150 KIM ROBINSON WALCOTr

 Adapting from Fanon we might use the phrase 'terrified consciousness' to
 suggest the White minority's sensations of shock and disorientation as a
 massive and smouldering Black population is released into an awareness of
 its power.4

 The existence of a terrified consciousness in these novels is indisputable.
 Wide Sargasso Sea most vividly, and hauntingly, portrays such terror with this
 theme being established from the very first lines: "They say when trouble
 comes close ranks, and so the white people did" (5). Antoinette and her mother,
 white plantocrats reduced to penury after Emancipation, live in fear of the
 resentful 1 black masses who surround them a fear realized when the great
 house at Coulibri is burnt down by the ex-slaves, resulting in the death of
 Antoinette's younger brother. Neither Antoinette nor her mother ever recovers
 from this horror, Antoinette's mother retreating immediately into madness
 while Antoinette herself clings tenuously to sanity and eventually disintegrates.
 The Orchid House and Christopher also portray white plantocrat families
that are in a state of decay. Christopher, alienated from his planter father,
who is preoccupied with the economic woes caused by the collapse of the
plantocracy, and from his weak and ailing mother, is a lonely frightened child.
Terrorised by the sinister sound of drums from the surrounding black com-
munities, he retreats into the safe world of his garden with its flora and fauna.
The Orchid House, in its depiction of what Ramchand calls "the hot-house
life of the white characters" (225), again speaks of decay, the decline of one
planter family reflecting the decline of a class, with illness in the foreground
(specifically, the Master's drug addiction and Andrew's tuberculosis) against
a background of hatred and destruction.
 The insecurity of a class that realises it has lost, is losing, or is about to
lose its power, translates to vulnerability, and vulnerability to fear. This fear
is of course especially compelling if the power that one is losing is derived
from oppression of those who are now taking control. Hence in the decades
immediately preceding Emancipation a terrified consciousness was clearly
evident in the writings of the white West Indian population a terror pre-
dictably magnified by the recent experience of Ste Domingue, which haunted
the white West Indian consciousness, but a terror which had long been de-
veloping out of a history of violent slave rebellions. While this fear was expe-
rienced by white people throughout the West Indies, it was manifest in an
extreme form in Jamaica. M. J. Steel suggests that the Jamaican planters
"had quite demonstrably and provably far more to fear" than their counter-
parts in the other colonies:


3 Kenneth Ramchand, "Terrified Consciousness," The West Indian Novel and its
Background (London: Faber and Faber, 1970).
4 Ramchand 224-25.