Connection Lost. Please Reconnect

     In Wide Sargasso Sea, we see that near the end of part two, the one thing that really tips the scale from potential love is the action of two forms of Obeah on each other. Antoinette poisons Rochester's drink with a potion to give him a lust for her, and Rochester works to change her name to be more "English." This has been mentioned in class already, but this occurred right after she and Rochester were about to start connecting.

     This connection appears through the fact that they both have similar relations with other people. Rochester has been unloved by his father in favor of the other son, who also inherits all of the land. Rochester is given none of the estate, and so has to find power elsewhere, as well as make it look like he actually succeeded in gaining power, rather than just having it fall in his lap.

     Antoinette also has not been given much love throughout her life. She grew up surrounded by people who hated her, a mother who cared more about her son than Antoinette, to the point of ministering to him rather than comforting her daughter. When Coulibri burns down, her only friend denies her with a rock to the face, and her mother dies, Antoinette is lost trying to find a physical connection with someone, and never finds it.

     They also are both lost socially whilst in Jamaica. Antoinette has always been separated from the powerfully rich white landowners there, and is unable to connect socially with the black population either, due to the fact that they all used to be slaves under her father's plantation. Similarly, Rochester is plunked down in Jamaica with no connections to anyone, because he is an outsider. He looks and tries to act like a rich stereotypical white man, and so won't try to connect with the locals, and is too far detached from the elites to be much of anything to them. Furthermore, the fact that he is disconnected from the time stream they all have been living in, he always thinks he's missing something.

     This looks like a match made in Heaven, with two people who have been denied by their families and are disconnected by the situation they find themselves in suddenly getting married to each other, but there is a problem: neither is willing to admit their feelings to the other. Antoinette never has had a person in her life to talk to about important things, really, and so doesn't feel comfortable doing so with Rochester, who she hardly knows. Rochester is playing the part of the rich white man, and so won't share his past experiences with someone so low on his spectrum (technically), and so they are both silent.

     That is, until someone else provides the information Rochester was lacking, which gives a weighted view that puts stress on their relationship. This leads to Rochester making Antoinette worried about their relationship, the thing she prizes above all others. Instead of talking and making up, the limited information they both have keeps them separate, which eventually leads to the end of this book.

     With the idealized views they had constructed of this relationship (Rochester of an estate that he has power over, and Antoinette of a loving relationship), to watch it crumble away is distressing, and so they both turn to forms of "Obeah" to reassert their view: Antoinette obtains a drug to make Rochester love her, and Rochester changes her name, asserting his dominance over her. Through this, they inadvertently create a permanent break between them, which could have been easily avoided if they just talked it out, like Christophene had said from the very beginning.