Repression: That's Obeah Too

Yet one day when I was waiting there, I was suddenly very much afraid. The door was open to the sunlight, someone was whistling near the stables, but I was afraid. I was certain that hidden in the room (behind the old black press?) there was a dead man’s dried hand, white chicken feathers, a cock with its throat cut, dying slowly, slowly. Drop by drop the blood was falling into a red basin and I imagined I could hear it. No one had ever spoken to me about obeah — but I knew what I would find if I dared to look. Then Christophine came in smiling and pleased to see me. Nothing alarming ever happened, and I forgot, or told myself I had forgotten.

(Rhys, 13)

As elsewhere in Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette narrates her expedition into Christophine’s room as a sort of lucid dream. While her description is reliable to an extent, it is tainted by her ‘certainty’ of obeah trappings lurking just out of sight, unperceivable and yet apparent to her mind’s eye in visceral and gory detail. While these images are not real in the conventional sense of the word, the fact that Antoinette is determined to forget, or more specifically repress her fantasies lends them even more credence later on. Freud has it that repressed memories have a seemingly untraceable effect on conscious thought. Thus by repressing her seemingly unfounded fears now, Antoinette retains their power to affect her later perceptions, while making them invisible to further scrutiny.

Antoinette’s husband plays a similar game later in the book. He receives two letters from Daniel Cosway, the first of which he mirthfully denies, but keeps in his pocket – hiding or repressing it – and the second of which he verbally denounces to Baptiste, refusing to acknowledge its possible contents. When actually meeting Daniel, the husband interrupts the man’s allegations against his wife by making for the door, and leaves without responding to the man’s claims. While a later internal monologue shows the husband accepting the notion that he has been duped in his marriage, it never addresses Daniel’s allegations of Antoinette’s promiscuity, further suggesting that these have been forced from his consciousness. While Daniel’s words “Give your love to your wife – my sister . . . you are not the first to kiss her pretty face,” (Rhys, 79) simply prompt the husband to leave and avoid facing this fear, the form they take upon resurfacing, “Give your wife my sister a kiss from me. Love her as I did – oh yes I did. How can I promise you that?” (Rhys, 102) show that while he has done his best to repress this fear, this has caused him to lose sight of the truth, and amplify his fear into a phantasm of devastating proportions further leading to his frightening conclusion, “She thirsts for anyone – not for me” (Rhys, 107).

It should be pointed out that while Antoinette’s fear of Christophine’s obeah practice is, at the point where the above excerpt is introduced, based purely on speculation, her fear does turn out to be true. This plays off yet another motif of the novel, in that the characters of Wide Sargasso Sea tend to live up to the very worst of the expectations placed on them: Antoinette suspects Christophine of being an obeah woman and this is revealed to be true, Aunt Cora fears Antoinette’s husband will mistreat her after taking her money and he does, and Antoinette’s husband fears his wife has slept with Sandi and others before driving her to do that very thing. This propensity for fatalistic prophecy hangs strongly over the book, and is related to the idea of obeah. In the mind of Antoinette’s husband, obeah is itself related to the poison or impurity that has entered their relationship, while Antoinette sees her husband's ability to manipulate her as a form of the same thing. “You’re trying to turn me into someone else, calling me by another name,” she tells him, “I know, that’s obeah too” (Rhys, 95) and this foreshadows not only the ultimate fulfillment of her husband’s fears, but also her transformation into the Bertha of Jane Eyre. In actual fact, both Antoinette and her husband have been poisoned by their own fears and beliefs of the other, this is what causes their relationship to shrivel, and fall apart.

By repressing fears, as Antoinette does in the above passage, the characters of Wide Sargasso Sea validate those fears. These function like a poison or black magic, and once implanted below the surface of the dreamlike narrative, spread and devour the characters they possess. On the slippery slope created by their own denial, Antoinette and her husband, cannot help but become Bertha Mason and Edward Rochester respectively. Their future has, after all, been pre-written.

Cited: Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. London: Penguin, 1966.