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but of difference, of meaning itself. The ambivalence of desire has
become inseparable from racial attraction and repulsion, just as the divi–
sion within the self is experienced in racial terms as the split between
Antoinette and Tia.
In Part II of the novel, the narration passes from Antoinette to
Rochester, although the man in Rhys's novel is not Charlotte Bronte's
attractively turbulent hero, but a conventional upper-class Englishman
very like male characters in Rhys's other fiction-hypocritical, coldly
seductive, and fundamentally cruel. He is frightened of the place-"Not
only wild, but menacing"-and repelled by the people: "I wouldn't hug
and kiss them," he protests when Antoinette kisses Christophine, " I
couldn't." Significantly, he criticizes Christophine for soiling her long
dress by letting it trail on the floor: "it is not a clean habit." But despite
his inhibitions, he is aroused by his wife's beauty and sensuality: "very
soon, she was as eager for what is called loving as I was-more lost and
drowned afterwards." The metaphor of drowning recalls the under–
water somersault-"sure look like I drown dead that time"-and sug–
gests the self-a nnihilating quality of Antoinette's erotic response.
Rochester treats her with lust unmediated by tenderness: "One day
the sight of a dress she'd left lying on the bedroom floor made me
breathless and savage with desire. When I was exhausted I turned away
from her and slept, still without a word or a caress." The dress, sepa–
rated from the woman herself, is emblematic of an empty and alienated
desire.
In the honeymoon house, the couple are dangerously free. "Here I
can do as I like," says Antoinette. Increasingly they liberate the dark
undercurrents of sex, the sadistic and masochistic impulses held in its
precarious equilibrium. For Antoinette, sexual surrender merges with
the attraction to death that has haunted her since her childhood losses.
"Say die and I will die," she whispers during sex, seeming to make her–
self dependent on Rochester for her very existence, as the child once
depended on her mother. The marriage shows the deadly working of the
repetition compulsion; with her husband Antoinette experiences again
the coldness and contempt of that first love. To the girl convinced that
she is damaged and dirty, a "white nigger," contempt and abuse mean
love; they make her feel desired for what she really is. "Desire, Hatred,
Life, Death came very close in the darkness," Rochester writes. "Not
close. The same."
This strange idyll is interrupted by a letter from Daniel Cosway, a man
who claims to be the son of Antoinette's father by a black woman–
"half-way house, as we say"-and thus Antoinette's half-brother. In the
