SOURCE: "The Secret of Wide Sargasso Sea," in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, Spring, 1990, pp. 185-97.

In "Making Bricks Without Straw," Jean Rhys remembers a typical question-and-answer game she played with many journalists who interviewed her. Before long, the game gently pushed her into her "predestined role, the role of victim." This means, says Rhys, that "I have never had any good times, never laughed, never got my own back, never dared, never worn pretty clothes, never been happy, never known wild hopes or wilder despairs…. Wailing, I have gone from tyrant to tyrant; each letdown worse than the last. All this, of course, leads straight to Women's Lib." As the game went on, Rhys shocked the interviewer when she said that she "didn't like the suffragettes much" and told how one threw herself in front of a horse. Rhys could only feel sorry for the horse. No doubt the woman was wonderful—she wanted to be a martyr, but the horse did not: "He had to be shot." Inevitably, some will interpret Rhys's sympathy for the horse in terms of the now-worn-out statement that Rhys sympathized with the underdog because she herself was a victim.

Critics persist in not so gently pushing Rhys and her heroines into the predestined role of victim. In 1983, Selma James argued from a feminist perspective that Rhys's novels are "about how women are aliens; how we don't stand a chance because the cards are stacked against us." The heroines have in common "hopelessness," "defeat," and "isolation"; each of the heroines is a personification of the "female condition," that is, alas, "the perfect victim, unable or unwilling to defend herself." In an excellent 1982 study of Rhys's work, Jane Aschom made a similar statement: "Rhys's novels describe a female consciousness passive and impotent in a world where men have all the power." In the same year, Linda Bamber included Rhys with her fictional heroines when she described Rhys as a "woman more comfortable with failure than with success" and the novels as autobiographical, having one subject: "the victimization and self-victimization of a woman drifting along the edges of artsy-bourgeois society." But she is a certain kind of victim; she is a "natural victim, not a victim of sexual politics or class oppression." Bamber, like Angela Williams, makes little distinction between the author and her fictional heroines when she claims that "Rhys's helplessness is often a kind of 'weapon' in her fiction just as it was in her life." Where does this helplessness originate? Williams provides an answer: "perhaps the Jean Rhys heroine, the perennial victim, originates from Jean Rhys's own childhood background." In 1979, Elizabeth Abel adopted a "psychological framework," derived from R. D. Laing's approach to schizophrenia, "to explain the perversely self-destructive reactions of Rhys's heroines." The diagnosis is that Rhys's heroines are not really in-sane but fit into the "category sometimes referred to as ambulatory schizophrenia and sometimes as the schizoid (as opposed to the schizophrenic) state." The picture we now have of Rhys and her heroines is that of a passive, impotent, self-victimized schizoid who, comfortable with failure, wields her helplessness like a weapon—all as natural as being female.

The tendency to see Jean Rhys and her heroines as natural perennial victims is found in many of the critical essays on Wide Sargasso Sea, particularly in the interpretations of Antoinette's dream of her own death. Anthony Luengo, in his study of the similarities between Wide Sargasso Sea and the Gothic mode of fiction, describes Antoinette as at "once victim and femme fatale" and argues that Rhys "creates around Antoinette, as she does around Rochester, a sense of damnation that grows naturally out of the narrative action." Luengo supports this argument by recalling how the servants (Godfrey and Myra) told Antoinette "that she and her kind are destined to hell." Gradually, Antoinette believes this, "dreaming of damnation at the convent and even embracing it in fits of ecstatic self-condemnation." Luengo uses the following quotation from Wide Sargasso Sea to illustrate his argument: "All the same, I did not pray so often after that and soon, hardly at all. I felt bolder, happier, more free. But not so safe." At no time at the convent does Antoinette dream of or ecstatically embrace damnation. She does, however, pray for death so that she may attain the blessed attributes or transcendent beauty, but she is told that it is a sin—the sin of despair—to pray for death. In time, she learns to "gabble without thinking as the others did," but as any sensitive woman would be dissatisfied with gabbling, she stops praying such gabble. While she is "bolder, happier, more free," she never stops longing for the blessed attributes. Surely this is not evidence that Antoinette dreams of damnation and even embraces it in "fits of ecstatic self-condemnation."

