Desire of Links of London

Of course, the main agent in Antoinette's descent into madness is her husband, whose very identity is engendered by the imperial tradition underpinning Bronte's text.

Rochester

embodies all of the characteristics of the colonizer, presenting many of the "imperializing desires deeply embedded in the education of privileged Englishmen-the narcissism, the will to domination, and the inevitable tragedy that it breeds" (Gregg 106), as well as typifying many of the characteristics which the ethnologist Octave Mannoni groups under the label of the "Prospero complex". Right from the start,

Rochester

feels insecure, uneasy, and unhappy in the island, which, hke Antoinette, is "U Charm". A victim of his sex and birth, he mistrusts everyone and feels superior to his wife, whom he treats as an object, replacing love and reciprocity with sex and domination. To survive, he has to assert his ego and assure his dominance. Thus, through the agency of her husband, who is guilty mainly because he conforms to the Empire-founding ideology that fashioned him, Antoinette becomes disjointed-"All you want is to break her up", repeats Christophine-driven mad by an encompassing ideological system. She is trapped-"like her island, she is 'colonized,' her independence an autonomy subsumed to British culture and to British law" (T Charm). In delineating the "common workings of fascism, racism and bourgeois patriarchy, the persecutory power of the modern religion of intolerance" (Carr 62), Rhys echoes Virginia Woolf, who in the Three Guineas argues that "patriarchy, racism, pomposity, militarism, economic exploitation, autocracy and fascism are all part of the same process" (51). Sexual politics are thus caught up in a wider system of power relationships and, within that ideological discourse, gender is only one factor alongside class and money (S Charm).