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Dreams propel the plot, delineate a narrative time, reveal the transformative presence of African philosophy, and drive action in Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966). Antoinette (the main character in the novel) has a series of dreams that are united through the textual appearence of a dress and/or a candle: two symbolic markers that create a subtle, codified rhythm that eventually reaches a climax at the end of the novel when the dream creates and becomes “reality”.
Antoinette’s dream of following a man to what appears to be her own rape foreshadows her future relationship with Rochester (the main character’s husband). It also foreshadows that the dream world itself will be a powerful force that addresses or alludes to time, religion, and culture as seen in Wide Sargasso Sea. Immediately after being told of a future European visitor, Antoinette has the horrifying dream in which:
I am wearing a long dress and thin slippers, and so I walk with difficulty, following the man who is with me and holding up the skirt of my dress. It is white and beautiful and I don’t wish to get it soiled. I follow him, sick with fear but I make no effort to save myself; if anyone were to try to save me I would refuse. This must happen.(1)
The idea that ‘this must happen’ implies that a greater force is guiding her path: her fate is determined, and she follows alone without resistance. In Obeah, Shango, and several other Yoruba-influenced, New World religions that are present in the novel (and that Rhys was familiar with both in Dominica and Britain), a devotee is said to have kneeled down to the supreme god before his/her birth and received their destiny, path, personal Orisha, unique Ashé, and inner and outer attributes.(2) According to the mentioned religions, the devotee must follow this destiny, path, and the wishes of their personal Orisha. Following the path of Orisha and surrendering oneself are fundamental in the practice of many African-American religions and characterize the actions which dominate this particular dream. The white dress, described in more detail later, is also very significant in Yoruba-influenced religions as it is the color of Obatalá, father of all the Orishas and the color which practitioners use in many rituals.
Amidst what seems to be a great amount of reference to African religion, the structure of time in the narrative becomes an important sub-theme: “the seconds pass and each one is a thousand years.”(3) Antoinette’s experience of time is distorted as she follows the man, and moves towards that which “must happen.”(4) This is “the second time” she had her dream, implying a history and connection which reaches back to a time before the reader, before the speaker yet returned to the present.(5) The dream is retold in the present tense, changing the reader’s sense of time to suit Antoinette’s change of the experience of time within the dream. Antoinette indicates that the dream refers to the “Outside”, insinuating that the time, and the events within the dream are a reality which may function like a language, and one which can be expressed to those looking ‘within’ or ‘inside’.
Antoinette’s next dream is interrupted by the presence and subsequent absence of two enormous rats on the sill. Place in the novel (the heat of that night, the heat from the sea) is alluded to through a white chemise that sticks to Antoinette’s body. Thus, the land is now speaking through her dress. The main character, “stared at them and they did not move. I could see myself in the looking-glass the other side of the room, in my white chemise with a frill round the neck, staring at those rats and the rats quite still, staring at me.”(6) Perhaps Antoinette is not frightened because she is aware of what the rats are seeing; she knows that she exists in the mirror’s reflection. When she wakes to find that the rats have left, it is the memory of their presence -- their continued presence in their absence -- that frightens her most. One can assume that the reflection of herself, although she is no longer looking at the rats, remains on the other side of the room. Now she is left to see only the image of herself and (as she floats between “Creole”, “British”, “White cockroach”, and a host of other identities throughout the novel) this confrontation with herself in the mirror is quite troublesome to Antoinette.
Rhys, through dream, through presence, is indirectly utilizing an African-rooted philosophy that understands the cosmos as two distinct (the material/physical world and intangible/ spiritual world) yet inseparable realms.(7) Throughout areas influenced by the Yoruba, the physical world is often described as populated by countless forces, spirits, and ancestors that do not necessarily manifest optically. Rhys alludes to the power of the unseen, the presence surrounding absence, and at the same time connects Antoinette back to herself through the reflection. In a physical world that is inhabited by, and inseparable from the spiritual, one’s identity forms as much through the intangible as the tangible. Similarly, through staring/mirror gazing, Rhys unites Antoinette with herself and with an invisible world that is very much alive.
