Wide Sargasso Sea’s Archipelagic Provincialism

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Kathleen DeGuzman
Keyword(s):  
Caribbean Literature ◽  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Wide Sargasso Sea ◽  
The Caribbean

This essay argues for an archipelagic rethinking of Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which has long had an uneasy fit into the category of Caribbean literature. It does so by drawing from archipelagic studies and its distinction between islands as discrete, closed-off landmasses and archipelagoes as interconnected, terraqueous topographies. Through close readings, the essay demonstrates how the Caribbean characters in the novel envision localness as an overlap between earthly materialities and contested epistemologies—an attitude the essay defines as “archipelagic provincialism.” The essay ultimately foregrounds archipelagic thinking as a way to recast the often pejorative idea of provincialism as well as offer a methodology for troubling the very idea of canonicity within Caribbean literature.

The Discourses of Jean Rhys: Resistance, Ambivalence and Creole Indeterminacy

Jean Rhys ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Adlai Murdoch
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Caribbean Literature ◽  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
Wide Sargasso Sea ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Complex Patterns ◽  
Social Separation

The complex depths of the creole figure in Caribbean literature and culture continue to demand further exploration, inflected as they are by the long and pervasive presence of colonialism in the region and its attendant corollaries of hierarchical social separation and ethnocultural difference inflected by perceptions of race. In the work of Jean Rhys, the complex patterns and performances of cultural identity that inform her multi-layered and multi-voiced narratives betray a deep-seated ambivalence towards England, the Caribbean, and their varied issues of identity. In her explorations of the various iterations and possibilities of the creole position in Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys compels us to confront the transactional relationship between colonizer and colonized and the uncharted variations of racial, cultural, and national identity.

scholarly journals Wide Sargasso Sea: Antoinette’s Living Spaces as a Case Study

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fann Oudah Aljohani
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Wide Sargasso Sea ◽  
Psychological Analysis

This study explores the identity formation and mobility of the role of Antoinette in the novel "Wide Sargasso Sea" from the perspective of the cultural and human geography. In general, it is a space and place study. The thesis suggests that, Antoinette has some conditions and circumstances that she developed in an autonomic manner with different experiences in order to navigate and recognize the dangerous and safe spaces around her. Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, elaborates a self-sacrifice experience that the protagonist went through in her search for identity, which she lost due to the circumstances around her. In this research, a psychological analysis of Antoinette's personality will be taken, moreover; an attempt is made to find out the reasons for her schizophrenic behavior. The research focuses on Antoinette's shattered identity and the specters she faced in her life, which ultimately played a huge role in her madness. Also, the visible opposite aspects of black/white, rationality/unconsciousness, male/female, and sanity/madness are conceived by her conscious mind, and it causes the frantic thoughts of insanity, womanhood, and blackness. Also, it sheds light on Antoinette's journey in life to figure out where she belongs and her struggle in this search. Antoinette's personality and identity crisis as a Creole girl will be discussed in depth. There are different areas that are explored in this paper; such as the interpretation of how the surrounding spaces affect Antoinette and the reasons behind the absence of a loving mother in Wide Sargasso Sea. Furthermore, Rochester's character is also examined to find out how the masculine space differs from feminine space, and to what extent Mr. Rochester's cruelty harms Antoinette. Another important thing that is discussed in the paper is the effect of family relationships on a person's identity, and how it becomes a reason of mental disorder.

On the Veranda: Jean Rhys’s Material Modernism

Jean Rhys ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Lou Emery
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Architectural Form ◽  
Wide Sargasso Sea ◽  
Good Morning ◽  
Material History ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Experimental Prose ◽  
Key Characters

This chapter focuses on the veranda in Rhys’s writing as an architectural space that opens onto multiple stories, its material history embedded within five centuries of imperial conquest and conflict, the slave trade, the Middle Passage, the plantation, and the plantation’s legacies in city spaces of early 20th-century Europe. As a creolized architectural form, the veranda speaks also to global circuits stretching from its origins in West Africa and India through Europe and the Americas, with the Caribbean as a central point of transit. I analyse the veranda in Rhys’s writing – including several of the short stories and the novels Wide Sargasso Sea, Voyage in the Dark, and Good Morning, Midnight – as framing key characters, conflicts, and events within the transcontinental reach of this deep history. The layering of time and space, as built into the veranda, situates also the experimental prose of Rhys’s Caribbean modernism.

“(The Knocking) Has Never Stopped”

2018 ◽  
pp. 163-180
Author(s):  
Andrzej Gąsiorek
Keyword(s):  
Special Interest ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
Wide Sargasso Sea ◽  
The Caribbean

Arguing against critics who situate Jean Rhys in either the modernist or postcolonial camps, this chapter suggests that these movements complement and reinforce one another. In “Again the Antilles” (1927), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Rhys consistently employs ellipsis, narrative fragmentation, and multiple narrators to unmask the ideological underpinnings of plantocratic ideology. Of special interest to Rhys are modernity’s discontinuities, which extend to the rigid binaries of the Caribbean: white and black, master and slave, colonizer and colonized. Unable to fit easily into any of these categories, Rhys’s heroines become “marooned in ruinous subject positions.” Although her work is sometimes read as a form of revisionism that exculpates the colonial class, Rhys not only enables the colonized to speak—most memorably through the character of Christophine in Wide Sargasso Sea—but also exposes the ways in which official discourse ratifies the logic and legacy of colonialism.

