I don't think marrying someone solely for their money is ever going to end well but I guess that's just my opinion. When we discovered that the only reason he traveled to the West Indies was to secure the wealth of a single woman it really kinda hurt my sympathy for Rochester. My view of the situation went from the story a man that was getting picked on by the people of this community during his honeymoon to the story of a man getting what he deserved.
Now there was a moment during the second part where he goes from just being with her for the money to trying to connect with Antoinette. She's explaining to him everything that she had to go through before they met and its nice because we see Rochester try to comfort her (even if it was with a strange song). This little bit of compassion between the characters is immediately ruined when Rochester has an affair that was completely uncalled for. When you get drugged the first thing you do shouldn't be to run off with the nearest maid. Also I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that drugging your man is on the Cosmopolitan's Top 100 sex tips.
At this point my feelings for these two is like being on a roller coaster, it has its ups and downs and by the end of the whole ordeal I'm left confused and looking up asking "What just happened?". The only person character that comes to mind that wasn't driving me crazy by the end of the novel was Christophine who tried to split Antoinette's inheritance 50/50 and tried to convince Antoinette that drugs aren't good (stay in school). I enjoyed this novel as a whole because using two narrators really lets us get a different perspective that would've been entirely different books on their own. Although there was one thing that I didn't like but can't change, which was the ending. Antoinette was doing alright on her own just to have everything flipped upside down by a gold-digging British man and nothing seems to really happen to him at the end of all this. I don't think its fair but I guess its the feeling of injustice that I had which made this novel so compelling.
I just felt very sympathetic towards Antoinette because she is just a product of her troubled past and current environment, and she's trying to just find some sort of stability in her life. I share your feelings about Rochester, I disliked him more and more as the novel progressed by how badly he treated Antoinette. He is just so selfish from the start and he later starts acting very bitterly towards her and makes some horrible decisions about her future. Overall, the entire novel is a really well-written tragedy, and I ended up feeling bad for both Antoinette and Rochester.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure Antoinette would agree that she's "doing allright on her own" before Rochester enters the picture. In her own account, she "never wanted to live" before she fell in love with him, and this happiness is so strange and scary to her because she feels it can be taken away at his discretion. It's true that in the end she'd be better off if she'd never met him, and we can imagine an alternate universe where she and Sandi are happy together (they sure seem to get along, and they actually have a lot in common, from what we can tell). But they're both caught up in this social world where the marriage seems like a necessity.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you super hard, in the sense that almost all of my sympathies were with Antoinette. I could understand the feeling of isolation and alienation that Rochester was feeling, but the whole possessive, abusive, kidnapping thing he pulled toward the end really kind of countered that. Obviously, this book takes an incredibly dark turn down an already dark path, so it's hard to say what was right or wrong for me at the end, because I would have no idea how to react in that situation, so who am I to say anything about how Antoinette and Rochester dealt with it? This sense of ambiguity reminds me also of the difficulty of saying "is Antoinette really mad? Isn't Rochester too?" As well, things become really blurred for me, because it's hard to say who is right or wrong based on the narrative perspective. But, all in all, I agree with you: Antoinette seems overwhelmingly like the one we should be sympathetic with, not Rochester.
ReplyDeleteThe Roch-toinette ship wasn't really going to sail in my opinion (sail across the sea? get it?). I guess knowing that this novel was sorta fanfic from Jane Eyre like we discussed in class doomed it for me from the start? Nothing for any of these characters was going to end well, almost like the way a spoiler can ruin a show. Oh well.
ReplyDeletePretty much any time Antoinette or Rochester made a decision in the last two parts of the book, it made me want to bang my head on my desk and yell at them for how stupid they were being. However, I still have some sympathy for Antoinette because she was making a real effort to connect with Rochester and make her situation work, and she almost succeeded (immediately before drugging him). Rochester, on the other hand, just completely gave up and purposely started acting abusively toward Antoinette.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with all of your points about Rochester, but I will add that I honestly felt very little sympathy for either character in the novel. While Rochester's decision to travel to the West Indies and marry Antoinette was questionable in the first place, every time he was faced with adversity he seemed to make the wrong decision. Likewise, when Antoinette was struggling with her relationship with her husband, rather than talk it out with him (although admittedly she did try this to a certain degree), she went into an alcoholic haze and ultimately drugged Rochester. For me, this was a novel without sympathetic characters, but still a very interesting read.
ReplyDelete