The White Creole in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea: A Woman in Passage (original) (raw)
Related papers
2019
The portrayal of creole identity is presented in several literary works, one of them is in the portrayal of Antoinette Cosway in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. Antoinette Cosway firstly is the minor character in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. The research traces the link between Antoinette Cosway’s creole identity with her madness. According to Bhabha’s ambivalence theory, creole identity possibly creates a new identity as the result of interrelation between colonizer and colonized. Based on the research, Antoinette Cosway failed to create a new identity and became a madwoman instead. The cause is the complex situation faced by her and the lack of supporting aspects for constructing a new identity. Keywords : creole identity, ambivalence, Antoinette Cosway, Homi Bhabha
Identity, Displacement and Alienation in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in The Dark
Eurasian Journal of English Language and Literature, 2023
After the abolition of colonialism, new literatures from the former colonies emerged, which challenged and questioned the identity of the colonized imposed by the colonizer, and also the identity of the colonial powers. Literature of this kind or namely the postcolonial literature thus aims to subvert the imperial literatures which are in the "centre" to make the voice of the colonized heard from the "periphery". In this regard, both Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark analysed in this paper are striking examples of the postcolonial literature in deconstructing the colonial image and in focusing on the subject of identity. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how the issue of identity is approached in Jean Rhys's postcolonial texts Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark through the study of female characters'-Antoinette and Annarace, displacement, exile, alienation, and othering by focusing on Homi Bhabha's concept of hybridity.
A Postcolonial Reading of Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Despite the fact that the story retold in Wide Sargasso Sea on the surface seems to be a pathetic love story of a Creole woman who goes crazy due to unrequited love in her marriage to an English man, through a close postcolonial reading of the novel several crucial cultural and political orientalist attitudes towards Creole people, Europe’s alternative and potential “other,” are depicted. “Orientalism, in Said’s formulation, is principally a way of defining and ‘locating’ Europe’s others”. Accordingly, within the context of this paper, the other version of the story of “the othered” will be examined from a post colonialist perception through the representations of the characters especially, that of Mr. Rochester. His orientalist and “othering” attitude towards Antoinette and the Creole way of life in the Caribbean and the related crucial identity problems of Antoinette will be discussed within the framework of this postcolonial reading on Wide Sargasso Sea. Key Words: postcolonialism, orientalism, postmodern paroody, Wide Sargasso Sea, Jane Eyre
The "Third Space" and the Questions of Identity in Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea
2015
In this paper, I claim that the “third space” extends beyond Western hegemonic discourse on identity and self, demonstrating that identity is not a singular and a stable subject but a multiple and fluid one. This article demonstrates that the “third space”, while opening the avenues for pluralities and negotiations, unsettles and problematizes the issues of identity, belonging, and home in Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea. Discussions on why Antoinette’s position as a Creole in Jamaica problematizes her status and identity, and what barriers negate herself and her sense of belonging are central to this research. I further investigate the roles of Western hegemonic presence in Antoinette’s subjectivity, and her sense of liberation and autonomy. Antoinette’s position in a liminal space not only jeopardizes her identity, her longing for home and belonging, but also creates a hybrid identity that emerges in a moment of historical transformation in Jamaican history. Hybridity interrogates and deconstructs the Western hegemonic assumption of stable subjectivity and meaning. Destabilizing the notion of the Self and the Other as envisioned by Western mainstream narratives, hybridity proposes that the Self is constructed by multiple ideologies and multiple discourses. Antoinette’s occupation of a hybrid position in Wide Sargasso Sea dismantles the stable binaries of white/black, colonizer/colonized category of Western discourse and questions identity formation based on the West as the ‘Self’ and the non-West as the ‘Other’ as in Edward Said’s contention in Orientalism.
