Birds of a Feather

One of the biggest things from Wide Sargasso Sea that stuck out for me was the image of a bird trying desperately to escape a fire and the image of a woman gleefully embracing the fire like an old lover. The cycle of a phoenix is a common trope in some fantasy novels. It lives and dies with fire. Although Antoinette’s trauma didn’t begin with the fire at her childhood home, it can be argued that it was a culmination of all the traumatic events she had experienced to that point.

“The crowd suddenly goes quiet as Coco the parrot emerges from an upper window of the house, screeching, his wings on fire. Antoinette begins to cry, remembering that it is considered very bad luck to kill a parrot or even to watch a parrot die. The members of the mob seem to remember this as well, for they begin to flee.”

The bird is a harbinger of doom. Life wasn’t amazing before the fire and it very rarely got better afterwards. This fire caused the death of her brother and her mother’s final descent into madness. The fire destroyed any hope of a normal life for Antoinette, already ostracised because of her skin color and lack of money. Afterwards she was passed to her aunt and was granted moments of peace at a convent.

When she is taken from her aunt and the solace the convent brings and basically given to her unnamed Husband, the fragile security she has collapses. Her Husband takes away her freedom, a sign of this is how he takes away her name. Bertha is how he calls her even when she states she doesn’t like it and would prefer to be called Antoinette.
After all her options are taken, all she is left with is her dreams. Locked away with only Grace Poole for company Antoinette’s presumed setting of the fire is a way for her to escape and end her suffering.

“As Antoinette looks at and smells her red dress, she is reminded of the colors and smells of her home, “the smell of the sun and the smell of rain.” ….. She drops her dress on the floor and thinks that it looks like the fire has spread across the room, and it reminds her of something she has to do, but can’t think of what.”
Even in the end she thinks back to the beginning of her story.
“In her dream, Antoinette runs back up to the attic and climbs out onto the roof, all the while calling out to Christophine. Sitting out on the roof and watching the flames, she remembers Aunt Cora and Tia and Coco the parrot calling “Qui est la?” She hears her husband, “the man who hated me,” calling to her in a panic, but calling her Bertha. She hears someone scream, then knows that it is she who is screaming. In the dream she jumps, and then wakes up. Grace Poole wakes up at the sound of Antoinette’s scream and comes over to check on her. Antoinette waits for Grace to go back to sleep, and then steals her keys. She lights a candle and descends into the house with a sense of purpose, thinking, “Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do.””

Fire was also a big symbol in Jane Eyre. It represent destruction, passion, all teh big emotions that Jane Eyre wasn’t allowed to feel due to her age, due to her gender and due to her class. In this passage from Jane Eyre Bertha is shown to be happily jumping off the building into the fire.

“‘…. he went up to the attics when all was burning above and below, and got the servants out of their beds and helped them down himself, and went back to get his mad wife out of her cell. And then they called out to him that she was on the roof, where she was standing, waving her arms, above the battlements, and shouting out till they could hear her a mile off: I saw her and heard her with my own eyes. She was a big woman, and had long black hair: we could see it streaming against the flames as she stood. I witnessed, and several more witnessed, Mr. Rochester ascend through the sky-light on to the roof; we heard him call ‘Bertha!’ We saw him approach her; and then, ma’am, she yelled and gave a spring, and the next minute she lay smashed on the pavement.’”

Why does this clay bird matter? I tried to recreate the flaming wings, but instead of a parrot the clay creation more resembles a phoenix. I used white and black clay as a rather obvious refernce to the racial tensions that exist for Antoinette/Bertha. She can’t escape it any more then the parrot Coco can escape the fire with its clipped wings. Antoinette has had her wings clipped by her station and her gender. The bird I sculpted matters because it represents my interpretation of the novel. Because without whoever reads it, the novel would fade into the dusty backrooms of thrift stores.