Wide Sargasso Sea: Irony 2 key examples

When her horse dies, Annette lashes out at Godfrey, the butler at Coulibri. She tells him "You're blind when you want to be blind, [...] and you're deaf when you want to be deaf." With this accusation, Annette claims that Godfrey allowed the Black neighbors to poison her horse. Caught between the Black community and the White Cosway family, Godfrey is not entirely loyal to either side. Annette is tuned into this impartiality. Later complaining to Antoinette about their various servants, she once again invokes deafness when she brings up Godfrey: "He isn't deaf—he doesn't want to hear. What a devil he is!"

In the second part, blindness and deafness come up as metaphors for unawareness and bad judgment. When the husband finally goes to visit Daniel Cosway, Daniel says "Must be you deaf you don’t hear people laughing when you marry her." As the husband grows upset to hear his stories about Antoinette and her family, Daniel tells him not to direct his anger at him: "it's I wish to open your eyes." Whereas Annette uses blindness and deafness to figuratively charge Godfrey with being implicated in her horse's death, Daniel uses them to charge the husband with naïveté.

Perception and the sense of sight figure prominently in the entire novel, and Rhys pays significant attention to people's facial expressions, gazes, and eyes. The narrators repeatedly describe the uncomfortable sensation of being stared at by unwanted audiences. In the exposition, for example, Antoinette recalls that Black people would stare and jeer at her mother when she went riding. She mentions that she avoided looking at Black strangers, and repeatedly mentions withholding her gaze or looking away throughout the first part. Staring faces figure prominently in Antoinette's memory from the night Coulibri burned down: "They all looked the same, it was the same face repeated over and over, eyes gleaming, mouth half open to shout." Perception thus takes on an ambiguous undertone; in order to feel safe, Antoinette deliberately diverts or interrupts her own gaze. Both seeing and being seen can be troubling and dangerous. 

Within this context, the motif of blindness becomes especially notable. Although perception is in certain instances associated with uncovering the truth, the act of looking is also associated with exposure and vulnerability. Spending her childhood cut off from other children and the rest of the world, Antoinette takes comfort in a sort of sheltered blindness. In the second part, perception gives the husband a similar dread. When he serves as narrator, he makes frequent mention of people's gazes: inquisitive faces, sidelong looks, sly knowing glances, and cool testing eyes. In certain moments, he describes being watched as a physical sensation. 

In his final conversation with Christophine, at the end of the second part, the husband says "I would give my eyes never to have seen this abominable place." This gives rise to a sort of intertextual foreshadowing and dramatic irony. In Jane Eyre, Rochester goes blind in a fire. For readers who are familiar with this outcome, the husband's statement is ironic, because he will indeed go blind one day. Although the husband has yet to go blind in Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys foreshadows what will happen to him beyond the scope of the plot.

Antoinette knows that there are guests staying at the house. One evening when she wanders through the halls, she hears a girl asking another girl whether she's seen a ghost. In this part, the reader assumes that Antoinette realizes that they are talking about her. It turns out that she doesn't connect these dots, however. In her final dream, Antoinette is scared to happen upon the ghost that she heard about:

[...] but it seemed to me that someone was following me, someone was chasing me, laughing. Sometimes I looked to the right or the left but I never looked behind me for I did not want to see that ghost of a woman who they say haunts this place.

Cite this Quote

Despite being totally cut off from social interaction, Antoinette is nevertheless aware of a rumor about a ghost that haunts "this place." In the dream, she lays eyes on the ghost in a mirror—a "woman with streaming hair." Still, she doesn't realize that the ghost is her. This is in part because her appearance has changed greatly with her worsening mental state, and because there is no mirror in her room.

It's ironic that Antoinette doesn't realize that she's the ghost, and this almost provides some comic relief in the third part. However, the reader most of all finds it upsetting, because it demonstrates Antoinette's extreme isolation. Antoinette has lost her grip on reality. This is not necessarily because she was doomed to madness as the husband feared in the second part, but because he has put her in circumstances that made her sense of self and mental wellbeing disintegrate.

It's worth mentioning that the third part is not the first time Antoinette is likened to a ghost. In the second part, Christophine tells her "your face like dead woman and your eyes red like coucriant." In patois, "coucriant" is a kind of wailing ghost or banshee.  Additionally, the husband refers to her as "a ghost in the grey daylight."