I'll keep you safe in my attic.

Wrapping up Wide Sargasso Sea, I feel an overwhelming surge of sympathy for Antoinette. Her humanity and sanity have been reduced physically to shrivers. And she is no longer Antoinette, but another. She is chained legally yet unwillingly to a gentleman who parades off to France to make merry with prostitutes. There is nothing left for her in this life except memories. Her caretakers - and I use that term lightly - do not care for her. The kind and understanding Mrs. Fairfax (or Mrs. Eff as she is called in this novel) we admired in Jane Eyre appear here to be entirely biased and narrow-minded. She calls Mr. Rochester "gentle, generous, brave," and scorns Antoinette. "He has grey in his hair and misery in his eyes. Don't ask me to pity anyone who had a hand in that" (Rhys 178). Yet the reader is very much like a Mrs. Fairfax to Antoinette. We have seen her struggle through her miserable childhood, and we have observed her own acts of humanity. We know her trouble with an unsympathetic mother and a hostile world. And most of all, we know her reluctance to marry Mr. Rochester.

For me, the moment when she attempts to back out of the upcoming nuptials is a testament to her own sanity. Somewhere perhaps in her subconscious, she knows that this union will bring nothing but trouble. It was Mr. Rochester who drags her into this marriage with well-placed words of cajolery, and by doing so, he has assumed a responsibility to fulfill the promises he made to Antoinette. "When you are my wife there would not be any more reason to be afraid," he tells her, "I'll trust you if you'll trust me" (Rhys 79). He sure kept her safe, locked away in an attic in the middle of England. Some stubborn defenders of Rochester will argue that Antoinette is safe and alive, and he ultimately will rescue her from the burning fire. But why couldn't he have just let her go? Christophine even offers to take her off his hands and Antoinette too wishes she could leave and never bother him again. It does not make sense to argue that Rochester has pride and refuses to return to England as the gentleman scorned by a Creole girl  for he returns to his homeland pretending elaborately to be a bachelor. So why can't he let her go? Why bring her here to a miserable home even he flees from to make her suffer? By forcing Antoinette in an attic where she is cut off from everything she knew and loved, he has become the worst of villains and the most terrible of tyrants.