Denial

      Working off of the idea of the lie, I feel it so creepy how Rochester is trying to erase all that there is about AntoinetteAt the very beginning, he tells of how he tries to imagine her as a beautiful English girl whenever he sees her after the marriage. Then, later in the book, he changes her name to Bertha, and does it subconsciously implying that everything about him is repelled from acknowledging Antoinette for being who she really is. He is desperate for control and steadily convincing himself out of reality and trying to reestablish a new reality on his life.  He is programmed by cultural values to deny his marriage, and he makes no effort to change his attitude.

      Rochester compares Antoinette to a doll constantly, taking away her human qualities and making her something established. A doll is a doll, it has no secrets, no surprises, and no free will. You can do whatever with a doll and not be affected by its feelings as it has none. Rochester feels very out of place in Jamaica, and feels as though he is always surrounded by lies and fiction, therefore he grasps Antoinette as something that he can control and have so stability with. The more he dehumanizes her, the more power he has, leading to the end where he looses all feeling for her and throws her, like an unwanted toy, into imprisonment for life.

      Rochester's dreamlike perception of his surroundings accent his denial and justify his willingness to see Antoinette as a lie. He sees a lie as a secret that can be held, a doll that can be hid. He sees all of this in dreamlike form where such transformations and comparisons could easily form. Rochester wants to understand Antoinette completely, he is desperate to know of all her secrets, and therefore in his mind he tries to ignore what he doesn't know, and slowly convinces himself more and more of how nothing is true. Maybe it is something from his past, from mal-upbringing or from never feeling any control over anything before that leads him to feel the need to exert power here over the only thing he actually can do it with. Subconsciously, he is a coward, and a wimp, and in a place where he has no stabilizing points, he acts without the presence of respectability.

     Overall, there is a sense of dehumanization from both parties. While Rochester takes it into his own hands to dehumanize Antoinette, his actions of doing so dehumanize him. He becomes cold and heartless as he gets angry about his situation, and the more he tries to repress Antoinette, the more he represses himself. There is yet another part in the book that may change all of this, but to me, I feel that this book is definitely headed for disaster where two heartless souls deal with their confined emotions to clash together in chaos.