Wide Sargasso Sea: Similes 5 key examples

When Antoinette first brings up the gardens in the first part, she makes a rather conventional allusion, likening the garden at Coulibri to the Garden of Eden: "Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible—the tree of life grew there." However, she immediately qualifies her comparison, noting that "it had gone wild." Although she mainly compares it to the Garden of Eden on the basis of appearance, it seems an apt comparison on another level as well. In Genesis, God expels Adam and Eve from the garden because they give in to temptation and eat the forbidden fruit. Similarly, the Cosway family is eventually driven away from Coulibri because of their misdeeds. The local Black population, a large portion of which consists of formerly enslaved people, is resentful against former plantation owners like the Cosways. Even more broadly, the European drive to colonize the Americas by way of slave labor can be likened to the greed and disobedience of Adam and Eve. In the 15th and following centuries, European explorers often compared the New World to the Garden of Eden.

Following the biblical allusion, Antoinette expands on her description of the garden using vivid visual and olfactory imagery:

The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched. 

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There is a duality to this description. On the one hand, Antoinette develops the garden as beautiful, lush, and fragrant. On the other hand, it feels menacing and beyond reach. She relies on simile to describe the orchids in further detail.

One was snaky looking, another like an octopus with long thin brown tentacles bare of leaves hanging from a twisted root. Twice a year the octopus orchid flowered—then not an inch of tentacle showed. It was a bell-shaped mass of white, mauve, deep purples, wonderful to see.

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By comparing the one orchid to a snake, she echoes the biblical allusion from earlier. She describes the second orchid more fully, using a simile to compare it to an octopus. This gives insight into the girl's imaginative mind, and again shows that she sees the world around her in simultaneously playful and frightening ways. 

Ultimately, Antoinette's descriptions of the garden reveal that the estate has been neglected. This neglect serves as a reminder of the Emancipation Act of 1833. Without slave labor, it became impossible for the Cosways to uphold Coulibri's former glory as a sugar plantation. Even as a child, Antoinette herself understood this, and she drives the point home right after the garden description: "All Coulibri Estate had gone wild like the garden, gone to bush. No more slavery—why should anybody work?"

In this passage, the husband personifies the telescope, the trees, and the shadows. Even just the green glow of the flora feels threatening. This demonstrates the extent of his alienation. He doesn't literally think the telescope is speaking to him, but rather feels reminded of his alienation by everything he lays eyes on. 

A few pages later, the husband continues to personify the nature around him: "I watched the hidden mountains and the mists drawn over their faces." Gazing at a specific tree, he imagines it preparing for the hurricane season as though it were sentient.

The hurricane months are not so far away, I thought, and saw that tree strike its roots deeper, making ready to fight the wind. [...] Some of the royal palms stand (she told me). Stripped of their branches, like tall brown pillars, still they stand—defiant. Not for nothing are they called royal. The bamboos take an easier way, they bend to the earth and lie there, creaking, groaning, crying for mercy. The contemptuous wind passes, not caring for these abject things. 

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This passage is full of personification. First, the husband imagines that he can see the tree grow its roots below ground, in preparation for the strong winds. With a simile, he compares the royal palms to "tall brown pillars." Although he compares them to something inanimate, he also personifies them by calling them "defiant." He also describes the bamboos as if they were human, imagining them bending towards the ground and groaning in the wind. Finally, he personifies the wind, calling it contemptuous and visualizing it "howling, shrieking, laughing." All this personification emphasizes the husband's loneliness—without consistent and conventional human contact, nature becomes human. At the same time, the personification emphasizes his paranoia, because he thinks these elements of nature are out to get him.

In fact, as they prepare to leave Granbois, he imagines himself talking to the house. Feeling as though it's straining "away from the black snake-like forest," the husband thinks he can hear it call out to him: "Save me from destruction, ruin and desolation. Save me from the long slow death by ants." In his mind, he sends the house a response.

But what are you doing here you folly. So near the forest. Don't you know that this is a dangerous place? And that the dark forest always wins? Always. If you don't, you soon will, and I can do nothing to help you.

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The husband seems to identify with the house, as both of them made the mistake of settling in a "dangerous place." However, he drives away his tenderness for the house by blaming it for its own eventual destruction. He's getting away, and he tells the house he can't do anything to help it.

By likening Antoinette to a doll, the husband reveals his emotional distance. Earlier, when she expresses strong emotions, he has seen Antoinette as an animal or a monster. Now, he sees her as a lifeless toy. A marionette is a specific kind of puppet, which one uses strings to move around. The mention of the marionette adds a layer to the doll comparison; he doesn't simply see her as a still and silent doll, but like a doll whose movements can be controlled. The word choice is notable for multiple reasons. Not only does it rhyme with Antoinette's name, it comes from French—a language Antoinette and Annette speak.

