Antoinette and Madness

        One of the themes that is really prevalent throughout Wide Sargasso Sea is the question of craziness and what it means for someone to be crazy. Antoinette’s mother, and later Antoinette herself face the question of whether they are crazy or if the environment around them has driven them into acting the way they do. The question of what makes a person crazy and why they act in certain ways is still a mystery, and has a great impact on the way the world works today. James Holmes, the shooter during the Dark Knight Rises shooting in Colorado was almost placed on a mental illness hold, but because the case was borderline, the doctors let him free thinking that confining him would only make it worse. This example, and many others show just how complicated this topic is, and how delicate the situation can be. Nature versus nurture has always been a topic that creates controversy, and in this case we can see quite clearly that while Rochester seems to think that it is natural for Antoinette to be crazy because her mother was the same way, Christophine seems to think that Annette and Antoinette acted mad because they were driven to madness by the way they were treated.

         If we look at Antoinette’s actions from an outsider’s perspective, there are countless examples where one could draw the conclusion that she is a little bit insane. Her spiking Rochester’s drink seems like a desperate and insane thing to do, well meaning, but also hopelessly out of touch with the real situation. At the end of the book she is obviously going mad, and other characters who don’t know her story would see just a woman who seems out of place and doesn’t fit in with society. It’s telling that the others describe Antoinette as fierce among other things, which seems to be so far off from the Antoinette that narrates the first section. Fierce is the last thing I think of to characterize Antoinette. Yet, despite the way the others in England react to her, since we are given her whole story, it makes more sense to feel sympathy for her. I lean towards Christophine’s side in the debate between nature and nurture, because it seems that Antoinette is driven mad by her neglectful husband and years in the attic rather than that she is inherently mad to begin with. Since we know her story, we can see what Antoinette has been through, and for her to be taken away from everything she is familiar with, including Christophine, who is so critical to her childhood, is huge. Additionally, she not only has been taken away from familiar surroundings, she is placed in the care of servants and never sees the man who brought her to England, and doesn’t even have a window in her room. I definitely think that overall Rochester is presented as a villain and that his actions drove Antoinette to madness more than Antoinette was destined for madness.