While biographical, psychiatric, and feminist approaches are valuable and enlightening, none of these approaches totally reveals the secret of Wide Sargasso Sea, which depends upon the language of poetry and paradox. What is the secret of Wide Sargasso Sea, of Antoinette's dream of her own death, and of too, too beautiful Granbois? What is it about Antoinette that disturbs Rochester, and why, as Rochester asks, is there always this talk about death? What is the secret, and how does Rhys reveal it?

"Only the magic and the dream are true—all the rest's a lie. Let it go. Here is the secret. Here." The secret of Wide Sargasso Sea lies in the paradox that "Desire, Hatred, Life, Death came very close in the darkness…. Not close. The same." Mad moonstruck Antoinette, the "orchid" heroine of Rhys's novel, discovers, like the narrator of Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock, that "every boundary line is a myth" and that she cannot escape the "ancestral and twin fantasy of death-in-life and life-in-death." In Smile Please, Rhys makes a similar discovery, and she is accused of madness. But if she has everything within her—life and death, good and evil—then so must strength be within her if only she knew how to get to it. Perhaps every Rhys heroine lives on the edge of the "abyss of sincerity," trying to get to this strength, this secret that life and death come so close in the darkness—"Not close. The same."

Each Rhys heroine struggles to heave herself out of the wide Sargasso sea found in every Rhys novel. Clara Thomas cites the OED when she points out that "there is in each ocean a Sargasso into which all drift matter finds its way." Sasha Jansen describes a similar dead center, one of hate and indifference—the wide Sargasso of Good Morning, Midnight: "Too sad, too sad…. It doesn't matter, there I am, like one of those straws which floats round the edge of a whirlpool and is gradually sucked into the centre, the dead centre, where everything is stagnant, everything is calm." It is not until Wide Sargasso Sea that the Rhys heroine overcomes the Sargasso and discovers her strength in a fallen world of fractured consciousness and failed relationships by overcoming what Harris's narrator describes as the "need in the world to provide a material nexus to bind the spirit of the universe" (Palace). Wide Sargasso Sea is the tale of intuitive Antoinette, the lunatic who always knows, yet never knows, the time, the lunatic who envisions a metaphysical wedding of magic and reality, of time and eternity.

In the beginning, there is a garden as "large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible," a sacred space where Antoinette hugs to herself the secret hidden in Coulibri. "There is the tree of life in the garden and the wall green with moss. The barrier of the cliffs and the high mountains. And the barrier of the sea. I am safe. I am safe from strangers." Coulibri itself is a "sacred place. It was sacred to the sun." The obvious allusions to the garden of Genesis are associated with the equally obvious fall when the garden has gone wild, gone to "bush" and the "smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell." For a time, Rhys lingers in a lost world of wholeness and holiness, but the focus of Wide Sargasso Sea is on the tragic loss of a place sacred to the sun and the need to "re-enter 'lost' origins, 'lost' heavens, 'lost' divinity." Rhys, like Harris, hungers for "renewed visions of creation" in which the boundary line between life and death—the "smell of dead flowers" and the "fresh living smell"—is no more. In Palace of the Peacock, such a vision is "radical and disruptive of all material conviction." No gulf exists between consciousness and the world, materiality and divinity. They are the same.

This radical disruptive vision is symbolized by the conflagration in the final dream of Wide Sargasso Sea when Antoinette sees the sky and the tree of life in flames. "It was red and all my life was in it." Lunatic Antoinette in phoenix flame symbolizes a rediscovery of "lost origins." The rediscovery happens only after Antoinette remembers what it is she must do; it is an act of remembering, a bringing to mind once again that which is lost. At the end of the novel, in the image of Antoinette standing at the edge of the battlements that Tia calls "you afraid?" Rhys describes a moment similar to that which Auden describes in The Sea and the Mirror:

Yet, at this very moment when we do at last see ourselves as we are, neither cosy nor playful, but swaying out on the ultimate wind-whipped cornice that overhangs the unabiding void—we have never stood anywhere else—when our reasons are silenced by the heavy huge derision—there is nothing to say. There never has been.

Although Auden is writing from a Christian perspective, this moment has a secular parallel in Wide Sargasso Sea. Antoinette sways out on the "ultimate wind-whipped" battlements of the "unabiding void" that disrupts the material conviction of Thornfield Hall. At this moment, overhanging the "abyss of sincerity," she reaches the strength that is born of the secret that death and life are the same. To reach this strength is perhaps to experience "the inseparable moment within ourselves of all fulfillment and understanding" (Palace).

