In Wide Sargasso Sea, it's become pretty clear at this point that Rochester is the main villain of the novel, given his actions in the last part of Book 2. While he has now become a pretty bad person and disliked character, I still hold some sympathy for him, as he's faced many hardships since coming to the islands and marrying Antoinette, not all of them his fault.
Even though the reader often seems to be supposed to side with Antoinette (it is her story, after all, only she appears in all three books within the novel), I found myself agreeing with Rochester several times, and I actually sort of liked him during the first few chapters he was there. He seemed to at least try to be nice to Antoinette, and hoped that it would work out between them, even though he didn't really marry her by choice, which makes the fact that he doesn't seem to truly love her more reasonable. Since he wasn't going to get an inheritance meant that he had to find some other way to get money, and this marriage was something that he had to do for that purpose. This is also part of what leads to Rochester's feeling somewhat inferior over the course of the novel, which makes him more relatable, and is even something that he and Antoinette have in common and sort of bond over.
Rochester also has a lot of difficulty in his new surroundings, both with the climate and the people. He sees the island as being very "dream-like," much more alive than the London that he's used to, much more controlled by nature. The natives of the island, even Antoinette to some level, seem to resent the fact that he's sort of an outsider, and many of the blacks also sort of dislike his upper-class, privileged status. This is well-shown with his walk in the forest, where the child screaming at him and Baptiste's coldness to him show how he's still not really a part of life there.
Even when his relationship with Antoinette completely falls apart, turning him against her and turning him into a villain, I still feel like it was, in large part, not his fault. There is a bit of irony in how he ends up being poisoned. Though Antoinette's main problem with Rochester is how ignorant he is, it's her that ends up being somewhat ignorant in the end. She blindly agrees to give Rochester the potion because she trusts Christophine, even ignoring some signs that this was a bad idea, and Rochester is sort of proved right in his distrust of her. Once he is poisoned, Rochester can't be completely held responsible for his actions and for sleeping with Amelie, though it is still somewhat his fault. His anger towards her is also somewhat justified, as she has poisoned him, and this is only enhanced by the doubts he has about her because of the stories that Daniel Cosway has told him. Though he does end up going way too far, even when he's sailing away with her in captivity he still has some regret over what's happened. Although he does some terrible things to Antoinette, he's not a completely evil character, and it's easy to see how and why he has become like this and to sympathize with him.
In a sense, you're suggesting that Rhys depicts both characters' "madness" as produced by their circumstances (and their reactions to those circumstances). Antoinette has more of a legitimate claim to victimhood than Rochester, largely because as a woman and a Creole she holds very little power in the relationship, and he literally can do what he wants with her. But Rhys doesn't make Rochester an unmotivated force of evil--we can see his obsessive need to control and even punish Antoinette as an extreme reaction to the profound loss of control and confusion he's felt since first coming to the islands. He feels like everyone knows more than he does, and that there's something no one is telling him, and he turns out to be right. It's not hard to understand his desire for revenge.
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