Antoinette then goes to the veranda where she sleeps beneath an equally still and staring moon. Christophine, a practitioner of Obeah, warns that it is very bad to “sleep in the moonlight when the moon is full.”(8) Again, the connection between the dream, the self, the religions, and cultures of the Caribbean are emphasized. Immediately after this scene, Rhys makes reference to two candles burning in the room, a symbol (akin to the dress) which will be repeated in and around later dreams. Rochester’s dream is connected to the Obeah love potion when:
I woke in the dark after dreaming that I was buried alive, and when I was awake the feeling of suffocation persisted. Something was lying across my mouth; hair with a sweet heavy smell. I threw it off but still I could not breathe. I shut my eyes and lay without moving for a few seconds. When I opened them I saw the candles burnt down on that abominable dressing-table, then I knew where I was.(9)
The reference to the ‘dressing-table’ (uncannily similar to ‘dress’) and the candles will connect once again to a dream pattern (a time pattern as well) that incorporates all of the dreams throughout the novel. Time, influenced greatly by Obeah “magic” in this particular scene, is measured by the burning candles on the dressing table. Similarly, the burning candles provide Rochester’s reference point to where he is and they form part of his memory which links the narrative’s “real” and dream worlds. Further, the above citation illustrates the manner in which Rhys is literally bringing the implied ‘dress’ and the candle on top of the other while Obeah practice surrounds and fills the air.
A dream language is developing from both within and “outside”, and importantly, a certain tension is building through the contact. It is just after this scene that Rochester and Amélie have sex behind the partition and the former comments to Antoinette, “‘a very graceful dress,’ I said and she showed me the many ways it could be worn, trailing on the floor, lifted to show a lace petticoat, or hitched up far above the knee.”(10) After telling Antoinette that he will soon be leaving the island, Rochester thinks to himself, “She wanted, it seemed, to join her sister who was a dressmaker in Demerara”, the city of gold and in 1823, site of one of the largest slave uprisings in the New World.(11) The dream, in it’s relationship to the dress, is now implicated in rebellion and revolution.
The end of Wide Sargasso Sea, “the third time I had my dream…”, confirms the power of dreams in the novel. In the final scenes, Antoinette dreams of burning down her home and subsequently proceeds to destroy the house. Again, the dress and candle are the physical markers that Rhys uses to indicate a fluidity and connecting quality among the dreams in the novel. If dreams are the heart of the novel, then the dress and the candle are the body that covers it.
In her third dream, Antoinette was being followed: a reversal or perhaps a reflection of her earlier dream.(12) She states that red and white (both of which were the colors of dresses that she wore, and highly significant in Yoruba-influenced New World religions), “reminded me of a church.”(13) Colors often represent the temperament of the Orishas, and also coincide with the Catholic Saints that “covered” the African spirits when African slaves were allowed only to worship catholic idols. Interestingly, time is alluded to through the ticking of the gold clock -- time and gold being an “idol which they [the European colonial powers] worship.”(14) Thus, Rhys is implying the destruction of power, perhaps revolution against the church, a concept of time, a corresponding system of logic and values when in the dream, “I knocked them all down. Most of them went out but one caught the thin curtains that were behind the red ones.”(15)
Before the final dream “I looked at the dress on the floor and it was as if the fire had spread across the room. It was beautiful and reminded me of something I must do.”(16) The dream and its material counterparts -- its markers, indicators, conductors, instruments of connection (i.e. the dress and the candle) -- are now unified inside and outside of the dream. Rhys has brought them to a level of action, in which the dress and candle play vital roles in the formation of events. When Antoinette states: “Time has no meaning… something you can touch and hold like my red dress, that has a meaning”, and, reminded by this same dress, “Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do.” she realizes that she must burn the house/structure that entraps her.
A dress simultaneously covers, marks, conceals, and communicates the body in the same ways that the dress in Wide Sargasso Sea covers and surrounds the dreams. The dress is a flag that Rhys waves to capture attention. But whose attention? As the novel is an extension of the English canonical classic Jane Eyre, it seems evident that a British audience and literary tradition is being addressed. And so the idea emerges: dreams (these beings that have profound connection to religion, culture, and time) in their indirect nature, have been the hidden warrior spirit – marked by the Yoruba warrior colors of red and white -- in an otherwise non-threatening novel. They are, quite possibly, the concealed hatred and mocking of Britain, unknowingly digested by a Euro-centric audience that is convinced it is reading a “rewrite”, or a “reproduction”, of a favorite novel.
Works Cited
(1) Rhys, Jean Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1999. (35-6),
(2) Thompson, Robert Farris Flash of the Spirit. New York: Vintage Books, 1984.
(3) Rhys 36
(4) Rhys 36
(5) Rhys 35
(6) Rhys 49
(7) Thompson
(8) Rhys 49
(9) Rhys 82-83
(10) Rhys 84
(11) Norton Prologue (Rhys)
(12) Rhys 111
(13) Rhys 111
(14) Rhys 111
(15) Rhys 111
(16) Rhys 111
(Jacob Dyer-Spiegel © 2006. All Rights Reserved.)