Rhys prefigures this moment when Coco the parrot falls from the glacis railing, all on fire. It is bad luck to watch a parrot die, perhaps because in West Indian folklore, the parrot is a symbol of the soul. Fire destroys Coco in the burning of Coulibri and also destroys, but re-creates, the soul as Antoinette discovers what it is she must do. She has broken away from the imitation of life in Thornfield Hall and has chosen to shield the flame, the strength, that transforms her soul in phoenix flame. In all Rhys's novels, fire is an image of beauty and strength. The light from the sun is gold in the Dominica of Voyage In The Dark, and "when you shut your eyes you see fire color." Marya, in Quartet, envisions dreams that are "many-colored and dark shot with flame"; the flame in Marya kicks like an "unborn child." In Good Morning, Midnight, Sasha wants more of the miracle of "fire and wings." Julia Griffiths in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, like Rhys in Smile Please, thinks "if I could get to the end of what I was feeling it would be the truth about myself and about the world and about everything that one puzzles and pains about all the time." Strength must be in her if only she can get to it. For a moment, she does: "… in a miraculous manner, some essence of her was shooting upwards like a flame. She was great." She is not only like a flame; she is a flame, defiantly "shooting upwards not to plead but to threaten." But the moment vanishes: the "flame sank down again, useless, having reached nothing." It is moonstruck Antoinette who finally experiences the miracle of "fire and wings." Some essence of her miraculously shoots upward. For a moment, the candle flickers, but Antoinette shields the flame with her hand, and it burns brightly to light her along the dark passage. Antoinette, like Robin in that old song Rochester thought he had forgotten, paradoxically shines bright in death: "Hail to the queen of the silent night, / Shine bright, shine bright Robin as you die."

Antoinette's dream of her own death has been variously interpreted as a triumph, a nihilistic embrace of nothingness, or an agnostic cry for redemption. To interpret Antoinette's death negatively, however, is to ignore the fact that Wide Sargasso Sea depends upon paradox. For example, Aschom argues that because Antoinette dies in the conflagration, she necessarily wants "not merely retaliation but personal annihilation. So much of herself has she lost already that to lose all is best." This interpretation is justified only if we accept a literal reading of the novel, but death and life come so close in Wide Sargasso Sea that every boundary line is a myth. Rochester knows that Antoinette has the secret hidden in wild, untouched Granbois: Granbois, where "everything is too much…. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near." It has a "disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret." But Antoinette knows: "Always this talk of death. (Is she trying to tell me that is the secret of this place? That there is no other way. She knows. She knows)." Later, Rochester realizes that everything he has "imagined to be true was false. False." Is this the secret? "Always this talk of death." Always the coexistence of death and life, shadow and light, death and beatitude. When Antoinette was a child, Christophine sang to her "about the cedar tree flowers which only last for a day," but, at the same time, Antoinette was "sure everything was alive, not only the river or the rain, but chairs, looking-glasses, cups, saucers, everything." Wide Sargasso Sea so depends upon the co-inherence of life and death and the crossing of familiar barriers between dream and reality that Antoinette's death can be understood in terms of the web of paradox in the novel.

Antoinette comes to her own understanding of the paradox inherent in Christianity during her stay at the convent, a "place of sunshine and death" where "everything was brightness, or dark." The co-inherence of opposites suggests the paradox that Rhys explores: "That was how it was, light and dark, sun and shadow, Heaven and Hell, for one of the nuns knew all about Hell and who does not? But another one knew about Heaven and the attributes of the blessed, of which the least is transcendent beauty." For a long time, Antoinette prays to die so that she can experience the ecstasy of the blessed. Underlying her prayer is the belief that death is necessary for rebirth. But she is told that it is another sin—"presumption or despair"—to pray for death and transcendent beauty. Sin or not, she prays for the blessed attributes to transform the motif of death that permeates convent life: after the meal, there is always the prayer "now and at the hour of our death, and at midday and at six in the evening, now and at the hour of our death. Let perpetual light shine on them." Her mother "hated a strong light and loved the cool and the shade"; thus, Antoinette refuses to say "Let perpetual light shine on them." Outside, the "shifting shadows [are] more beautiful than any perpetual light could be." The co-inherence of death and beatitude, of "great splashes of sunlight" and the "shadows of trees" fires Antoinette's soul. The blessed attributes cannot be symbolized by perpetual light or disembodied essence but by "something tangible," like the brilliant silk roses Antoinette colors green, blue, and purple or the fire-red dress with which she later identifies. Antoinette discovers happiness in "the blazing colours of flowers" in a "place of sunshine and death" and finds her identity in "the colour of fire and sunset. The colour of flamboyant flowers." She wonders and soon forgets about happiness but thinks "about changing now and the hour of our death for it is all we have."

