Dear Reader, I Didn’t Marry Him

by Kathleen Williams Renk

part 1

In the end, you expected me to marry him, didn’t you, since that’s the convention of Victorian novels that must act as if they were Shakespearean comedies, where Rosalind and Orlando are wed and all’s well that ends well? It’s a tidy package and satisfying to some, but I didn’t wish to comply with the author, so I argued with her.

“Why must I marry him? He feigns interest in my art and condescends to me. He treats me like his possession. Even when he suggests I am his equal, he belittles me.”

“You must marry either him or St. John Rivers; otherwise, no one will publish my novel,” Miss Brontë replied.

I told her that I did wish for her book to be published, for she allowed me to voice our dissatisfaction with women’s lot, how we don’t wish to knit stockings, sew French lace, or make puddings all day. How we wish to exercise our faculties and imaginations. How we desire the freedom to learn, to travel, to be considered complete human beings. Her novel’s conclusion, where I would marry Rochester, could not supersede my own desires.

I genuinely did not wish to marry Rochester, just as I did not wish to be his mistress. You see, I foresaw Mr. Mill’s argument about marriage and knew that marriage for women is a catastrophe. And even though Miss Brontë planned to emasculate her “hero,” intending to blind him like Samson, I wasn’t satisfied with her diminishment of him. I also didn’t care for the way she made me refer to his wife Bertha as if she were a rabid dog; I disliked the way Miss Brontë refused to recognize female sisterhood. So, it was necessary for me to escape the pages of her novel.

What if I told you that I returned to Thornfield Hall not to save Rochester but to save Bertha? What if I told you that I came back to help Bertha escape the hellish prison that Rochester built for her in his Great House attic? What if I told you that Bertha was the part of me that I kept bottled up, ever since the horrific night in the Red Room when Mrs. Reed terrorized me?

I had managed to sequester Bertha the entire time I was at Lowood, but when I paced Thornfield Hall’s third floor after I lamented woman’s lot, I heard someone laugh in a maniacal way. Even though the laughter frightened me, I knew then that I needed to release my hidden self.

Miss Brontë erred when she assumed that Rochester telepathically called me back to him. No, it was Bertha who preternaturally cried out, who beseeched me as a fellow female to rescue her from her prison and from Charlotte’s iteration of a racist stereotype. It was Bertha who made me confront my own hidden rage.

Bertha confided, “I’m not a Hottentot Venus, as Rochester claimed. In fact, I never wished to have sexual congress with him, for I did not love him but loved another back home in Dominica. I did not wish to marry Rochester and nearly didn’t. And later my nurse and I used obeah magic to try to poison him. But unfortunately, he recovered.

“I loathed Rochester as much as he hated me, for he had called me an intellectual pygmy, but I was as well read as he. And even though he thought he was the victim of patriarchy, being forced to marry me to acquire my fortune, I was equally the victim, for I had no choice in my marriage partner.

“So, when I returned to Rochester’s Bluebeard lair, I snuck back in just as Bertha was about to set her prison on fire. She held a flambeau, and was wearing a red dress, the color of a tropical sunset.

“Somehow you heard my cries. I tried to warn you that, if you married Edward, you would end up like me. I rent your wedding veil as a caveat.”

I noted her dark beauty, which contrasted with the creature that I saw in my bedroom, someone I had mistakenly believed was a vampire. “I recall that night. At first, I thought it a nightmare, but in the morning, I found my veil torn in two.”

“My warning worked?”

“I did not marry him. I hated the way he diminished me by calling me his sprite and fairy. I am not that. I am a flesh and blood woman.”

“As I am, even though he treated me like an animal. He treated his dog Pilot better than me. What’s your name?”

“Jane Eyre.”

“I am Antoinette.”

“You’re not Bertha.”

“No, that’s what the fool called me, for he wished to stamp out my French and Creole heritage and make me English. He tried to make me someone else. I know that’s obeah magic too.”

