What happens in Part Three of Wide Sargasso Sea?
Part Three is the shortest and most intense section of the novel, told entirely from Antoinette's perspective — now called Bertha and locked away in the attic of Thornfield Hall. She wakes up feeling confused, unable to tell whether she is dreaming or awake, and is looked after by Grace Poole, whose rum-drinking and silent demeanor provide the only human interaction she has. Antoinette feels the English cold as a physical blow and perceives the darkness of the house as a way to erase her existence. She remembers bits and pieces: the red dress, Rochester's face, the voyage across the sea. One night, she takes Grace's candle and wanders through the sleeping house, passing by the portraits on the walls and the bedroom where a woman lies next to an unnamed man. She sets the house on fire, catches a glimpse of the battlements, and in the novel's last lines, she sees Coulibri burning in her mind — her childhood home — and hears Christophine calling her name. She jumps. The story doesn't end with a confirmed death but rather captures the moment of the leap, suspended in the imagery of flight and return.
Analysis
Rhys compresses the final section into something resembling a prose poem rather than a traditional chapter, and this formal tightening serves as a craft argument: Antoinette's inner world has been so thoroughly colonized that only fragments remain. The present tense, introduced here for the first time in the novel, merges past and future into a single, intense moment—an approach that reflects Antoinette's fragmented sense of time. The candle becomes the novel's most significant object: light representing agency, fire as the sole form of communication left to her after her speech and identity have been taken away. Rhys turns the Gothic tradition she inherits from Jane Eyre on its head; the madwoman is not the lurking threat behind the door but the consciousness the reader has been experiencing all along, allowing us to see Brontë's Bertha as a person rather than merely a plot device. The red dress, remembered in flashes, connects Part Three back to the vibrant colors of Part One's Caribbean setting—red symbolizing vitality, desire, and danger all at once. The final vision of Coulibri signifies not a retreat but a reclamation: if Antoinette dies, she moves toward home rather than away from it. Christophine's voice is the last sound heard, reinforcing the Creole maternal lineage that Rochester's renaming attempted to cut off, and the leap itself defies the passive confinement represented by the attic.
Key quotes from Part Three
“'Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do.'”
Antoinette speaks to herself after taking the candle, the moment her fragmented consciousness coalesces into a single, irreversible intention.
“'I called 'Tia!' and jumped and woke.'”
The novel's closing lines, in which Antoinette's leap from the battlements merges with the childhood image of her friend Tia, fusing destruction and longing for belonging into one gesture.
“'There is no looking glass here and I don't know what I am like now.'”
Antoinette reflects on her imprisonment, the absent mirror signalling the complete erasure of self-image that Rochester's renaming and confinement have accomplished.
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Create an accountSign inVocabulary in Part Three
- looking glass
- A mirror; a reflective glass surface used to see one's own face and appearance.