Secrets may by nature be hidden, but their presence is hinted at in their surroundings. Often, even the best-contained secrets are tinted with an aura of discomfort and laughter. But sometimes it can be hard to determine whether the uncomfortable laughter it a signal of a secret or if it is simply there, perhaps magnified by a paranoid mind. The trouble becomes, then, that if you are not “in the know” about a secret, how can you be sure that there’s truly one there? This notion of potential secrecy, I believe, is what prompts Rochester into madness in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, as he attempts to make sense of his new environment in the midst of unexplained laughter and untold stories.
Rochester is severely disoriented in Granbois. Although it is naturally beautiful, its vivid colors are surreal and intimidating in their contrast to industrial England. The unknown is suffocating and the beauty blinding.
"On one side the wall of green, on the other a steep drop to the ravine below. We pulled up and looked at the hills, the mountains and the blue-green sea. There was a soft warm wind blowing but I understood why the porter had called it a wild place. Not only wild but menacing. Those hills would close in on you. […] Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. And the woman is a stranger."
Rochester never settles into the land, though. Rather, he becomes convinced that there is something behind it all that he cannot grasp, but everyone around him has. “It was a beautiful place – wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I’d find myself thinking, ‘What I see is nothing - I want what it hides - that is not nothing.'" The most ambiguous part is that Rhys never reveals what exactly Rochester suspected the secret was, or even if a magical secret did in fact exist. Therefore it’s hard to judge Rochester as coping with unfamiliarity with paranoia versus being legitimately concerned about something in the atmosphere.
Even more, Rochester begins to associate the secrecy with Antoinette. “She trusted them and I did not," he remarks about her relationship with the people. This observation implies that Rochester senses that Antoinette understands something he is not privy to, which adds to—or perhaps results from—his feelings of alienation as the lone Englishman. It seems to Rochester that Antoinette is more closely aligned with the people there than she is with him—a feeling that causes him to envelop her into his interpretation of secrecy. Coupled with the fact that he barely knows her, Rochester drives himself mad imagining the secrets she may hide.
For this reason, Rochester feels affirmed by Daniel Cosway’s letter, which revealed bits of Antoinette’s past that Rochester hadn’t known before. “I felt no surprise,” he says. “It was if I’d expected it." After spending so much time being anxious, he was almost glad to know that his delusions were valid. But as the laughter of the servants—and even Antoinette herself—continues, his world becomes even more elusive. The most notable hint at the motives behind the laughter is given by Amelie, who laughs often. “Like Hilda she put her hand over her mouth as though she could not stop herself from laughing and walked away. Then turned and said in a very low voice, ‘I am sorry for you.’ ‘What did you say?’ ‘I don’t say nothing, master.'" I think this added mystery is what ultimately prompted Rochester to seek out Daniel Cosway. At the end of his visit with him, Daniel remarks about Antoinette,
"They fool you well about that girl. She look you straight in the eye and talk sweet talk – and it’s lies she tell you. Lies. Her mother was so. They say she worse than her mother, and she hardly more than a child. Must be you deaf you don’t hear people laughing when you marry her. Don’t waste your anger on me, sir. It’s not I fool you, it’s I wish to open your eyes."
When Antoinette tells her story for herself, Rochester still has this conversation in mind and remains unsure about what to believe. Thus the mysteries of the land become the mysteries of Antoinette.
Finally, Rochester goes mad with the notion of secrecy. The ambiguous nature of laughter causes him to worry so much that he becomes angry, and the way he speaks in his possessive anger towards the end of Part Two illustrates his insanity.
"So I shall never understand why, suddenly, bewilderingly, I was certain that everything I had imagined to be true was false. False. Only the magic and the dream are true - all the rest’s a lie. Let it go. Here is the secret. Here.
(But it is lost, that secret, and those who know it cannot tell it.)
Not lost. I had found it in a hidden place and I’d keep it, hold it fast. As I’d hold her."
The madness comes from his lack of control. Rochester’s prideful desire to be on top is thrown to the ground by foreign laughter. So he goes mad trying to regain control, leading to him renaming his wife to recreate her personality, and, when that fails to satisfy, locking her away in the attic for eternity.
"I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it. [...]
Very soon she’ll join all the others who know the secret and will not tell it. Or cannot."
Rochester’s lack of ability to discover this potential secret of the land leads to his own insanity, as his confusion transforms into hatred and he strives to maintain power. I think Jean Rhys’s novel revolves around secrets that cannot be touched and the ambiguity of knowledge. While the novel hints toward Antoinette’s insanity, it is impossible to hold down whether it was caused by her secrets or by Rochester’s perception of secrets. But even as he pushes Antoinette into an isolated insanity, Rochester pushes himself into a madness of his own.
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