After I remarked about the loveliness of her true name, I advised her to put down the torch, but then it occurred to me that she was completing what she had been trying to do when she set Rochester’s bed afire. Even though I don’t condone violence, I realized that in attempting to burn down the Great House, she was freeing herself while searching for the warmth of her Caribbean sun; even though the sun shines in England, it is never warm.

Nonetheless, I said, “Antoinette, there is no need to destroy this place, is there?”

And she quickly responded, “There is every need. It was my prison and yours. I detested this place that was supposed to be my home. Please, you must help me destroy it.”

“If you come with me, I will.”

“Where are we going?”

“I am taking you home,” I replied as I took the torch from her hand and then grabbed her around the waist.

She grinned and fell into my arms. “To Dominica? You’re taking me home?”

I nodded.

“Bless you, Jane Eyre.”

Then, united in our rage, we lit the curtains in her attic. We felt the warmth of the fire as we ran down the stairs and out the front door. On that way, we fetched Mrs. Poole, Mrs. Fairchild, and Adèle, my pupil and Rochester’s daughter by a French dancer.

Then Antoinette and I watched as Thornfield Hall burned. We later learned from Mrs. Fairchild that we incidentally disabled our captor, the good Mr. Rochester, just as Miss Brontë planned.

After we escaped the novel and when we revealed our plan, Mrs. Poole was glad that her prisoner was free, but she needed to find other employment and did not desire to go with us to Dominica. Mrs. Fairchild and Adèle said that they would rather travel to Paris, for Adèle greatly desired to be a dancer like her mother, so we said au revoir.

I held onto Adèle for the longest time, telling her to be a brave girl and to not let a man take advantage of her joie de vivre. She promised that she would and that she’d write and tell me about her dance career. “I will be a brilliant dancer, mon enseignante. You’ll see.”

“I have no doubt, ma fille.”

In private, Mrs. Fairchild told me that she was also glad that Rochester’s prisoner was at last free, and she thanked me for releasing her. “I should have done it myself long ago, when Edward brought the girl here. England was not her home; it was wrong to lock her away as he did and claim that she was mad. She wasn’t. She was merely enraged by his cruel treatment of her.”

I nodded, for I understood, and I also thanked Mrs. Fairchild for her reluctance to condone my marriage to Rochester and wished her Godspeed.

She said, “I’ve always wished to see the City of Lights. Thank you, Miss Eyre. I will not forget your kindness.”

After waving them goodbye, Antoinette and I booked our voyage to Dominica, where Antoinette said we would reside at her mother’s home, Granbois, high in the purple mountains overlooking the clear, azure sea. We would free ourselves of England and Englishness. We would become our true selves.

We landed in Roseau after our month-long voyage and, immediately, I was overcome by the colours and scents of this world. The scarlet-coloured hibiscus that graced each of the yards of the balconied cottages, the ubiquitous coral and crimson-coloured leaves of the frangipani tree, its pungent and sweet smell nearly made me swoon with delight, the emerald green of the jungle, which was both alluring and terrifying, for Antoinette spoke of its intense beauty but also of the many dangers that lurked in the jungle, the snakes and reptiles that peopled the choking vines.

I asked her how she could ever leave such a beguiling place, to which she replied, “I had no choice. It broke my heart to leave this paradise, even though its history is fraught with pain and suffering. Even so, I imagined England to be as magnificent, but it wasn’t.”

“Indeed, England seems a pale imitation, now that I’m here,” I replied. “I’m overcome by the beauty. I can hardly take it all in.”

“Edward also reacted to the colours here, but he did not love them. They frightened him. He could not love their splendour, their intensity. And the flowers that open in the moonlight made him think that the world was turned upside down.”

“Flowers bloom at night?” I asked. “How extraordinary.”

“Yes, I will show you. We will walk in the dark and you will see the moonflowers that glow and will smell the jasmine that blossoms under the stars,” she promised.

