World Literature in English Wide Sargasso Sea

The Ending of WSS: Different Spaces and the Madness
 

• self-enclosed gardens:
• the garden  in Coulibri and the forests in both Coulibri and Granbois
• the "enclosed garden" (p.36) Antoinette dreams. --> a house with "thick walls," "blazing fires and the crimson and white rooms." (106)
• places without looking glass: the convent (p.32) the house in England (Thornfield in Jane Eyre) (p.107)

 
• England
• "a black and cruel world to a woman"  for Grace (106)
• "[their world] is, as I always knew, made of cardboard" (p.107)What is the significance of this metaphor?  Why does Antoinette insist that she has lost her way to England? (clue: p. 109)

• relationships between Grace and Antoinette: Grace is kind but in lack of understanding
• a speaking, rational, perceptive and knowing subject:
•   "she hasn't lost her spirit." (106)
• plans to convince Rochester to let her go home.
• "Name matters."
• "Now finally I know why I was brought here and what I have to do."

• Signs of "madness":
• look at the tapestry
• loss of memory -- does not remember fighting Richard.  (108)
• Time has no meaning, but the red dress does.
• different dreams (nightmares) (p.47, 72)

Elements in the last dream:

• recurrent ones: followed by somebody,
• the hall with only red and white colors, searching for the altar, Aunt Cora's room, the "ghost";
• escape from the fire, to see "all her life" written on the sky.

• Antoinette does not burn the house.
• She unlocks the door and "shield[s]" the fire, which "light [her] along the dark passage."

• Other accounts of madness
• Daniel: [about Annette]: "she can't life a hand for herself and soon the madness that is in her, and in all these white Creoles, come out." (96/57); "crazy and worse besides" [suggesting wantonness]
• Rochester: "she mad but mine" (99).

 
• One critic's analysis:

"Antoinette has progressed from fearing the power of the Afro-Caribbean and moving away from its protection, to becoming not only mistress and user of the flame, but its protector.. .  .The reversal--stylistically inscribed--is a textualization of the theme of the zombi, a literary acting out of a belief about its nature.  For Laroches writes that the zombi is the incarnation of the only "truly feared death," but that its fate "is reversible and thus transitory. . . Salt is the agent which renews the awareness of life, the antidate to the spell which brought on the state of zombification.  Is is similar to divine fire" (E & T; 56; emphasis added).  (textbook 202)
 
• Different interpretations of the fire and red dress