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PARTISAN REVIEW
But the damage is already done: Antoinette has been contaminated by
the soiled dress, representing not only her identification with Tia but
also her family's ambiguous status and her own outcast condition as a
girl unloved by her mother, therefore dirty, damaged, and unlovable.
The relationship with Tia reaches its violent climax on the night of
the burning of Coulibri. Catching sight of Tia in the black mob,
Antoinette runs to her as if to a part of herself: "We had eaten the same
food, slept side by side, bathed in the same river. As I ran I thought, I
will live with Tia and I will be like her." Once again she tries to resolve
her divided identity by somehow fusing herself with Tia, and again this
is impossible. Tia throws a stone at her, wounding her forehead. "We
stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers.
It
was as if I saw
myself, like in a looking-glass."
For some weeks after the fire, Antoinette lies
ill
and unconscious, per–
haps signaling the onset of another kind of unconsciousness-that of
repression. When she wakes up, she has indeed lost touch with some–
thing. With the separation from Tia, she is cut off from the "blackness"
in herself-the innocent dirt and animality of childhood. The mingled
racial world in which she has grown up has included intimacy and love
as well as hatred. Now blackness and whiteness are sharply severed in
her and what survives is mutilated and incomplete.
Moreover, the wound on her forehead may also signify the transforma–
tion of puberty. According to the chronology of the novel, Antoinette is
about thirteen at this point. The bleeding wound suggests not only the sev–
erance from Tia and the childhood world of Coulibri, but also the bloody
event that marks the end of childhood for every girl. When Antoinette
regains consciousness with a bandaged head, she worries about having a
scar, but her Aunt Cora reassures her, saying,
"It
won't spoil you on your
wedding day." The illness, the blood, the bandage, the fear of bodily
imperfection, and the doubts about the wedding day-all suggest men–
struation, with its unconscious link with castration. And in fact, the first
thing Antoinette sees on waking from her illness is her cut-off braid: "I saw
my plait tied with red ribbon...
.I
thought it was a snake."
The cut-off hair also echoes another severance-that from the
mother, whose hair once enclosed the daughter in safety; now the
daughter'S hair is cut off. Antoinette's mother has broken down into
madness after the fire and the death of her son. When Antoinette visits
her, the mother flings her away, looking only for Pierre. With this
renewed rejection in favor of the brother, Antoinette's sense of insuffi–
ciency is confirmed. Involved in this damaged sense of herself is the
black girl in the dirty dress, a link that persists even in repression.
