DALTON
439
Rochester, horrified by what he has discovered about himself, takes
revenge on his wife by going to bed with the servant who resembles her.
The next morning, looking at Amelie, he thinks, "Impossible. And her
skin was darker, her lips thicker than I had thought."
Amelie is another of Antoinette's dark doubles, and Rochester's
ambivalence toward her parallels his feelings for his wife. He is repelled
by the idea that Antoinette might have the fateful drop of black blood;
yet unbeknownst to him, the love charm that excites him comes out of
the heart of blackness-the hut in the forest where the "blue-black"
Christophine does her Obeah magic.
Rochester's mingled repulsion and attraction for both Amelie and his
wife echo Antoinette's own conflicted feelings about the possibility of
blackness in herself: she both wants to be black and fears that in fact she
might be. This paradox in turn grows out of ambivalence toward the
elements represented for Antoinette, and indeed more generally for the
Western imagination, by blackness: sex, dirt, animality, both the vitality
and the violence of nature. The fact that these are largely projections of
the content of the unconscious itself does not diminish their power-on
the contrary. Blackness and all it represents is both frightening and irre–
sistible. In his encounter with Amelie, perhaps even in his relationship
with Antoinette, Rochester is tasting the guilty pleasures of old Mr.
Cosway and the other slave-owners with their concubines: the forbid–
den fruit in the West Indian paradise is interracial sex.
All these strands of race and sex are tied together in one powerful
scene involving Antoinette's mother, and thus Antoinette herself. In the
series of doubles embodying the different aspects of Antoinette's frag–
mented being, the most important is her mother, whose name–
Annette-resembles her daughter'S, and whose fate-drunkenness,
madness, confinement-prefigures Antoinette's. In Daniel Cosway's
story, the mother is "a raging lunatic and worse besides"-the "worse
besides" evidently something so shameful that even he is unwilling to
name it. On the night of the love charm, however, Antoinette tells
Rochester the story of her mother's final degradation.
After the fire and the death of Pierre, Mr. Mason put the mother in
the care of a colored couple. Antoinette goes to their house one day and
hears crying; thinking her mother is being hurt, she runs onto the
veranda and sees her mother inside: "I remember the dress she was
wearing-an evening dress cut very low, and she was barefooted. There
was a fat black man with a glass of rum in his hand. He said 'Drink it
and you will forget.' She drank it without stopping." As Antoinette
watches, the man lifts her mother up and kisses her. "I saw his mouth
