“As for the happiness I gave her, that was worse than nothing. I did not love her. I was thirsty for her, but that is not love. I felt very little tenderness for her, she was a stranger to me, a stranger who did not think or feel as I did” (Rhys 55).
There are several instances in Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, in which the Englishman who will soon marry Antoinette, the white Creole protagonist, is in cognitive dissonance regarding her displaced identity as a white European raised in the Carribean. He describes how he merely plays a part in the romancing of Antoinette. He has a firm understanding of his role as well as Antoinette’s empty relation to him, but all his thoughts are self-contained and deeply internalized:
She never had anything to do with me at all. Every movement I made was an effort of will and sometimes I wondered that no one noticed this. I would listen to my own voice and marvel at it, calm, correct but toneless, surely. But I must have given a faultless performance. If I saw an expression of doubt or curiosity it was on a black face not a white one.” (45)
He clearly has made a representation of Antoinette outside of his own inner reality and from that forceful rupture, is merely going through the motions of a lover. He “understands” her mere traces of human affectations only through her “black face.” He has internally displaced her out of his realm of “love” and finds it perfectly apt to merely treat her as a character in his performance of a self-created and false reality. He merely sees Antoinette as an accessory and means of sorts for the sake of his own “thirst.” In his mind, he is allowed to do this because of the fact of her identity and all the social connotations associated with it. Antoinette can intuitively sense this robbing of her “self” by her lack of trust in him and even pointing out directly to him that he doesn’t know anything about her. She can sense the distance and artificiality of her relation to him even when he reassures her with loving words.
In his essay, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Stuart Hall explains the traumatic nature of “the colonial experience” (225) as the way in which black experiences were under the dominant powers of representation not only in an explicit manner but by their ability to make black people see and experience themselves as “Other.” He explains that they subjected them to specific categories of knowledge, but even worse by an internal rather than external manner. He explains, “It is quite another thing to subject them to that ‘knowledge’, not only as a matter of imposed will and domination, by the power of inner compulsion and subjective con-formation to the norm” (226). The Englishman clearly subjects Antoinette to this internalized power dynamic, without caring at all what that truly is doing to her and the consequences of his actions.
While I agree that Rochester in his dialogue with himself puts Antoinette into this space of Otherness, I don’t believe that it is within the same context to which Hall writes. That is to say, I don’t think that he subjected her to her own otherness explicitly. What I believe Hall was getting at was the ways in which Whites made black understand that they were not white and those ways may not have been explicit but were continuously implied before internalized. Hall’s subjugation to knowledge of otherness would fall more in line with what Antoinette experienced with the white cockroach song and not necessarily with Rochester. I say that because Rochester never outwardly disregards Antoinette as other, nor does he continuously remind her of her caribbean heritage. He often recounts how his demeanor of loving husband was a flawless presentation which makes it difficult for me to see that his actions would fall under the same category to which Hall speaks.