Wide Sargasso Sea

Racial identity
• Christophine stands apart from the Jamaican servants because she is originally from
the French Caribbean island of Martinique.
• Interaction between racial groups is often antagonistic. Antoinette and her mother,
however, do not share the purely racist views of other whites on the island. Both
women recognize their dependence on the black servants who care for them,
feeling a respect that often borders on fear and resentment.
• Antoinette also struggles over feleing like an oxymoron, and is described as a ‘white
nigger’ and ‘white cockroach’ throughout the novel. This confusion causes her to
struggle to find an identity.
Colonialism
• Enslavement shapes many of the relationships in Rhys’s novel—not just those

between blacks and whites.

• Annette feels helplessly imprisoned at Coulibri Estate after the death of her husband,
repeating the word “marooned” over and over again.
• Likewise, Antoinette is doomed to a form of enslavement in her love for and
dependency upon her husband.
• Women’s childlike dependence on fathers and husbands represents a figurative
slavery that is made literal in Antoinette’s ultimate physical captivity.
Womanhood and Madness
• Ideals of proper feminine deportment are presented to Antoinette when she is a girl
at the convent school. Two of the other Creole girls, Miss Germaine and Helene
 de Plana, embody the feminine virtues that Antoinette is to learn and emulate:
namely, beauty, chastity and mild, even-tempered manners.
• Mother St. Justine’s praises of the “poised” and “imperturbable” sisters suggest an
ideal of womanhood that is at odds with Antoinette’s own hot and fiery nature.
Indeed, it is Antoinette’s passion that contributes to her melancholy and implied
madness.

Motifs
Madness:
• Madness in Wide Sargasso Sea is intricately linked with images of heat, fire, and
female sexuality.
• Madness is Antoinette’s inheritance: her father was mad, according to his bastard son
Daniel, as was her mother, Annette. Antoinette’s upbringing and environment
exacerbate her inherited condition, as she feels rejected and displaced, with no
one to love her.
• She becomes paranoid and solitary, prone to vivid dreams and violent outbursts.
• It is significant that women like Antoinette and her mother are the most susceptible
to madness, pushed as they are into childlike servitude and feminine docility.
Death:
• One of the first memories she recounts from her childhood is that of her mother’s
poisoned horse, lying dead in the heat and swarming with flies.
• The death of the horse also foreshadows the deaths of Pierre, Antoinette’s mother,
Aunt Cora, and Mr. Mason, all of which leave Antoinette without a family. So
attuned to death’s presence in her childhood tale, Antoinette foreshadows her
own violent end.
Fire:
• Fires recur throughout the novel, representing destruction, damnation, and
smoldering passions.
• In Part One, Antoinette describes the fire that burned down Coulibri Estate and
triggered her mother’s collapse into madness. In
• Part Two, Rochester describes the use of candles at night, paying particular attention
to the moths that burn themselves in the flames.
These descriptions not only recall the grotesque death of Annette’s bird, but they also
mirror Antoinette’s perverse fascination with fire and foreshadow her own tragic end.

Symbols

Birds:
• The clipping of Coco mirrors Mr Mason’s and Rochester’s attempt to anglicise
Antoinette and the colonial oppression on Jamaica.
• As Antoinette recalls, “[Coco] made an effort to fly down but his clipped wings failed
him and he fell screeching. He was all on fire.” This passage presages the
apocalyptic dream that ends the novel, including Antoinette’s fiery fall from the
attic.
• When she sees a cock crowing alongside Christophine’s house, Antoinette thinks,
“That is for betrayal, but who is the traitor?” As with the parrot, the appearance
of the cock portends danger.
Garden of Eden:
• Antoinette compares the garden at Coulibri Estate to the biblical Garden of Eden,
with its luxurious excess and lost innocence. In her own words, the garden has
“gone wild,” assaulting the senses with its brilliant colors, pungent odors, and
tangling overgrowth. The flowers look vaguely sinister; Antoinette describes
one orchid as being “snaky looking,” recalling the biblical fall and man’s decline
into greed and sensuality
• The temptation was the owning of slaves within the house.
Paper House:
• Comments upon the materialistic and fragile English society.
• Also reminds the reader that the story is now within the confines of Bronte’s book
pages.
Dreams:
• Antoinette has three dreams which form a sequence:
• The first at Coulibri (Part one, section 3)
• The second in the Mount Calvary convent (Part one, section 12)
The third at Thornfield Hall (Part three, section 7).

Characters

Christophine
• The other islanders will have nothing to do with her because she is known to practice
the dark art of obeah.
• Throughout the work, Christophine exhibits an emphatic independence. She actually
encourages Antoinette to leave Rochester, and stands up to him until he takes
his wife back to England.
• Christophine is Antoinette’s only real protector.
• She is often likened to the Western men in the novel and acts as a feminist power
with in the novella.
Mr Rochester
• Unnamed for the duration of the novella. Allows Rhys to reverse roles from that of
Jane Eyre.
• Represents the colonial powers as a whole and their power over the enslaved
countries during colonialism.
Annette
• Annette has never been accepted by the black Jamaicans.
• After the fire that destroys her family home, she attempts to kill her husband and is
locked away for the remainder of her days. She apparently dies when Antoinette
 is at school, but the exact cause of her death is never made clear, and later even
the timing of her passing is called into question. She acts as a frighteningly
spectral presence for most of the book.
• Annette also foreshadows Antoinette’s fate later on in the book.
Sandi
• Daniel tells Rochester that Sandi and Antoinette have a history of incestuous
intimacy.
• Represents the life she could have had
Tia
• Tia betrays Antoinette by taking her pennies and stealing her clothes. Tia’s disloyalty
manifests the allure and corrupting power of money in the text.
• Like Mr. Mason and Mr. Rochester, she appears to covet money more than a loving
relationship, whether it be a childhood friendship or a marriage.
Amelie
• Amélie fights back, calls Antoinette a “white cockroach,”
• shortly thereafter retaliates by having sex with her mistress’s husband.
• Rochester offers her money the morning after, and Amélie says she is going to use it
to start a new life in Rio.
Pierre
• It is never made explicitly clear what is wrong with Pierre, although Daniel insists he
was an “idiot from birth,” and there are further suggestions that generations of
incest lead to the birth of this “cretin.”

Narrative Style and Voice:

Comparison of structure
• Jane Eyre is documented chronologically, typical of a romantic text and enhancing
it’s autobiographical style. Jane Eyre also references the time throughout the
novel sot he reader is aware of the setting. On the other hand Wide Sargasso
 Sea is fragmented, and the reader is often unaware of time and location, this
represents Antoinette’s fragmented thought.
Voice
Both texts are first person. Jane Eyre in particular addresses the reader personally
throughout the novel, engaging them with the text. Both first person narratives provide
the reader with the sense that they are involved with the text and being confided to.