Wide Sargasso Sea Part Two, Section One Summary & Analysis

Part Two opens with the ominous statement, "So it was all over." Hardly the words of a giddy newlywed, these first lines betray Rochester's immediate apprehensions regarding his hasty marriage to a woman whom he hardly knows. From his perspective, we see the idiosyncrasies of his Creole bride and the strangeness of the lush and wild tropical landscape. The trip away from Spanish Town and the honeymoon to a remote Windward Island reflects a movement away from the more colonial and "civilized" areas of the Caribbean to a more remote, pristine area of the West Indies, where nature dominates human affairs and views. As they move away from Spanish Town, Rochester's privilege as a white Englishman diminishes; he becomes an alien outsider, outnumbered by a community that is indifferent and hostile. His feeling of being watched in this section mirrors Antoinette's own paranoid fears in Part One. Here, Rochester, too, reads contempt in the faces of the black servants.

Rochester searches for traces of England in the strange world around him: he compares the red tropical land to parts of England, and finds books by Byron and Scott on the bookshelf. He tries to imagine his wife as a young English girl in an attempt to comfort himself in his decision to marry her. When Antoinette hands him a drink of water, Rochester imagines that "looking up smiling, she might have been any pretty English girl." He already wonders about the truth of her pure English descent, marveling at her interactions with the black servants and silently disapproving of her refusal to assert rank with them. He feels physically uncomfortable in the hot climate of the Indies: although mostly recovered from his fever, he still imagines that the green hills are closing in around him. From the outset of his story, Rochester often feels antagonized by a natural landscape that he associates with his wife and her Creole background.

As a small estate passed from mother to daughter, Granbois represents the Cosway women's inheritance. Significantly, it is far removed from Spanish Town, the white nexus of power in the West Indies. More intimately linked with the natural world and the Afro-Caribbean culture of magic, the Creole women in the Cosway family find their home on the outskirts of the colonial outposts. Necessarily, Rochester is an outsider in such a place. Even its very name, Granbois, which means "great forest," contributes to its atmosphere of isolation and mystery. As an allusion to Antoinette's recurring forest nightmare, the name foretells of violence and danger. That Granbois is located near the ominous-sounding Massacre further enhances its sense of threat.

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