Antoinette in Eden

There are quite a few episodes in part one of Wide Sargasso Sea that seem to symbolize a kind of Eden that shelters Antoinette from the outside world. One is the out-of-the-way place that Antoinette plays in with Tia, and another is the garden at Coulibri. There is also the convent where she is given refuge after the family is driven out of Coulibri. All are isolated from society, and in these places race and class become less important issues, allowing people to focus on emotions.

The description of Antoinette's and Tia's friendship seems to fit the idea of a safe haven, or a kind of Eden, very closely. The girls meet at a bathing pool--"deep and dark green under the trees, brown-green if it had rained, but a bright sparkling green in the sun. The water was so clear hat you could see the pebbles at the bottom of the shallow part. Blue and white and striped red" (21). This setting is very beautiful, even magical, much like the garden at Coulibri where Antoinette also goes to seek refuge, which has a wall "covered in green moss soft as velvet" and was "large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible" (a specific reference to the actual garden of Eden) (20; 17). By the pool, Antoinette and Tia cook bananas and Tia sleeps. Antoinette sits in quiet contemplation, much as she does when she escapes to the garden to be by herself. She says "when I was safely home I sat close to the old wall at the end of the garden...and I never wanted to move again. Everything would be worse if I moved. Christophine found me there when it was almost dark, and I was so stiff she had to help me to get up" (21). Obviously, both places are places where she can think and be comforted. 

Unlike in the garden, however, the pool is also a playful place where Antoinette sometimes engages in childish competition with Tia. They are sheltered from the constraints of their society--in fact, neither of them every goes to the other's house, but at the pool they are able to be playmates. However, playful as this was initially, it becomes less fun once Antoinette calls Tia a "cheating nigger", bringing race, and serious and adult concept, into the conversation. Once this has been brought into their safe space, their backgrounds and their families close in on them and the safety of the place is ruined. This is similar to the time when Tia throws the rock at Antoinette; when both girls literally have their families and the entire cultural clash between the two races behind them, they are not friends.

The convent is not an Eden in its natural beauty, but it provides the same sort of refuge from cultural constraints, and it is interesting that while in the convent, race is hardly mentioned. Antoinette says that the first nuns that she met at the convent were "coloured women", but after that it is not clear who is colored and who is not. Even though it seems like most of the girls at the convent are white Creole, they seem to respect the black nuns and there is no distinction between white nuns and black nuns. At the convent she is able to have fun, even though she says that it was a "place of sunshine and death" (51). She describes the convent as such: "Everything was brightness, or dark. The walls, the blazing colours of the flowers in the garden, the nuns' habits were bright, but their veils, the Crucifix hanging from their waists, the shadow of the trees, were black. Thatwas how it was, light and dark, sun and shadow, Heaven and Hell..." (52). Although this seems like it would not really make a good refuge, it is actually similar to the other two places. In the garden at Coulibri Antoinette often felt sad and it was overgrown and wild. At the pool, darkness sometimes broke in when the outer world invaded. And yet all three places were refuges, and Antoinette was always hesitant to leave them. In fact, leaving them often meant going into a more uncomfortable place, like when she must leave the pool to go home in Tia's dress and meet the visitors, or when she must leave the convent and is inexplicably sad.

Together, these places seem to show that getting away from society is the way that Antoinette copes with the world and its difficulties. It also sets up problems for the next section. What will happen to Antoinette when she leaves her last available place of refuge, the convent, and must go out into society to find husband and a place in the "aristocracy" of the island or of England?