Reading the beginning of Wide Sargasso Sea is like stepping into a corner of Eden. There is a "tree of life" blossoming in the overgrown garden at Coulibri Estate. "It had gone wild," we learn, but why wouldn't Eden be wild and untamed, preserved by Nature? "Orchids flourished out of reach for some reason not to be touched. One was snaky looking" (19). Placed side by side, the latter description seems to be foreshadowing an unfortunate end. Despite its sinister flaws, the garden nevertheless strikes me as an ideal home for Antoinette. She lives in Jamaica where she is hated, yet also where she thrives and loves. It is her home, the only one she physically knew. She "loved it because I [she] had nothing else to love" and called it "the most beautiful place in the world" (130). But like Adam and Eve, she and her family is chased out of paradise without a choice.
When she marries Mr. Rochester, she introduces him to her home with obvious affection for the place. She "picked up a large shamrock-shaped leaf to make a cup and drank. Then she picked up another leaf, folded it and brought it to me. 'Taste. This is mountain water'" (71). Then a few days after, she tells her husband where to find the bathing pool; "there are two pools, one we call the champagne pool because it has a waterfall... underneath is the nutmeg pool, that's brown and shaded by a big nutmeg tree" (86). But Mr. Rochester does not fit in and he even says that he feels "that this place is my [his] enemy and on your [Antoinette's] side" (129).
Although I haven't finished the rest of this novel, I have read and enjoyed Jane Eyre. I know the inevitable fate that awaits "Bertha," and compared to her life in the imperfect Eden, it is a frightening future.
1 comment:
Yes--note the similar tone surrounding Antoinette's descriptions of the garden, with its attractive beauty and inherent undertone of menace, and the way she describes Christophine's room. For her, even the things that make her feel safest and most secure have an undercurrent that's darker and more threatening. But in all, the affection in these moments in clear simply in the poetry of the narration.
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