scholarly journals African by Exposure: Caregivers, Madness, and the Contagious Other in García Márquez’s Of Love and Other Demons and Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Meredith Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
Wide Sargasso Sea ◽  
Postcolonial Development ◽  
African Black ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Potential Antidotes

The following article discusses Gabriel García Márquez’s Of Love and Other Demons and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Specifically, this article will discuss the parallel ways that two novels critique the nature of postcolonial development in the Caribbean, particularly in regard to race and hybridity. Within the novels, the child protagonists and their African/black creole nursemaids follow surprisingly similar plots, though the settings, contexts, and styles of the two texts differ greatly. In these two novels while the white protagonists both die because of their hybrid navigation of their environment, their nurse/mothers survive, largely because of their maintenance of African practices. In many ways, the nurse mothers’ survival and attempts to heal their charges present potential antidotes for the “disease” produced by slavery. The purpose of this paper is to explore those parallel developments in plot, and to look at the ways the two texts disrupt and reinforce colonial hegemonic norms through their depictions of both the nurses and their charges.

scholarly journals “Madwoman in the Post-Colonial Era” A Study of the Female Voice in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (7) ◽  
pp. 236
Author(s):  
Nushrat Azam
Keyword(s):  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Female Voice ◽  
Female Character ◽  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Written Text ◽  
Wide Sargasso Sea ◽  
Voice And Silence

This paper seeks to analyze the mediums and effects of voice and silence in the life of a female character of the re-written post-colonial text Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. The analysis shows how a re-written text can give a new meaning to a character and story of a novel, where the character of Antoinette tells the untold story of Bertha in Jane Eyre. The method of investigation for this research is analytical and descriptive; the research was completed by analyzing the events, actions and the interactions of the female character, Antoinette with the other major characters in the novel in order to identify how the character of Antoinette was portrayed throughout the novel. It is understood through the study of the text, that the post-colonial novel gave the female voice much more importance than its previous counterpart. This represents the early post-colonial times during which women were starting to gain liberation but had still not completely moved on from the notions of patriarchal societies that they had grown up in.

scholarly journals Travestilidade como denúncia política: performatividade de gênero e panantillanismo em "Sirena Selena Vestida de Pena"

2018 ◽  
pp. 16-33
Author(s):  
Luana Barossi ◽  
Thais Neves Marcelo
Keyword(s):  
Gender Studies ◽  
Gender Diversity ◽  
Caribbean Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Political Matter

RESUMO: Este breve ensaio propõe uma leitura do romance Sirena Selena vestida de pena levando em consideração sua matéria política, encontrada no tema da travestilidade. Dessa maneira, serão abordadas duas possibilidades interpretativas sobre o caráter subversivo da narrativa: a diversidade de gênero, que desestabiliza a tradição patriarcal, heterossexista e cis-sexista da sociedade caribenha e a travestilidade como alegoria do Caribe, cujo foco está na denúncia de problemáticas econômicas e sociais. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Travestilidade, estudos de gênero, literatura caribenha. ________________________ ABSTRACT: This brief essay aims to analyze the novel Sirena Selena vestida de pena taking into consideration its political matter, found in the topic of travestility. We will approach two different interpretative possibilities about the subversive matter of the narrative: firstly, gender diversity, that destabilizes the patriarchal, heterosexist and cissexist Caribbean society tradition, and secondly, travestility as an allegory of the Caribbean, which focus on the denunciation of economic and social matters.  KEYWORDS: Travestility, gender studies, caribbean literature.

scholarly journals A Symbolic Reading of Wide Sargasso Sea

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (9) ◽  
pp. 1221
Author(s):  
Li Luo
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Wide Sargasso Sea ◽  
Racial Conflicts ◽  
The Times ◽  
Moral Themes

Wide Sargasso Sea is acclaimed as the masterpiece of the British female writer Jean Rhys. In the novel, Rhys reshapes the mad wife of Rochester, Bertha Mason, who is imprisoned in the attic in Jane Eyre. With her own life experience as a white Creole and her experience living in West Indies as a blueprint, setting the abolition of slavery in West Indies in the nineteenth century as the background of the times, Rhys restores Antoinette a real state of survival under colonialism and patriarchy, with a sense of identity loss and confusion. The use of symbolism is one of the most outstanding styles in description. Owing to the use of symbolism, the historical situation of Jamaica under colonialism and patriarchy has been successfully displayed and the abstract moral themes have been vividly conveyed. This paper seeks to set symbolism as a theoretical basis, classify and analyze the symbols in the novel in accordance with their roles in revealing the themes, illustrating a complete interpretation of the complicated racial conflicts and patriarchy oppression in West Indies.

scholarly journals “Mimic woman” or “Abject Subject”? Crisscrossing Glances of Postcolonial and Psychoanalytic Theories in Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 75
Author(s):  
Shima Peimanfard ◽  
Fazel Asadi Amjad
Keyword(s):  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Wide Sargasso Sea ◽  
White Hegemony ◽  
Psychoanalytic Theories

This study intends to examine the intersections of Postcolonilism and Psychoanalysis in Rhys’ literary oeuvre, Wide Sargasso Sea. In the light of Kristeva’s Abjection theory, the paper challenges Bhabha’s notions of hybridity, mimicry and ambivalence as he accentuates them as a form of resistance against White hegemony. Notwithstanding Bhabha’s arguments, the novel also indicates that the hybrid woman’s mimicry of whiteness subjects her to an ambivalent space, which not only make her incapable of distorting the master’s hegemony, it dooms her to get lost in a constant psychotic delirium and abjection.

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