Wide Sargasso Sea

Antoinette narrates that she now lives in a sparsely furnished room with no mirror. A woman named Grace Poole has become Antoinette’s caretaker in England and sleeps in her room with her. Antoinette no longer knows what she looks like. At night, she dreams about taking Grace’s keys and seeing what exists outside of her room. In one dream, she imagines that the walls of the house are made of cardboard. She doesn’t believe that she’s in England.

One day, Antoinette sees a girl in a white dress coming out of her bedroom. Grace tells Antoinette that her brother Richard visited her. Antoinette denies that she has a brother. Grace tells her that Richard didn’t recognize Antoinette and that she attacked him with a knife. Richard, she says, will not return. Grace wonders where Antoinette got the knife, figuring that she must have gotten it on the day that Grace took her outside. Indeed, Antoinette bought the knife from a woman driving a cart and horse in exchange for the locket around her neck. Grace had taken her to a place near the water with “grass and olive-green water and tall trees” (109). Antoinette felt that this place was the true England and that she could “get well again” in this place (109).