Shortly after Great Britain passes the Emancipation Act in its West Indian colonies, Antoinette Cosway finds her mother’s horse dead. It is lying under the frangipani tree and there are black flies in its eyes. The dead horse is a symbol of the fall of the white, landowning gentry in Jamaica. Even after the act is passed, simultaneously emancipating all enslaved black people and driving the white landowners into poverty, Annette Cosway obstinately holds on to her past glory. She goes riding every morning in her “shabby” riding clothes while the local blacks “jeer at her” (10). By killing the horse, Annette’s former servants are signaling that slavery has ended and that she can no longer occupy the lofty position in which she insists on holding herself. This point is later reasserted, both when Tia refers to Antoinette and her family as “white [niggers]” and when a mob later gathers and sets fire to Coulibri Estate, forcing the Cosways to flee and killing Pierre (14). 

The tree of life is mentioned twice in Wide Sargasso Sea: at the beginning when Antoinette is still living with her mother at Coulibri Estate and at the end when she is imprisoned at her husband’s home in England.