What happens in Part Two of Wide Sargasso Sea?
Part Two opens with a striking change in perspective: Rochester, who remains unnamed throughout, takes over the narration as he and Antoinette make their way to Granbois, the secluded mountain estate in Dominica that is part of her dowry. The journey feels like a descent into an alien, overwhelming landscape — dense forests, unfamiliar heat, and creole servants watching with guarded eyes. Rochester notes his unease with a clinical detachment, appreciating the house's beauty while also cataloging everything that disturbs him: the overly vivid flowers, the silence that feels heavy, and the nagging sense that he has been pushed into a marriage he barely agreed to. In contrast, Antoinette navigates Granbois with a sense of ease and belonging that she has never displayed in his presence before. The couple’s first nights together are charged yet unstable — a mix of desire and estrangement coexisting in the same space. Rochester starts reading a letter from Daniel Cosway, which sows the first seeds of doubt about Antoinette's family history and her own mental health. By the end of this section, their marriage is already showing signs of strain: Rochester retreats into cold observation, while Antoinette reaches out to him across a growing divide she cannot yet articulate.
Analysis
Rhys's decision to let Rochester take over the narration is one of the most talked-about choices in the novel. His voice is sharp, factual, and almost clinical, creating a stark contrast to Antoinette's rich, sensory writing in Part One. The result is striking: the Caribbean landscape, which Antoinette sees as a safe haven, is reinterpreted as menacing, overwhelming, and mysterious. Rhys uses this tonal clash to reveal the colonial perspective in real time; Rochester doesn't just misunderstand Granbois, he actively denies it.
The theme of naming — or not naming — comes into sharp focus here. Rochester will later call Antoinette "Bertha," but he starts by consistently reducing her inner self to mere symptoms. Daniel Cosway's letter serves as a plot device but also symbolizes this dynamic: Rochester prioritizes written "evidence" over lived experience, valuing documents more than the person.
Granbois itself is a transitional space — neither fully English nor entirely part of the colonial plantation world, but something older and harder to define. Rhys fills the setting with sensory richness (like the scent of frangipani and the overwhelming nature of the forest) to illustrate how Rochester's aesthetic judgments completely fail here. The marriage bed, seen rather than described, becomes another boundary: it creates not connection but deeper isolation. The tone shifts between Rochester's restrained irony and moments of almost involuntary awe, and it is within those gaps that Rhys allows the reader to glimpse what he cannot acknowledge in himself.
Key quotes from Part Two
“Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near.”
Rochester catalogues the Dominican landscape on the ride to Granbois, his syntax enacting the sensory overwhelm he cannot process or control.
“I did not love her. I was thirsty for her, but that is not love. I felt very little tenderness for her, she was a stranger to me, a stranger who did not think or feel as I did.”
Rochester reflects on his feelings for Antoinette during their early days at Granbois, articulating the dissociation between desire and intimacy that will corrode the marriage.
“She never blinks at all, I've noticed. Long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either.”
Rochester scrutinises Antoinette's face, his observation sliding from intimacy into taxonomy — the colonial impulse to classify what he cannot understand.
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Create an accountSign inVocabulary in Part Two
- wearily
- In a way that shows exhaustion and lack of energy, moving or acting as though drained of strength and spirit.
- alien
- Deeply foreign and strange, belonging to a world or nature that feels utterly unlike one's own experience or expectations.
- Creole
- Describing a person of European ancestry born and raised in the Caribbean colonies, belonging fully to neither the European nor the local Black community.
- descent
- Family ancestry or lineage; the ethnic or national background inherited from one's parents and ancestors.
- thirsty for
- Feeling an intense, consuming physical desire or craving for someone, distinct from genuine emotional love or tenderness.
- tenderness
- Gentle, warm affection and care felt toward another person, going beyond physical attraction to genuine emotional closeness.