What happens in Part Two of Wide Sargasso Sea?
In this crucial chapter of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, Rochester—who is never named in the novel—makes the irreversible choice to leave Granbois, the Creole estate he has shared with Antoinette since their marriage. After acting on Daniel Cosway's malicious letter and having slept with the servant Amélie while Antoinette listened, Rochester now moves through the house with a cold, calculated detachment. Antoinette, shattered by his cruelty and the obeah drink she convinced Christophine to prepare, retreats into a glassy, dissociated state that Rochester interprets not as grief but as madness—a conclusion he has already reached. He orders the household to get ready for their departure, ignoring Christophine's passionate confrontation where she demands he either treat Antoinette fairly or let her go. Rochester dismisses both demands. He organizes the journey to Spanish Town and, consequently, to England, effectively sealing Antoinette's fate as a captive. The lush, oppressive landscape of Dominica—which has never felt like home to Rochester—is depicted one last time in its full, indifferent beauty, highlighting the violence of his departure.
Analysis
Rhys uses Rochester's first-person narration here as a prime example of unreliable interiority. His writing is sharp and rational at moments when it should feel most chaotic, and this very control becomes a critique in itself. The key moment in the chapter is the confrontation with Christophine, which Rhys sets up as a formal debate that Rochester wins legally but loses morally. Christophine's direct speech—raw and rhythmically different from Rochester's measured tones—serves as a counter-narrative that the text refuses to silence, even when Rochester tries to. The landscape motif, rich and menacing throughout Part Two, takes on a somber tone here: the forest and mountains are described with a sense of finality that feels like an elegy, reflecting the natural world's mourning for what the human characters cannot openly articulate. Rhys also sharpens the Gothic elements of Jane Eyre; Rochester's choice to label Antoinette as mad is revealed to be a conscious decision rather than a mere discovery, exposing the colonial and patriarchal reasoning behind Brontë's original work. The obeah subplot reveals its bitter irony: the love potion Antoinette hoped would bind Rochester only reinforces his belief that she is dangerous and foreign. Imprisonment—legal, spatial, psychological—emerges as the novel's central theme, and Rhys clearly illustrates how the cage is being constructed in this chapter, plank by careful plank.
Key quotes from Part Two
“She was my wife and I was told what to do. I did it.”
Rochester reflects on his compliance with colonial and familial arrangements, his syntax enacting the very passivity he uses to deflect moral responsibility.
“She is not béké like you, but she is béké, and not like us either. She is in between, and that is the trouble.”
Christophine diagnoses Antoinette's impossible social position to Rochester, articulating the novel's core argument about racial and cultural liminality.
“I watched her die many times. In my way, not in hers.”
Rochester's admission, buried in detached syntax, that his psychological erasure of Antoinette precedes and precipitates her physical confinement.
Check your understanding
Ask about this work
The reader has this chapter in front of it — the summary, the analysis, the key quotes and the vocabulary — along with the rest of the book’s chapters. Ask what happens and why it matters, or push back on a reading.
It cites the chapter or the line it is working from, and it says so plainly when the guide doesn’t cover something. It’s instructed never to write an essay, a paragraph or an answer for you to hand in, and never to grade anything — it will show you how to approach the question instead.
Sign in to ask the reader about this work — 1 credit a message.
Create an accountSign inVocabulary in Part Two
- béké
- A Caribbean Creole term for a white person of European origin living in the West Indies, used here to mark racial and social identity in the colonial hierarchy.
- in between
- Occupying an uncertain social and racial position that belongs fully to neither one group nor the other, leaving a person without a clear community or identity.