Top Highlights

• One of the servants is Amélie, whom the husband finds “lovely” but “sly, spiteful, malignant perhaps, like so much else in this place
• The husband is disoriented. The locals, the servants, the weather, and the landscape all seem unwelcoming to him
• His opinion of Amélie can be extended to cover his view of Jamaica and Granbois in general-- lovely in appearance, but malignant.
• The town named Massacre, of which no one remembers the history, presages the tragedy and loss of identity that will befall Antoinette as a result of this marriage. The fact that the husband himself is never named in the novel heightens his sense of non-being in this foreign place.
• Despite his private complaints that the rain is adding to his feelings of discomfort and melancholy, the husband refuses to take shelter in the woman’s house when Antoinette offers, claiming to not mind getting wet. At this, Amélie gives him a look that he feels is so malicious and intimate that he has to look away.

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