Antoinette In Charlotte Bronte's The Awakening

Antoinette ‘belongs to no one and belongs nowhere’ and as she does not fall into the category of the coloniser or the colonised, she attempts to mimic both. She cannot be accepted into either the black or white society, as symbolically shown when Tia steals her dress, and she is forced to fit into one that ‘tore as [she] forced it on’ (p. 11), and again when Rochester notices that the white dress he ‘had admired […] had slipped untidily over one shoulder and seemed too large for her.’ (p. 80) The dresses represent the category she is attempting to mimic, but neither fits. She is too big to fit into the ‘white nigger’ category, and too small to fill the dress of a white woman. Julliet MacCannell believes that white woman already,
‘imply …show more content…
This is why the dress no longer fits her when her only connection with England, Rochester, ceases to want her. The scenery of Dominica does not allow her to merge harmlessly, because she is not from its soil either. She tells Rochester that the nature is ‘not for you and not for me. It has nothing to do with either of us’ (p. 82) implying that neither belongs there: they are not autochthonous. When Amélie sings about Antoinette being a white cockroach, she tells Rochester,
‘That’s me. That’s what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders. And I’ve heard English women call us white niggers. So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I even born at all.’ (p. …show more content…
Teresa F. O’Connor has debated that Antoinette’s madness actually ‘protects her from Rochester’, which could be because she is no longer a mimic. Her madness turns her into the ‘menace’ of Bhabha’s theory, as she becomes a threat to Rochester. He did not succeed in overpowering her by sleeping with the servant Amélie, in fact, after the incident, Antoinette flees to Christophine’s and according to Moira Ferguson, ‘commandeers the narrative, wrests it from Rochester […] Her alliance with Christophine silences the new colonizer.’ Antoinette has power over Rochester in Jamaica; his attempts to punish her lead to the alliance she longed for with the colonised. MacCannell has also commented that Annette and Antoinette’s ‘madness confirms […] the alignment of the interests of the Euro-woman with the colonized rather than the colonizer.’ Rochester tells the reader ‘Christophine would take good care of Antoinette… they would go to Martinique. Then to other places.’ Christophine could save Antoinette from colonial authority. When Antoinette is at Christophine’s she abruptly realises, ‘this is my place and this is where I belong and this is where I wish to stay.’ (p. 68) She has found her