How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Part.Section.Subsection [if applicable].Paragraph). Wide Sargasso Sea is divided into three parts. Within those parts, the novel does not number sections and subsections. This guide refers to sections if they are marked by an asterisk or some other symbol in the text. Within those sections, the novel indicates subsections by an extra line break.
Quote #1
Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible – the tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild. The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest trees, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched. One was snaky looking, another like an octopus with long thin brown tentacles bare of leaves hanging from a twisted root. (I.1.2.2)
This passage about the Coulibri estate makes explicit reference to the Biblical garden of Eden, but it's a strange and creepy paradise where beauty and decay are intermingled. Instead of being associated with a state of innocence, we have a "wild" paradise, with vaguely threatening flowers that look like snakes and octopi.
Quote #2
There was a soft warm wind blowing but I understood why the porter had called it a wild place. Not only wild but menacing. Those hills could close in on you […] Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. (II.1.2.1-4)
Rochester goes into sensory overload as he makes his way to Granbois. Unable to handle the "wild" beauty of the Caribbean, he finds it "menacing" as it threatens his control over his senses.
Quote #3
"Oh England, England," she called back mockingly, and the sound went on and on like a warning I did not choose to hear.
Soon the road was cobblestoned and we stopped at a flight of stone steps. There was a large screw pine to the left and to the right what looked like an imitation of an English summer house. (II.1.2.12-13)
For Rochester, the Caribbean takes him out of his English comfort zone, and thus radically challenges his sense of self. You can see how he clings to anything in the environment that remotely reminds him of England, as when he compares their vacation home to an "English summer house." Rather than appreciating the Caribbean on its own terms, he only sees the island as either a pale imitation or a monstrous deformation of his English homeland.
Quote #4
"Is it true," she said, "that England is like a dream? Because one of my friends who married an Englishman wrote and told me so. She said this place London is like a cold dark dream sometimes. I want to wake up."
"Well," I answered annoyed, "that is precisely how your beautiful island seems to me, quite unreal and like a dream."
Both characters spar over which country is more dream-like and "unreal" than the other, but Rochester gets annoyed, while Antoinette seems merely curious at this point. That Antoinette views England as merely a dream, and not the center of the universe, may have something to do with Rochester's annoyance.
Quote #5
It was a beautiful place – wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I'd find myself thinking, "What I see is nothing – I want what it hides – that is not nothing." (II.3.4.4)
In response to the "menacing" threat of his surroundings (see Quote #2 above), Rochester wants to figure out what makes it "alien, disturbing, secret," but knowing this secret seems equivalent to destroying what makes it so marvelous to begin with. That is, once it becomes familiar to him, it is no longer different and terrifying. Rochester also describes the location's disturbing beauty in the same way he describes Antoinette's appearance, particularly her eyes.
Quote #6
She often questioned me about England and listened attentively to my answers, but I was certain that nothing I said made much difference. Her mind was already made up. Some romantic novel, a stray remark never forgotten, a sketch, a picture, a song, a waltz, some note of music, and her ideas were fixed. About England and about Europe. (II.3.5.53)
Here the novel calls attention to Antoinette's ironic reversal of the way that the Caribbean is conceived in Victorian literature and English literature in general. Instead of the Caribbean being an exotic place made up of fictions and legends that have little to do with the "real" Caribbean, Antoinette sees England as just such a fantastic place.
Quote #7
I will be a different person when I live in England and different things will happen to me […] England, rosy pink in the geography book map, but on the page opposite the words are closely crowded, heavy-looking. Exports, coal, iron, wool. Then imports and Character of Inhabitants. Names, Essex, Chelmsford on the Chelmer. The Yorkshire and Lincolnshire wolds. Wolds? Does that mean hills? How high? Half the height of ours, or not even that? (II.5.1.26)
We see how Antoinette develops her image of England in this quote from Antoinette's point of view, rather than from Rochester's. And is it really any different than the way we learn about other countries – or even other states, for that matter – in school? In focusing on maps and unfamiliar names, Antoinette shows how much texts contribute to the way we get to know the world around us and, in a sense, limit our experience of the world as well.
Quote #8
"England," said Christophine, who was watching me. "You think there is such a place?"
"How can you ask that? You know there is."
"I never see the damn place, how I know?"
"You do not believe that there is a country called England."
She blinked and answered quickly, "I don't say I don't believe. I say I don't know, I know what I see with my eyes and I never see it." (II.5.1.27-31)
Christophine brings up an interesting distinction between believing and knowing, between a superficial and an intimate, lived knowledge of a region.
Quote #9
Then I open the door and walk into their world. It is, as I always knew, made of cardboard. I have seen it before somewhere, this cardboard world where everything is coloured brown or dark red or yellow that has no light in it. As I walk along the passages I wish I could see what is behind the cardboard. They tell me I am in England but I don't believe them. We lost our way to England. When? Where? I don't remember, but we lost it. (III.3.5)
Even though Antoinette is now actually in England, she still thinks of it as an imaginary place. In a sense, she's experiencing the distinction between belief and knowledge that Christophine lays out in Quote #9 above: since all she's seen of England is the interior of the house and a brief visit to a random meadow, how can she know she's in England? That the house is made out of paper reinforces the fact that, for Antoinette, England is still something straight out of the pages of a book. Like Jane Eyre, perhaps?
Quote #10
That afternoon we went to England. There was grass and olive-green water and tall trees looking into the water. This, I thought, is England. If I could be here I'd get well again and the sound in my head would stop. (III.4.25)
What's interesting about this passage is that England isn't a thoroughly horrible place, but actually has some redeeming features. The nature Antoinette describes invokes a typical English pastoral scene, a literary mode that celebrates England's natural beauty as representative of everything that's great about being English. For a novel that's a pretty obvious critique of British imperialism, it's interesting to think of what it finds redeeming about English culture. After all, it does adapt one of the greatest novels in the English literary tradition.