Wide Sargasso Sea

Antoinette narrates that she now lives in a sparsely furnished room with no mirror. A woman named Grace Poole has become Antoinette’s caretaker in England and sleeps in her room with her. Antoinette no longer knows what she looks like. At night, she dreams about taking Grace’s keys and seeing what exists outside of her room. In one dream, she imagines that the walls of the house are made of cardboard. She doesn’t believe that she’s in England.

One day, Antoinette sees a girl in a white dress coming out of her bedroom. Grace tells Antoinette that her brother Richard visited her. Antoinette denies that she has a brother. Grace tells her that Richard didn’t recognize Antoinette and that she attacked him with a knife. Richard, she says, will not return. Grace wonders where Antoinette got the knife, figuring that she must have gotten it on the day that Grace took her outside. Indeed, Antoinette bought the knife from a woman driving a cart and horse in exchange for the locket around her neck. Grace had taken her to a place near the water with “grass and olive-green water and tall trees” (109). Antoinette felt that this place was the true England and that she could “get well again” in this place (109).

Antoinette asks Grace what she has done with her red dress. She insists that Richard would have recognized her if she had been wearing it. With pity, Grace says that Antoinette probably doesn’t know how long she’s been in England. Antoinette, touching the red dress that hangs in the press, asserts that time doesn’t matter. She smells cinnamon, flowering lime trees, and other odors that become stronger as she breathes in. She was wearing this dress the last time she saw Sandi. They would meet when her husband was gone, and she was still free to drive horses alone. He had invited Antoinette to go away with him. She refused and they bade each other goodbye.

Antoinette’s husband later found out that Sandi had visited the house and called his wife the “[i]nfamous daughter of an infamous mother” (110). The red dress reminds Antoinette of a task that she feels compelled to perform but cannot remember.

One night, Antoinette dreams that she has waited for Grace to fall asleep. In the dream, she takes the servant’s keys and leaves her room. When she goes out, she sees that the house is empty of people. She descends the staircase, going further than ever before and ends up in the hall. Everything in the main room is white except for “a red carpet and red curtains” (111). The room’s coldness and emptiness remind her of a church. She lights all of the candles. Suddenly, Antoinette feels hatred for the candles and knocks them down, causing one of the thin curtains behind the thicker red ones to catch fire.

Antoinette goes back into the hall with a candle and sees a ghost— “[a] woman with streaming hair” (112). She drops her candle. The flame “[catches] the end of a tablecloth” (112). She runs, calling Christophine for help. Antoinette escapes from the fire and runs back upstairs. She looks out at a red sky, which seems to contain all of her memories of the West Indies. Grace Poole wakes her.

Later, when Grace goes to sleep, Antoinette becomes resolved to take action. She takes Grace’s keys and leaves her room. She brings a candle with her, careful to shield its flame from the draught as she makes her way “along the dark passage” down the hall (112).