Wide Sargasso Sea and Schizophrenia

Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Schizophrenia and Capitalism is a ridiculously obscure text with an extremely powerful argument about the nature of schizophrenia and its relationship to production and "madness." To drastically oversimplify their critique of psychoanalysis, they essentially argue that the psychoanalytic structure is based on lack--lack of the phallus, circumscription of life-flows, the privileging of absence over presence and the abstract over the concrete--and does violence to the true nature of desire, which is based on the production (not the representation or expression) of the unconscious within a system of flows that is constantly being disjointed and reconfigured. Schizophrenics refuse to be "Oedipalized," producing individuals within the psychoanalytic framework that seem to have lost touch with reality (either by removing themselves completely from it and becoming "autistic" or acting as if they existed on their own unique plane of reality). Thus schizophrenics become social revolutionaries, as their actions are based on the (innately radical) desiring-production of the unconscious rather than the (ex post facto) applied structure of the Oedipus complex.

This schizoanalytic framework is extremely useful when discussing the question of Antoinette's "madness" in Wide Sargasso Sea. Antoinette's "madness"--as annoying as it may get, I'm going to continue to put "madness" in quotation marks--reads as a type of schizophrenia: her rapid change in mood,  her disbelief in that which she cannot empirically sense (D&G convincingly argue that not only is the scientific claim to "nonbelief" the last bastion of belief in contemporary society, belief is absurd and completely foreign to the schizophrenic), and her inability to temporally locate herself according to those around her (D&G argue in a very complex and confusing way that the schizophrenic is atemporal according to phallocentric conceptions of chronology but is supremely historical in that he experiences all of history by merit of his constantly shifting subject-position) all characterize her as a type of schizoanalytic heroine. Her alignment with desire (in a less nuanced sense than D&G suggest but desire nonetheless) associates her with revolutionary production, particularly when contrasted with Rochester's Oedipal fixation on order and restriction (demonstrated by his linguistic and bodily imprisoning of Antoinette on the basis of her "madness"). The roots of the conflict between Antoinette and Rochester become clear, then: Antoinette is schizophrenic and poses a radical challenge to the order of Rochester's Oedipal regime. The question still remains, however, as to whether schizophrenia is actually "madness."

D&G would suggest that Antoinette is not mad--she simply refuses Oedipalization. Her connection to desiring-production represents a radical threat that Rochester feels he must contain, but which he ultimately fails to do. In light of the work done by Anti-Oedipus, one can read the ending of Wide Sargasso Sea--Antoinette's arson--not as a destructive act but as a positive act of production-of-consummation. She performs a "disjunctive synthesis," a synthesis that seems destructive (in that it breaks a previously existing connection) but is productive in that it allows for the configuration of a new order of connections. D&G argue that all life is connected and that seeming disjunctions only cause new formations and structures; in fact, they argue that subjectivity resides in the shifting disconnects between desiring machines and that the Subject is always disjunctive. In the context of Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette performs a disjunctive act (the burning of Thornfield) in order to posit a new social situation and its accompanying Subject--a social situation that is anti-colonial and anti-phallocentric and a Subject that has freedom and agency.