability in her reproductive system? This could explain her palsied son; and, if this is the case, it is not inconceivable that this maternal disability was passed down to her daughter. Daniel Cosway, in his letter to Antoinette’s unnamed husband, speaks of Annette’s affliction and says of Antoinette that “she worse than her mother” (WSS 75). Here Daniel speaks externally of Antoinette and her mother’s madness, but madness has also been a term used to describe infertility3 (interestingly, a footnote makes reference to the commonly held English belief that the tropics inspired ‘madness’ [WSS 57]; evidence exists of Caribbean diseases that cause infertility4.) Also, psychoanalyst Juliet Miller states that “dead liminal creatures can… appear as symbols of internal destruction… [for] women who cannot conceive” (Miller 50); Pierre’s death in the fire at Coulibri marks for Antoinette the destruction of her family.
Close reading of Antoinette’s demented state at the end of the novel reveals many psychological similarities to the state of infertility. Along with alluding to the link between infertility and “lack of mothering” (Miller 54), Juliet Miller’s treatise entitled Mourning the Never Born and the Loss of the Angel describes the plight of the infertile woman as being “trapped in a timeless world where mourning is not possible and as a result nothing can change”, and “experienc[ing] herself as… spiritually and psychically severely disabled… [resulting] in an inability to function on many levels” (Miller 48, 51). These symptoms correspond to Antoinette’s condition in Part III; her mind in no way accounts for the passage of time except for vague expressions such as “one morning”, “at last” and “the third time I had my dream” (WSS 107, 111). Nothing seems to change for Antoinette either. A conversation with Grace Poole reveals that she does not even believe that she has left the Caribbean and is in England:
“When we went to England,” I said.
“You fool,” she said, “this is England.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said, “and I will never believe it.” (109)
Miller’s word “trapped” also correctly describes Antoinette’s condition—confined against her will on the top floor of her husband’s estate, the mad woman locked in the attic. Miller goes on to say that in infertility “something more than the possibility of a baby has been removed… all other identifying marks are washed away” (51). We notice this phenomenon of lost identity and identifying stigmas in Antoinette when she vocalizes her sensation of anonymity, of seeing “Antoinette drifting out of the window with her scents, her pretty clothes and her looking-glass”; “Who am I?” she goes on to ask herself (WSS 107). Miller also uses the word “ghostly” to describe the infertile mental state, a word that Jane uses to describe Antoinette/Bertha in Jane Eyre. In continuing to describe the varying mental upshots of infertility Miller speaks of the tendency whereby infertile women “reactivate old losses” (Miller 52). We see this tendency in Antoinette in the dream that precedes the torching of her husband’s estate: in her dream Antoinette “ran or perhaps floated or flew5 [and] called help me Christophine help me”; and finally, before hurling herself off a balcony she calls out to Tia. These two women to whom she calls mark the most important losses in Antoinette’s life, those of her surrogate mother and only friend.
I have sought to prove through this composition by analyzing the psychological symptoms of infertility and demonstrating their relation to the text, and with close-readings of characters and scenarios, that another component to Antoinette’s marginality is her inability as a woman to give birth. If I believe that evidence to support this claim exists (and I do), this begs the important question of why. Rhys, I have avowed, achieves no implication or metaphor in this novel by accident; so, why does she make the lunatic woman from the attic in Jane Eyre infertile? What implications does this hitherto-unacknowledged side of Antoinette Mason née Cosway have in the greater scheme of postcoloniality? In my opinion, rendering Antoinette infertile consummates the circle of Antoinette’s relegation. I have already described how descendents of slave owners were despised by the West Indians in the setting of Wide Sargasso Sea, and whites born in the Caribbean were snubbed by the English; furthermore, English law made no provisions for the rights of married women, a fact which leaves Antoinette rejected by both the law and society at large. Infertility adds a biological aspect to this picture of reclusion in two ways: by this deficiency Antoinette is rendered both incapable of completing the most basic of biological functions—that of reproducing—and is left even more alone with no option of ever bearing a child to accompany her drab existence. Antoinette, socially loathed, legally enslaved, and now biologically incapable, is doomed to a life of misery, solitude and psychosis.
1 I mean no offense or disrespect in referring
to the stories of the Bible as “myths”.
2 Gunner 141
3 Maitland 5
4 http://memorias.ioc.fiocruz.br/943/3561.pdf
5 these ethereal verbs fortify the image of Antoinette
in the last stages of her life as ‘ghostly’
Works Cited