Annette and Antoinette

Annette seems to play a critical role in Antoinette life. But, I really don't think that this role is altogether positive. Antoinette knows that her mother prefers Pierre to Antoinette, because she makes it painfully obvious, and I think that this knowledge is only hurting her self-worth. This feeling of rejection from her mother just completes her feeling that she doesn't really belong anywhere. She does not seem to be too bothered by this initially, but she realizes that she is not English, because that life is so alien to her, and she identifies with Christophine, whose group she cannot belong to because of their differences of skin color. Christophine is a black woman from Martinique- an automatic outsider, while Antoinette is her white charge, but she's not fully white because she has black relatives, and while she may be a born white colonist in the Caribbean: by definition a Creole, and yet while she identifies with the Creoles ("none of them understand us [the Creoles]", she never is a place where she can be associated with any of them. She spends her time with Tia, who is black. Her mother, who is also a Creole, almost ostracizes her, hardly ever paying her a lick of attention, except to ask why she id wearing Tia's dress, not that she remembers who Tia is. She never learns to be a part of a specific group until she is sent to the convent by Mr. Mason.

The feeling that her mother did not love her that way she should have, or that she belonged nowhere, could have led to the mental problems she is now encountering later in life. She has mood swings, and ends up slapping Amelie, the hired girl, after she made an insignificant but rude comment. We the readers don't know how she met her husband, but my take on it is that she was essentially sold off, because it was hinted that this was an arranged marriage, and this would, if anything, only increase her feelings of worthlessness. She knows that her husband does not love her. He does not treat he in the loving easy that he should, and she is getting sick of it. Part of what contributed was the absentness of her mother when she was a child.