To change now and the hour of our death is to discover the blessed attributes, not in the glaring perpetual light of the absolute but in "something you can touch and hold." Antoinette longs to discover in earthly existence, "In all poor foolish things that live a day, / Eternal beauty wandering on her way." Where among the pale flowers too fragile to resist the wind is the rose that has never faded? At the convent, Mother St. Justin tells the story of a saint who brings a rose to her earthly lover from the Garden of the Eternal Spouse: "'Here Theophilus is a rose from the garden of my Spouse, in whom you did not believe.' The rose he found by his side when he awoke has never faded. It still exists. (Oh, but where, where?)." While the flowers fade and fall in a day, Antoinette looks for the never-fading rose from the sensuous sacred garden of spousal love. Mother St. Justin's story combines immortality and earthly existence in the symbol of the rose that never fades. It exists. It combines "immateriality and mysterious substantiality" (Palace). Perhaps like Antoinette, who knows yet never knows the time, the rose also knows but never knows time. No dichotomy exists between immortality and mortality, magic and reality, sunlight and shadow. To find the rose from the Garden of the Eternal Spouse is, paradoxically, to know eternity in time and to transform now and the hour of our death.

Antoinette longs for the metaphysical wedding of opposites, but in her marriage to Rochester she does not find the eternal rose from the sacred garden. But there are roses. At the honeymoon house when Hilda brings coffee, there are "always two roses on the tray." One day, when Rochester touches the full-blown pink rose and its petals drop at his touch, he wonders, "Is that poem true? Have all beautiful things sad destinies?" It can be almost any poem, perhaps one such as this:

        But pleasures are like poppies spread,
     You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;
     Or like the snow falls in the river,
     A moment white—then melts for ever.

For Rochester, the sentiment of that poem is true. He finds the secret hidden in Granbois and is determined to keep it, to hold it fast, as he would hold Antoinette. But as he seizes the secret of the rose, "its bloom is shed." And always, Antoinette is the solitary queen of the silent night whose "long, sad, dark, alien eyes" never reveal their secret. She is like the solitary mountain bird: "Oh, a heartstopper is the solitaire's one note—high, sweet, lonely, magic." "She was silence itself," as silent as this "beautiful place—wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret."

Derek Walcott aptly describes that wild silence in his poem "Jean Rhys":

     In that fierce hush
     between Dominican mountains
     the child expects a sound
     from a butterfly clipping itself to a bush
     like a gold earring to a black maid's ear.

The "fierce hush" disturbs Rochester. Neither the landscape nor Antoinette can (or will) break the silence; "No one would tell [him] the truth." Rochester's image of Antoinette—the orchid—symbolizes the paradox that life and death not only come close in the darkness but are the same. Paradoxically, the orchid, one of the most beautiful flowers, lives from dead and decaying matter. As Rochester "passed an orchid with long sprays of golden-brown flowers," he remembers telling Antoinette that the orchids are like her. Because no one will tell him the secret the orchid symbolizes, however, he breaks one of the long sprays and tramples it in the mud: "Its bloom is shed." Always there is talk of death; always there is the orchid's silence, as hushed as the child's sigh in Walcott's "Jean Rhys":

     And the sigh of that child
     is white as an orchid
     on a crusted log
     in the bush of Dominica.

Rochester comes to hate beautiful Granbois, its magic and indifference, and the secret he will never know. Above all, he hates Antoinette because "she belonged to the magic and the loveliness." She is intuitive, even prophetic, but certainly not matter-of-fact; she is undecided and uncertain about facts. Moonstruck Antoinette overcomes the usual limitations of space and time and, in the final conflagration, destroys the "cardboard" security of Thornfield Hall. Like Julia Griffiths, she strains to "see what is behind the cardboard." During her mother's funeral, Julia thinks that "she was so close to seeing the thing that was behind all this talking and posturing, and that the talking and the posturing were there to prevent her from seeing it." The false security of Thornfield Hall, like the posturing of ritual, hides the darkness and death within. It is women such as Grace Poole, Mrs. Eff, and Leah who refuse to confront their own darkness, who cling to a "shelter from the world outside which, say what you like, can be a black and cruel world to a woman." For some of Rhys's characters, "the secret of life was never to go too far or too deep," and for others, the "shadow can be more important than the substance." In Quartet, the Heidlers believe that life should have a "surface of grace, lightness, and gaiety"; but Antoinette knows that we are "neither cosy nor playful" but swaying out on the "cornice that overhangs the unabiding void." In confronting that void, that death, she learns what it is she must do: the secret is all about changing now and the hour of our death, for that is all we have.

