Wide Sargasso Sea

The tree of life is mentioned twice in Wide Sargasso Sea: at the beginning when Antoinette is still living with her mother at Coulibri Estate and at the end when she is imprisoned at her husband’s home in England. The tree of life occupies the garden at Coulibri Estate and is likened to the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. While narrating a description of the garden, Antoinette explicitly likens its beauty to “that garden in the Bible” (10). The tree of life is the garden’s most prominent feature and, after the Cosways’ slaves are emancipated, the tree begins to grow wild, along with the other vegetation on the estate. The fact that it is untended implies that the Cosways have been abandoned to survive in an environment over which they no longer feel control.

The tree of life symbolizes the end of the Cosways’ idyllic years, when they were sheltered from the rest of the world as a result of the island’s insularity and their status within the plantation system. English opportunists arrive and bring with them different mores. The workers leave the plantation, forcing the white Creoles to cultivate their own land, though they are unprepared to perform this labor. The tree of life, like the Tree of Knowledge, signifies Antoinette’s increasing awareness of a life and a world beyond that which has been constructed for her.

At the end of the novel, Antoinette dreams that the tree of life has burst into flames, which is reminiscent of the burning bush in the Bible. The burning bush conveyed God’s message to Moses that he must lead the Israelites out of Egypt and toward Canaan. For Antoinette, the vision of the burning tree of life indicates that she must free herself from her husband.

Rhys makes note of the colors of two of Antoinette’s dresses. White is usually a symbol of innocence and purity, but the color can also symbolize death. The white dress first appears in a dream that Antoinette has shortly before she marries. In the dream, she is following a man through a forest, past Coulibri Estate, without a sense of where he is taking her. The hem of her dress trails along the ground, becoming sullied. This detail subtly suggests that she is somehow being spoiled by this journey. Rhys intimates that Antoinette will soon suffer a loss of innocence—not as a result of losing her virginity but as a result of experiencing her husband’s cruelty and betrayal.

In the dream, Antoinette senses the passage of time, which feels like thousands of years, as the man leads her further and further away from her place of origin. The dream is a premonition of the losses that Antoinette will suffer later in the novel—the loss of her home and that of her youth.

To hold on to her memories of the only things that felt real to her, she becomes attached to a red dress that she wore when she was young. She insists that the dress represents her true self and, when Grace Poole reminds her of how she attacked her stepbrother when he visited, Antoinette says that her brother would have better recognized her had she been wearing the red dress. Red usually symbolizes passion and sensuality. Here, the color also signifies a time when Antoinette’s existence felt real.

Rhys uses the dress motif to critique conventions around femininity. The white dress, which could double as a wedding dress, is a garment that Antoinette wears while in the midst of a nightmare about loss and betrayal—a nightmare that comes true after she is married. In Part Three, Antoinette sees a girl in a white dress emerge from her bedroom. Presumably, this girl is Jane Eyre, who will usurp Antoinette’s position as the husband’s wife. A red dress, in contrast, is the marker of a scandalous woman. Daniel Cosway and the husband accuse her of being morally reprobate. By embracing the red dress, she seems to be embracing the aspects of her character that Daniel and her husband used against her—her sensuality, her romanticism, and her connection to an island culture that encouraged an independence of spirit within her that was unacceptable to both men.