Christophine eventually leaves the sleeping Antoinette to find the husband. She confronts him for likening his wife to a doll:

"She tell me in the middle of all this you start calling her names. Marionette. Some word so."

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"Yes, I remember, I did."

(Marionette, Antoinette, Marionetta, Antoinetta)

The parenthetical that follows the husband's line seems to echo earlier conversations between him and Antoinette. Rhythmic and haunting, the line evokes the hypnotic process by which the husband attempts to give his wife a new name.

Over the course of the novel, the husband tries to change Antoinette's name in a number of ways. To begin with, their marriage gives her a change in surname. He also tries to change her given name to Bertha, which she dislikes. Here, Christophine reveals that the husband not only thinks Antoinette has a "marionette quality," he has literally begun to use the word as a name for her. Like when he compares her to a doll, his imposition of new names on Antoinette dehumanizes her and strips her of her sense of self.

Christophine asks him whether "that word mean doll," stating that he wants "to force her to cry and to speak." The husband has conflicting expectations for his wife. On the one hand, he's frightened by the possibility of her madness and wants her to restrain her emotions. On the other hand, he doesn't want her to be vacant and blank. After nurturing passivity, dependence, and numbness in his doll-wife, he now seems prepared to do anything to spark an emotional reaction in her—such as sleeping with Amélie.

Again, Christophine asks the husband, "You call her a doll?" She then delivers a warning: "If you forsake her they will tear her in pieces—like they did her mother." Emphasizing Antoinette's emotional, social, and economic vulnerability, Christophine tells the husband that she can be destroyed as easily as a doll can be torn apart.

In their final moments at Granbois before leaving for good, the husband thinks to himself that "The doll had a doll's voice, a breathless but curiously indifferent voice." He hopes to see a trace of emotion on her face, expecting to see her cry. He finds that he's mistaken: "No, the doll's smile came back—nailed to her face."

First describing the physical stone above Old Cosway's grave, Daniel proceeds to use the stone as a basis for a simile about the man's character. This section of dialogue also contains another simile: Daniel claims Old Cosway bought and sold people "like cattle." Cultivating, harvesting, and processing sugar requires a large amount of heavy labor. The brutal owner of a sugar plantation before the Emancipation, Old Cosway bought and sold enslaved people to keep his operations running. This kind of slavery is called "chattel" slavery, and it seems significant that Daniel uses a near homophone in the simile.

As the husband quietly listens, Daniel proceeds with his description of Old Cosway.

I never put my eyes on a man haughty and proud like that—he walk like he own the earth.

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In this simile, Daniel describes Old Cosway's conceit. Much of Daniel's disdain for his father seems to revolve around his greed and pride. This is somewhat ironic, as Daniel himself is haughty and obsessed with money. When the husband leaves, Daniel rails against the husband for refusing to give him money.

Rhys leaves it somewhat ambiguous whether Christophine actually shares any obeah remedies with Antoinette. However, the husband offers a series of details that make it seem as though she did. To begin with, he notices that there is "white powder strewn on the floor" before they go to bed. Additionally, in the light from a set number of candles that seem intentionally arranged around the room, he finds himself suddenly enchanted by Antoinette's beauty—after having been put off by her appearance shortly before. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Antoinette hands him a glass of wine, with a smile. As he recalls the final moments before his memories go blank, he thinks, "She need not have done what she did to me. I will always swear that, she need not have done it."

The husband wakes up feeling suffocated, as though he were "buried alive." Soon after, he realizes what has happened:

I thought, I have been poisoned. But it was a dull thought, like a child spelling out the letters of a word which he cannot read, and which if he could would have no meaning or context.

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In a simile, the husband compares his realization to the early stages of literacy. Although he's lucid enough to understand what has happened, the poison's effect on his body and brain make him unable to take the thought any further. His cognition flounders, like when a child spells out a word that he doesn't know the meaning of.

As he gazes at Antoinette, the husband uses another simile to describe her face:

The cold light was on her and I looked at the sad droop of her lips, the frown between her thick eyebrows, deep as if it had been cut with a knife.

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This sentence is significant for a number of reasons. First, it shows that if Antoinette did actually give the husband a sort of love potion, it failed—the husband looks at her with revulsion. Second, it echoes a description Antoinette gave of her mother's face early in the first part: "A frown came between her black eyebrows, deep—it might have been cut with a knife." After the husband learns more about Antoinette's family from Daniel, he becomes apprehensive about Annette's madness, and whether Antoinette will turn out like her mother. Although the husband doesn't realize it, this simile seems to confirm his fear.