Antoinette is like the swimmer in Margaret Avison's "The Swimmer's Moment," who recognizes the whirlpool and "dare[s] the knowledge." "For everyone / The swimmer's moment at the whirlpool comes," but many, like Grace Poole, refuse to contest the "deadly rapids" and choose, rather, to remain on the "rim of suction." Those "bland-blank faces," which refuse to go beyond all the talking and posturing, also shrink from the struggle for what Harris calls "that harmonious rounded miracle of spirit which the world of appearances has never truly known" (Palace). Avison writes about a similar experience, using different images. Those who refuse the whirlpool are not only saved from contesting the rapids but never emerge in "the mysterious, and more ample, further waters." The swimmer who descends into the "black pit" may be one of the few who experiences the rounded miracle of spirit—those who come to "the silver reaches of the estuary." Rhys and Avison use the familiar paradox of life in death so that the images in Wide Sargasso Sea and "The Swimmer's Moment" suggest resurrection and triumph in death rather than a nihilistic embrace of nothingness. But if only a few come to the "silver reaches of the estuary," what happens to those who dare the knowledge, yet do not emerge in the mysterious further waters? They are the ones who are "whirled into the ominous centre which seals up / For them an eternal boon of privacy": they are sealed in their own silence, not able to speak their knowledge. We turn away from them "with a despair, not from their deaths, but for / Ourselves, who cannot penetrate their secret." Rochester turns away from Antoinette, and very soon, he says, she will join all those who dare the knowledge, "who know the secret and will not tell it. Or cannot. Or try and fail because they do not know enough."

Antoinette's secret is as sealed as the pirates' knowledge of treasure; those who find the jewels never tell "because you see they'd only get one-third then: that's the law of treasure." The pirates want it all, so it is better not to tell, not to speak of the treasure. For a moment, before they leave England, Rochester wistfully imagines that they can be like the swaggering pirates who make the most and worst of what they have, that perhaps one day they will watch the sunset and see the "Emerald drop" of the sky, but Antoinette is as silent as "an orchid / on a crusted log."

Antoinette's knowledge is born of dream and madness. The line Rochester draws, Antoinette crosses out; the barriers he builds, she destroys. Her secret and her madness frustrate Rochester's sane need to provide a material nexus to bind her spirit, a need that is illustrated by his childish scribble of a woman standing in a third-floor room of a large house. Presumably this is Antoinette imprisoned in Thornfield Hall. But the lines of such a house cannot contain the secret and the dream. Rhys uses a sequence of dreams not only to foretell and to parallel Antoinette's experience but to reveal how Antoinette's knowledge transcends ordinary perception.

In the first fragment of her dream, Antoinette is walking in a forest where someone who hates her follows out of sight. In the second fragment, it is Antoinette who follows the man, whose face is "black with hatred." She is sick with fear, but "if anyone were to try and save [her, she] would refuse. This must happen." Soon Antoinette and the man are no longer in the forest "but in an enclosed garden surrounded by a stone wall and the trees are different trees." She touches a tree and tries to hold on, but it sways as though it were trying to cast her off. These images recall Anna Morgan's dream in Voyage In The Dark, in which Anna is on a ship "sailing very close to an island, which was home except that the trees were all wrong. These were English trees." Antoinette's dream foretells her voyage to England. The voyage into darkness is inevitable; it must happen so that finally Antoinette is the only one, among Grace Poole and the others, who does not accept the thick walls of Thornfield Hall. She "lives in her own darkness," but "I'll say one thing for her, she hasn't lost her spirit. She's still fierce."

