438
PARTISAN REVIEW
letter and a later visit, Daniel informs Rochester about Antoinette's
family-"the bad blood she have from both sides." The story Daniel
tells is one of drunkenness, miscegenation, and inherited madness-in
other words, the standard nineteenth-century view of the "degeneracy"
of the white Creole. Antoinette's mother is "a raging lunatic and worse
besides"; her father was "a shameless man," with innumerable slave
concubines and half-caste children. (Although Antoinette later disputes
these allegations, they accord with gossip she overheard as a child.) As
Rochester leaves him, Daniel says "Give my love to your wife-my sis–
ter....Pretty face, soft skin, pretty colour-not yellow like me. But my
sister just the same."
Outside Daniel's house, Rochester is transfixed by something he sees:
"a black and white goat...was staring at me and for what seemed min–
utes I stared back into its slanting yellow-green eyes." Symbol of lust,
the goat with its mixed colors seems to stand for the sexual license of
the men of Cosway's class and for the mixed race they produced. Their
offspring can be of any color, as Daniel suggests: yellow like him, brown
like the beautiful servant Amelie, white like the red-haired boy, perhaps
even the "pretty colour" of Antoinette. This thought has already
occurred fleetingly to Rochester: "Long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of
pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European
either." Now he notices a resemblance between Antoinette and AmeIie:
"Perhaps they are related," he thinks. "It's possible, it's even probable
in this damned place."
A similar suspicion is adumbrated in
Jane Eyre
in the description of
Mrs. Rochester. Although the race of "the Creole" is never specified, the
lurid glimpses of her are pointedly suggestive: Jane sees "a discoloured
face...a savage face," "fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments,"
"lips swelled and dark." Rochester alludes to "the risks, the horrors, the
loathings of incongruous unions." It seems unlikely that he would
knowingly have married a woman of mixed race; the implication, there–
fore, is that even within the white Creole there lurks a germ of black–
ness, acquired through some secret impurity of the bloodline or
perhaps, magically, through long proximity.
In Rhys's novel, Daniel Cosway's revelations cause Rochester to shun
his wife's bed, driving Antoinette to seek an Obeah love charm from
Christophine. The aphrodisiac works all too well, leaving Antoinette
with bruises and a torn nightdress. But she is evidently not put off, quite
the contrary: Christophine tells Rochester that what happened "make
her love you more." For Antoinette, violence is intimacy, a confirmation
of her own sense of herself as damaged, soiled, a "white nigger." But
