Similarity

      While reading part three of Wide Sargasso Sea, I realized that there is a tiny similarity between Jane and Antoinette in this section. Both are forced to be in the shadows while life goes on. Although I do not remember every detail of Jane Eyre, I remember how, her being the governess of the house, she had to stay low around other people, in other words, be invisible like the servants. Antoinette is the same, except for different reasons. When she sneaks out while there is a party going on downstairs, she encounters a girl on the stairs. That girl describes Antoinette as a ghost to yet another girl. At this moment, I wanted to reread Jane Eyre to see whether there was a possibility that one of those girls could have been Jane herself.
   
     Interestingly enough, Antoinette does not recount anything that happens at Rochester's manor in reference to other people. She does not consciously go into Jane's room and rip up the veil, she doesn't set Rochester's room on fire. To her, all of the people are nonexistent, and besides Grace Pool, everyone is described at a distance. Antoinette definitely seems out of this world by the way she thinks and seems to be alienating herself more and more. In Jane Eyre, it is presented as though Bertha is a animalistic person that has a complete sense of thought, and it is thought that she knew what she was doing when she wandered the house. Jane felt as though she were followed, or that there was this monster that wanted to attack her. Curiously, Antoinette felt the same way. She recalls hearing voices and footsteps, people laughing at her. In the shadows of the house she seems to be remembering her childhood and her fears.

     Of course Antoinette and Jane are very different, but sometimes we can get just a glimpse of parallels between the two stories. In fact, if there were a third book to come out, for everything to be inline it would have to have Jane and how her fantasies and "love" with Rochester turns foul as he grows old and becomes self centered, and she realizes that she is stuck with a man that is more afraid of his own death than interested in spending his days with her, leading her to trying to leave him, he feels the same rage and sense of possession and locks her up in his castle, thus leaving two doomed souls with Bertha being the warning and Jane not following it. With this ending the picture would be complete to a three part tragedy where love is the cause of all misery.