Painting the Cardboard House Red: Rewriting Colour in Wide Sargasso Sea.

This article reads the end of Wide Sargasso Sea as a spectral portrait of the artist. As she is said to spread colour/fire, Antoinette asserts herself in a gesture where the frame of the picture replaces the frame of a mirror that is either broken, absent, or luring her with a deadly reflection. The I/eye that faces the red backdrop of the sky has stepped through the looking-glass to compose a landscape where another logic is made to prevail. The moment that is created is both a moment of meaning and a moment when meaning is resisted through a handling of colour that displaces codes and challenges the black and white world of the master/colonizer system as much as the symbolism of the mother-text itself. Colour triumphs as an event that sets all lines into motion and allows us to draw a line between modernist aesthetics and a postcolonial poetics of resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]