Wide Sargasso Sea Identity Quotes

The wild beauty of the Coulibri estate provides the young Antoinette an escape from her troubles. But this estate isn't a home, a safe and secure place that Antoinette can identify with and make her own. The razor grass's mutilation of Antoinette's body marks a wound where her sense of self should be. Antoinette forgets her troubles to the point where she doesn't exist anymore, perhaps to the point where she isn't even human anymore, and that's not necessarily a good thing.

Oh, boy, Antoinette gets cut again. This time by a rock thrown by Tia, although she never sees Tia actually throw the rock. Like the razor grass in Quote #1, Tia is an avatar of the unwelcoming home. Tia is an image of what Antoinette would like to be: a black woman, not a white Creole who is accepted by neither white nor black communities. Unlike Tia, Antoinette will never have a racial identity to call her own.

Other than the fact that this is the only instance where we get an actual date in the novel, the quote is also interesting because it's a rare instance where Antoinette seems to embrace her identity. The fact that she has two last names (since her mother's re-marriage), yet another indication of her split identity, doesn't seem to faze her as she emblazons her signature in "fire red," a color that resonates with the moments where she is the most defiant in the novel (See "Red Dress, White Dress" in "Symbols, Imagery, Allegory"). This uncharacteristic confidence might have something to do with the fact that she feels the convent is a kind of "refuge," a community of racially diverse women, away from the grasp of marriage-minded, gold-digging, white English bachelors (I.2.5.1).

In explaining her conflicted feelings about race to Rochester, Antoinette is also touching on another important issue: the question of national identity. That is, how do we determine who "belongs" in a country? Is it determined by race? Does whoever live there "first" get first dibs? Then neither black nor white can lay claim to the islands, because the Caribs and other indigenous tribes preceded them. Antoinette's musings here could indirectly explain why white Creoles attract so much abuse: their liminal status as not-quite-white and not-quite-black undercuts the claim that either race deserves to call the island exclusively theirs.

At this point, Rochester has been drugged with obeah powder by Antoinette. He enters into a zombie-esque state where he temporarily loses his sense of self. However, the passage also invites us to think about the other ways in which Rochester becomes a zombie, so to speak. Is Rochester, who considers himself superior to everyone else because he's a white European male, really so different from people like Antoinette and Christophine?

Antoinette learns Christophine's lesson about the way that the white-dominated, colonial society works. (See our discussion of Quote #8 under "Race.") Rochester's calling Antoinette another name isn't just an annoying habit. It's his way of taking control over her entire identity, just as he assumed legal control over her fortune when he married her. Rochester's "obeah" makes us wonder whether he's all that different from Christophine…

Christophine tries to explain Antoinette's ambiguous racial status to Rochester, but even Christophine, who seems wordy enough when she's abusing Rochester, can't seem to find the right words to explain exactly what Antoinette is. At the same time that she tries to explain Antoinette's Creole temperament, she risks repelling Rochester because it's Antoinette's Creole side that really turns him off. Perhaps this is the game Christophine wants to play – who knows what she really wants?

To Rochester, Antoinette has become a "doll," an inanimate object. But you could say that he's been objectifying her all along. At this point in the novel, the end of Part II, it's up for debate as to whether Rochester has completed his domination of Antoinette, or whether Antoinette's doll-like exterior is only a sham, a mask to conceal her rebellious impulses.

Locked up in Thornfield Hall, Antoinette has no access to a mirror, part of Rochester's strategy for depriving her of a unique identity to call her own. The childhood mirror scene she describes here is reminiscent of the scene with Tia (see our discussion of Quote #2 above): her sense of alienation from the image of herself indicates her general lack of a sense of self. But this quote also brings up the larger question of whether Antoinette is in fact "mad" – has she really lost her mind? Or can we see her fractured sense of self as a consequence of her personal history? Perhaps we have to learn to "read" Antoinette in a way that Rochester, or any of the other characters, never could.

These lines are from the end of Antoinette's recurring dream. Here it sounds as if, in answer to the question "Qui est là?" ("Who is there?"), Antoinette's answer isn't Antoinette or Bertha, but Tia. A mark of her identification with Tia, her hostile childhood "friend"? If so, does that mean she's waking up as Tia? Are we supposed to read her burning down the house as being somehow motivated by her identification with Tia, a black female character? Or does her calling out "Tia!" reflect the persistent splitting of her self, closing off the possibility of ever having an identity to call her own? Hmm….