Intemperate and Unchaste': Jean Rhys and Caribbean Creole Identity
Women: A Cultural Review, 2003
In this article, Carr examines Jean Rhys's ambivalent feelings about her West Indian origins. She looks at the problems both she and others have had in deciding whether her work can be truly considered to belong to the category of Caribbean literature. The difficulty lies not just in her expatriate existence or European themes, but goes back to her position as a white Caribbean Creole woman, the descendant of slave-owners. Carr looks at the traditional representations of the Creole woman, and suggest that the characteristics assigned to Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre , 'intemperate and unchaste', persisted to Jean Rhys's day, and that all her fiction, even when not explicitly Caribbean, can be seen to write back to such representations. When Rhys arrived in England, she was immediately identified as Other because of her Caribbean accent, something that marked her out as disturbingly associated with non-white West Indians; in England, she was no longer really white, although back in the Caribbean her whiteness made her unacceptable to so many of her fellow Dominicans. Much of the power of her fiction comes from her knowledge of the violent scars left in the Caribbean by the colonial past, and her own experience of the prejudices and oppressions of a hierarchical metropolitan society. In particular, if it had not been for her stigmatization as the always racially dubious West Indian when she reached England, her insight into the injustices of metropolitan and colonial society might never have been so acute.
SELF-IDENTITY IN JEAN RHYS' WIDE SARGASSO SEA
Caribbean literature has been one steeped in identity crisis. Jean Rhy's Wide Sargasso Sea chronicles the problems associated with people who are found in cultural, social and economic limbo as far as their identity and history is concerned. Through dual narrative voice in the novel, Rhys gives voice to the less heard in mainstream discourse in Caribbean literature. This paper thus examine the notion of self-identity in the Rhy's Wide Sargasso Sea.
The Voice of the Madwoman in the Attic: An Analysis of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea
Grounded on Homi Bhabha’s theory on hybridity, Gayatri Spivak’s concept of the subaltern, and Lacan’s psychoanalytic development, this paper accounted the postcolonial issues in Jean Rhys’s novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. Through the interaction of ambivalence and hybridity, exoticism, and subaltern, this paper examined the relationship and condition of the colonizers, the natives, and the creoles. This paper also accounted how the Wide Sargasso Sea, alluding to Jane Eyre, serves as a rewriting of a colored woman’s story.
Writing Back to the Empire: Righting Creole Identity in Wide Sargasso Sea
2013
Twentieth century witnessed writers challenging certain canonical English texts. The slow yet steady collapse of the imperial powers' direct control over their colonies, during the century, and at the same time, the desire on the part of the earlier colonized people to ascertain their cultural recognition, in a way other than the one established by the colonizers, have caused a great as well as new representative literature. Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, being emblematic of this literature, portrays the voice of the formerly oppressed Other and thus sets up an assertion to the cultural distinctiveness of the earlier colonized Creole people. In this manner, this novel questions the elitism and exclusiveness of the say of the literature produced by writers from the powerful imperial nations, scrutinizing their well-established and fully though out perceptions about the weaker and, at the same time, colonized nations. While using the critical tool of Postcolonial Criticism as ...
Post-Colonial Perspective of Identity in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea
Philologia, 2020
Postkolonijalna teorija pruža mogućnosti i koncepte savremenog promišljanja o istoriji i iskustvima ljudi pod kolonijalnom hegemonističkom vlašću. Tumači političke, književne i kulturološke pojmove poput rasizma, ropstva, krize identiteta, hibridnosti, emancipacije i složenosti pojma roda. Različiti naučnici opsežno su raspravljali o odnosu pojmova identiteta i fenomena "Drugosti" (npr. Edvard Said, Gajatri Spivak i Homi K. Baba). Ovaj rad teži da precizira način na koji se navedena dva pojma predstavljaju u romanu Džin Ris "Široko Sargaško more". Naime, Ris prikazuje krizu identiteta kod Antoanete, junakinje karipskog porekla koja odrasta između dva različita sveta i između dve drugačije kulture, što je motiviše da izdrži sve životne borbe.
Rhetoric of Post-Colonial Mindset in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea
Contemporary Research: An Interdisciplinary Academic Journal, 2021
This paper examines the rhetoric of post-colonial mentality, mindset and attitude in Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea and looks at how the writer is not aloof from the colonial mindset. Drawing on insights and postulations from Gayatri Spivak’s post-colonialism and Lee Erwin’s new-historicism, this article analyzes the imperial discourse in the novel. Although the writer shows her narrator being close to black people as a Creole woman, the writer’s closeness to the imperial mindset is evident throughout the novel. This paper concludes that by creating a certain distance from the ex-slaves, the writer is not able to fully liberate herself from her imperial mindset. Although the writer tries to affiliate herself with the ex-slaves, she however remains within her own culture, that is, culture of Creole.