But Antoinette's prophetic knowledge is not only articulated in dreams. In Part Two, she consciously foretells the future in an intuitive remembrance: "For I know that house where I will be cold and not belonging, the bed I shall lie in has red curtains and I have slept there many times before, long ago. How long ago? In that bed I will dream the end of my dream." For Antoinette, time is not linear, but fluid. Like the narrator of Palace of the Peacock, we may ask

Was it possible that one's memory and apprehension of a tragic event would strike one's spirit before the actual happening had been digested? Could a memory spring from nowhere into one's belly and experience? I knew that if I was dreaming I could pinch myself and wake. But an undigested morsel of recollection erased all present waking sensation and evoked a future time, petrifying and painful, confused and unjust.

Antoinette's "undigested morsel of recollection" evokes the future when she will dream the end of her dream and finally answer, "What is it that [she] must do?"

In Part Three, the red dress, "the colour of fire and sunset," suggests "the colour of flamboyant flowers. 'If you are buried under a flamboyant tree,' I said, 'your soul is lifted up when it flowers. Everyone wants that.'" The paradox of the buried, then flowering soul has all the conventional connotations of phoenix, rebirth, and resurrection, but it also recalls the importance Rochester assigns the tree image. The hurricane months are not far off when he imagines the trees striking their "roots deeper, making ready to fight the wind." Some, like the royal palms, take the hard way; they defy the wind, but the bamboos bend to the earth and cry for mercy: "the contemptuous wind passes, not caring for these abject things." Rochester himself will not touch Antoinette, "excepting as the hurricane will touch that tree—and break it." Rhys carries the tree image into Antoinette's final dream, where the tree of life is in flames: this is Antoinette, a defiant flame shooting upward, not an abject creature crying mercy against a contemptuous wind. It is an image that combines the resurrection theme associated with the flamboyant tree, the paradox inherent in the symbol of fire, and Antoinette's earlier prayer for death and the blessed attributes.

Antoinette's longing for the lifting up of the soul is analogous to that "immortal passion" in Yeats's "The Travail of Passion":

     When the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide;
     When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay;
     Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way.

The theme of immortal passion is a perennial one, one to which Leonardo da Vinci alluded when he compared man with moths flying into the candle flame; for man's longing to return to his origins contains the seeds of his destruction, and yet it is the essence of life. Rhys symbolizes this paradox in the "procession of moths and beetles fly[ing] into the candle flame": they are attracted to the light but to their deaths as well. Rochester is drawn to the flame, longing for the secret, but he is rather like the bird-like moth that "blundered into one of the candles, put it out and fell to the floor," whereas Antoinette, at the end of the novel, shields the flame, and it burns brightly.

William MacNamara tells a story that provides an interesting parallel to Rhys's story of Antoinette:

I think of the young novice in the desert who went to the elder, the holy man of God, and said: "father, according as I am able. I keep my little Rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation, and contemplative silence; and according as I am able, I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts. Now, what more should I do?" The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He said: "Why not be totally changed into fire?"

Antoinette ventures a jail break, a transformation at the hour of her death when she refuses to live as Rochester's marionette: "Marionette, Antoinette, Marionetta, Antoinetta." This is a redeeming change from the Marya of Quartet, who to the very end "felt like a marionette, as though something outside her were jerking strings." Marya cannot get to her strength, but Antoinette reaches the flame and is totally changed into fire. Perhaps Antoinette would say, like Margaret Avison, "nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes. / The optic heart must venture: a jail-break / And recreation."

The pattern of images in Wide Sargasso Sea suggests that Antoinette's death is a re-creation. Obviously and literally, death is death, and there is the end; but, because Rhys focuses upon the paradox of transforming the hour of death, Antoinette's death should probably be read in terms of transformation and paradox. If everything is within her all along, Antoinette perhaps discovers, like the characters in Palace of the Peacock, that "each of us now held at last in his arms what he had been forever seeking and what he had eternally possessed." But Antoinette's death is neither absolute triumph nor absolute failure. Rather, the image of death in her final dream mixes the "twin fantasy of death-in-life and life-in-death," the smell of dead flowers and the fresh living smell, the buried but flowering soul, the prayer for death and the blessed attributes, and the immortal passion that draws the moth to the candle flame. Here is the secret. When Antoinette awakens from her dream, her strength guides her along the dark passageway, and she knows in the moment of epiphany that no one on "earth can truly understand the fortune of love and the art of victory over death without mixing blind joy and sadness and the sense of being lost with the nearness of being found" (Palace).