Wide Sargasso Sea Love Quotes

At the convent, Antoinette questions the overwhelming emphasis on happiness as possible only in the afterlife – i.e., after death, in heaven.

As part of her religious education, Antoinette hears a lot of stories about young maidens who choose a life "married" to their God as opposed to hot young men. These stories reinforce what she learned from her mother's unhappy marriage to Mr. Mason: romantic love isn't possible, and sexual desire can only corrupt and degrade.

We feel compelled to repeat here that maybe Rochester isn't such a terrible guy. (Doesn't really help the novel if he's just a one-sided, flat-out-mean villain, right?) In an honorable mood, Rochester touches on the one thing that Antoinette and he both need if their marriage is to survive: mutual trust. Of course, the rest of the novel is just a long series of betrayals, but at least he made an effort.

Antoinette and Rochester's sex talk might seem weird and more than a little morbid, but they're playing on a literary tradition of using death as a metaphor for orgasm. (See "Shout Outs," Othello.) But Rochester here is careful to distinguish between love and sex, "what's called loving," and furthermore, between his way of "dying" and hers. It seems that his way of dying is sex, but Antoinette's words seems to indicate that she associates dying with happiness. In contrast to the convent, where happiness is associated with chastity, Antoinette is experimenting with happiness as sexual desire. But with death as the dominant metaphor, neither Rochester nor Antoinette seem to have a particularly appealing attitude toward sex.

Really, what's there to say? Christophine is just uttering one of those clichés that are still around because they have a tiny kernel of truth. You know, the "rules," playing hard-to-get, "he's just not into you," etc. But Christophine is also touching on here the basic problem with the way Rochester's desire works – he seeks to own things, to possess Antoinette. Once she's his, he loses interest because he doesn't need to pursue her anymore.

In one of his moments of tenderness, Rochester brings up an interesting question: how much does Antoinette contribute to the situation? Without a doubt, locking up a woman in your attic is a pretty extreme and degrading thing to do, but isn't drugging your husband kind of a no-no? Just as Christophine said, explaining things to Rochester seems to have softened him up – he even uses that word, "happy," that Antoinette's been obsessing over for the entire novel. But perhaps Antoinette was just so convinced of Rochester's malevolent intentions that she couldn't help but drug him? Then why did Christophine give Antoinette the obeah powder in the first place? This passage brings up all kinds of questions about Antoinette's and Christophine's motivations.

It's interesting that Antoinette and Rochester never express their love to each other, and Antoinette is more ready to express her love for a place than for a person (see our discussion of Quote #1 in "Identity.") But we also have to wonder how different Antoinette's hatred is from her love for Rochester. She drugged him before he betrayed her with Amélie, just on the mere suspicion that he might leave her. Who needs love like that?

As with Antoinette, Rochester's love doesn't seem to be too different from his hate. For Rochester, both emotions seem to be essentially possessive, appropriative emotions: he wants to own her completely, and her fortune and her body are not enough. He has to own her entire sense of self, but to do that, he has to destroy her sanity.

Here we get some insight into how love and hate can be so closely intertwined for Rochester. If he seeks to own Antoinette body and soul, it's to fill a void within himself, his "thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it." Just as Tia indicated for Antoinette what she had lost (a concrete racial identity) before she had found it, Antoinette indicates for Rochester something critical to the way he thinks of himself, something that he didn't know he lacked until he met her. Now what that something might be is a huge question that he doesn't seem to answer or be able to answer, mired as he is in all those "mad conflicting emotions." But even though Rochester is repulsed by Antoinette, he still needs her as a reminder of what that something is. Confusing as this all is, it partly explains why he doesn't just throw her out and washes his hands of her altogether.

Antoinette describes her last kiss with Sandi Cosway. We never really get to know Sandi in the novel, but in the few instances we do see him, he seems to be a presence that offers Antoinette security, safety – well, happiness, really. So why didn't she run away with him?