The trek to Granbois was arduous, and the difficulty was enhanced by the fact that I had never ridden a horse and had only encountered Edward’s horse when Edward slipped on the icy road when I first met him, and he asked me to fetch his horse. Horses had always frightened me, but Antoinette showed me how to mount the standing stone and throw my leg over the horse’s saddle and then how to rein in my horse and control its willfulness.

When I mounted the horse, my dress flew up, and I felt rather immodest, but Antoinette said that we would remedy that when we arrived at her home. We would wear men’s trousers when we rode, for that’s what women do here. “There is no need for English propriety,” she said. “We will be free to be ourselves.”

As we climbed, I looked ahead at the long and steep mountain path. To my right, it descended into a deep chasm. It seemed both heaven and hell; a paradox, for we climbed to Antoinette’s favorite place where her mother lived but, below it, was a treacherous abyss.

Granbois had been her mother’s home before Antoinette’s sickly brother Pierre died and her mother’s parrot Coco, whose wings were clipped by Antoinette’s stepfather, fell to his death when their home Coulibri was destroyed. As I rode behind Antoinette, who insisted on wearing her dress that resembled the sunset, I wondered whether Dominica would be an earthly heaven for us.

Granbois was a thatched, white-washed cottage with a large veranda that strutted out over the mountainside. As soon as we rode up, several dark-skinned people rushed out and, when Antoinette had alighted from her stead, she embraced them and called them by name: “Baptiste, Hilda, Francine, I’m grateful that you’re here.”

And then a woman stepped out of the shadows. She was a tall, regal-looking woman wearing a yellow turban and a long black dress. Golden hoops dangled from her ears. She called to Antoinette, “Doudou, ché cocotte!” I later learned that her Creole words meant “Darling little ducky,” the term of endearment she always used with her dear Antoinette.

“Phenna, thank God you’re alive!” Antoinette shouted as she ran up the stairs and was enfolded in the woman’s arms. They embraced for the longest time. Both wept tears of joy.

The woman said, “I knew you’d return. I called to you, no? I told you to get dressed and come home. A woman must have spunk to live in this wicked world.”

Antoinette nodded and rested her head on the woman’s shoulder. Finally, Antoinette turned to me and said, “Jane, this is my nurse Christophine, who saved my mother and me. She is the reason I love Granbois more than any place in the world.”

“And, Christophine, this is Jane, who raised me from my English grave.”

Christophine nodded to me and I to her, both acknowledging our roles in Antoinette’s salvation.

“We are home, Jane,” Antoinette said.

That evening, Antoinette and I sat on the veranda. I smelled cloves, roses, cinnamon, and lemons in the air. On the mountainside, I glimpsed my first sight of the white moonflowers that blossomed at night. Antoinette offered me a rum punch and when I said that I didn’t imbibe, she said, “But we must drink a toast to our new life, to my resurrection from the dead. Please, Jane, sip the sweetness of Granbois.”

I did as she instructed and felt the drink soothe my throat. I settled back into my chair and listened to the gently falling waterfall near the house, and the whistling of what Antoinette said were tree frogs singing as they courted their mates.

I spent my days returning to my art. I had a knack for sketching birds, so I sat and drew the birds that I had studied in England.

Those of you who recall my early life after my parents died, when I was forced to live at Gateshead with Mrs. Reed and her malicious children, will likely recall the book I was reading when my vile cousin, the “slave-master” John Reed attacked me for reading his books.

I had been studying Bewick’s British Birds, which I was quite fond of, for birds are not only beautiful but, to me, represent escape. If their cage door is opened, they gracefully soar toward the sun and then return to feather their nests.

As a child, I sometimes imagined myself a bird that could fly out the open window and never return to the place where I had been abused by the people who were supposed to love and protect me. I would venture out and find my own nest and feather it in the way that I preferred.

Proceed to part 2...