| Wide Sargasso Sea - Extract n°4 |

Commentaire Wide Sargasso Sea - Extrait 4

De "This convent was my refuge" (p.31) à "Soon it will be tomorrow morning" (p.35)


[ Corrigé, note : 14/20 ]

« This convent was my refuge », explains Antoinette at the beginning of the extract. Indeed, during eighteen months, she will at last feel safe, after having so much suffered. She spends her mornings the same way every day : she wakes up with the signal, she takes her bath – she refers to the « smell of soap » -, then she has breakfast. In the between, she often prays without thinking about she says, just because she took this habit, like the other girls. In fact, she doesn't really know about God, and his « perpetual light shin[ing] on » anybody. She soon stopped asking herself too many questions (« but I soon forgot »).
The convent is said to be a « place of sunshine and death ». All in it reveals contrasts : « light and darkness », « sun and shadow », « Heaven and Hell ». Antoinette prayed to die, but she soon remembered it is a sin, and forgot about it. This oppositions let us guess Antoinette's mental state, which is very unstable.
She also realises that plenty of things, of thoughts, are sins. In fact, praying is a way to be safe, a « refuge » ; outside, she would be free, but she cannot have safety and freedom at the same time. Moreover, her mother has died, nobody wants to explain to her how, which suggest the secret around this mysterious death, but it does not seem to be important to Antoinette, as she just evokes this event in one or two lines. But unconscienciously, she has been moved by this death :

when Sister Marie Augustine tries to comfort her by giving her a hot chocolate after her nightmare, it makes her think about her mother's death. About Sister Marie Augustine, she could be considered as another surrogate mother after Christophine. Meanwhile, Antoinette has at last a happy pause in her life, as if she was kindly waiting for a new bad event.

And this bad event does not forget to happen. Mr Mason, her mother's husband, often comes and sees her. One day, he expresses a different behaviour. Step by step, line by line, we begin to understand his plans. First particularly nice, then insinuating that he would like her to live with him, as Aunt Cora is at last back from England, and finally evoking with a « careless voice » the visit of English friends, and more precisly, the one of « one of them ». We can now suppose he is already planning Antoinette's marriage with Mr Rochester.
Antoinette feels something unpleasant is going to happen. She tries to hide her dismay, but Mr Mason must have felt it, as he « begins to joke ». Even if she also laughs, she's soon taken by other feelings : « sadness » and « loss ». Premonitory feeling ?

Right after this event, she has her second dream, more detailed that the first she had in Coulibri. In her first dream, she's followed in the forest by « someone » that hates her. She's wearing a beautiful white dress she doesn't want to soil. In the second dream, the setting is more precise : the scene takes place at night, this time, she is following someone, a man, his face « black with hatred », smiling slyly at her, she's « sick with fear ». She trails now her dress in dirt, as a symbol of the purity she's loosing, step by step.They soon arrive into an enclosed garden, with trees she cannot identify, and begin to go up a few steps.
This is a premotinory dream, it must be her future house with Rochester. This dream announces the Hell she's going to live with him, and at least her spirit she's going to let behind her, climbing these steps. « I make no effort to save myself; if anyone were to try to save me, I would refuse » she says. She knows she's doomed, she knows her future is already written, and that there's nothing else to do than wait and undergo. And that's what she'll do, until she dies.


At last, Jean Rhys didn't want to write a happy story, with happy events, and happy end. She just wanted to understand, and explain, how Charlotte Brontë's character turned mad. At the end of this first part, we could think that it's quite enough, but Jean Rhys has decided it is not. And « tomorrow morning » will be worse.