What happens in Part Three of Wide Sargasso Sea?
Part Three is the shortest and most explosive section of the novel, told entirely from Antoinette’s perspective—referred to as Bertha by Rochester—while she is locked away in the attic of Thornfield Hall. Confused by the cold, the darkness, and the gradual fading of her identity, she navigates the days in a haze of fragmented memories. Grace Poole keeps watch over her, and Antoinette manages to sneak away with a candle, carrying it through the quiet house. She glides past the red room that haunted her childhood and catches a glimpse of the world below: the gold and red tapestries, the figures asleep. The recurring dream she has been having throughout the novel finally comes together—she sees herself setting fire to Thornfield, jumping from the battlements, and soaring into the sky. Awakening with the candle still in her grasp, she moves with grim determination toward the curtains. The novel concludes not with the act itself but as she stands on the brink of it, Antoinette stepping forward into the inferno she has already envisioned in her dream, reclaiming—through destruction—the only power left to her.
Analysis
Jean Rhys concludes Wide Sargasso Sea with a section that leans more towards vision than narrative, and that tonal compression is intentional. Part Three reduces language to its simplest form—short, direct sentences and an urgent present tense—reflecting Antoinette's diminished reality: she has no name, no landscape, no trustworthy past. Rhys has been guiding us toward this blend of dream and action since the recurring nightmare in Part One, and here she completely merges the two. The candle Antoinette carries becomes a literal symbol of the novel: the Caribbean warmth and color she’s been denied, now turned into a weapon. Rhys also executes a subtle intertextual twist. By finishing where Jane Eyre initiates its most gothic elements, she challenges Brontë's portrayal of Bertha as merely a threat; instead, the fire represents an act of self-authorship, the only sentence Antoinette can write. The red-and-gold imagery—echoing from Coulibri, from Antoinette's dress, from the parrot’s feathers—returns in the flames, bringing vibrancy back to a world drained of color by England. Importantly, Rhys holds back the act itself. We conclude on motion, with the word "now," denying the reader the voyeuristic satisfaction of spectacle and emphasizing that the decision is what truly matters, not the destruction.
Key quotes from Part Three
“I know what I have to do now and it is all that is left to me to do.”
Antoinette speaks with quiet finality after her dream resolves, the sentence enacting the collapse of uncertainty that has defined her entire existence.
“There is no looking-glass here and I don't know what I am like now. I remember watching myself brush my hair and how my eyes looked back at me. The girl I saw was myself yet not quite myself.”
Confined in the attic, Antoinette registers the theft of her reflection—and by extension her identity—in a passage that crystallises the novel's preoccupation with doubling and self-alienation.
“Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do.”
The line immediately precedes Antoinette's movement toward the curtains with the candle, fusing the prophetic logic of her recurring dream with irrevocable waking action.