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.

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 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 Caryl Phillips’s Rewriting of the Canonical Romance as a Genre

Il Tolomeo ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessia Polatti
Keyword(s):  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
Fictional Character ◽  
Mansfield Park ◽  
Wuthering Heights ◽  
Wide Sargasso Sea ◽  
Return Journey ◽  
Lost Child

The paper considers Phillips’s rewriting of the canonical nineteenth-century romances in three of his novels – A State of Independence (1986), The Lost Child (2015), and A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018). The three texts resettle the romance genre through the postcolonial concept of ‘home’. In A State of Independence, Phillips rearranges the role of one of Jane Austen’s most orthodox characters, the landowner Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park (1814), by transposing the Austenian character’s features to his protagonist Bertram Francis, a Caribbean man who comes back to his ancestral homeland after twenty years in Britain. In The Lost Child, chronicling literary-historical events in the present tense by transferring the life of the Brontë family into the protagonists of Wuthering Heights (1847) is for the author one way of calling into question the real sense of literature. It is for this reason that Phillips constructs a cyclic narration around the figure of Branwell Brontë, fictionalised by his sister Emily in the romance protagonist Heathcliff, and mirrored in The Lost Child in the character of Tommy Wilson. In A View of the Empire at Sunset, Phillips definitely overturns the colonial and genre categories by reassessing the in-between life of the Dominican-born writer Jean Rhys through her personal return journey to Dominica: as a result, the author of Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) (an intense rewriting of Jane Eyre) becomes a fictional character, and the literary events of her life sum up the vicissitudes both of the two ‘Bertrams’ – of Mansfield Park and A State of Independence – and the protagonists of Wuthering Heights and The Lost Child.

scholarly journals ‘Ropes of stories’: Jean Rhys, Vivienne Cleven and Melissa Lucashenko

2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-84
Author(s):  
Jessica Gildersleeve
Keyword(s):  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Female Role ◽  
Indigenous Woman ◽  
Wide Sargasso Sea

Cultural narratives also function as lifelines in the work of another Queensland Indigenous woman writer, Vivienne Cleven. Cleven's novel,Bitin’ Back(2001), begins when Mavis Dooley's son, Nevil, announces that he is no longer Nevil, but the writer Jean Rhys. Although Nevil eventually reveals that he has simply been acting as a woman in order to understand the protagonist of the novel he is writing, his choice of Rhys in particular is significant. Nevil selected Jean Rhys as a signifier of his female role because, he explains:She's my favourite author; she wroteWide Sargasso Sea[1966]. She was ahead of her time; she wrote about society's underdogs; about rejection and the madness of isolation. I know it sounds all crazy to you, Ma, but this is about whoIam . . . [A] lot of people would never understand me and they wouldn't want to. (2001: 184)

scholarly journals The Foregrounding Function of Praesens Historicum in Russian Translated Adventure Narratives (20th Century)

Slovene ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 226-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastasia V. Urzha
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
English Language ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Functional Grammar ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
Translation Strategy ◽  
Common Basis ◽  
Narrative Forms

This research focuses on the functioning of praesens historicum forms which Russian translators use to substitute for English narrative forms referring to past events. The study applies the Theory of Grounding and Russian Communicative Functional Grammar to the comparative discourse analysis of English-language adventure stories and novels created in the 19th and 20th centuries and their Russian translations. The Theory of Grounding is still not widely used in Russian translation studies, nor have its concepts and fruitful ideas been related to the achievements of Russian Narratology and Functional Grammar. This article presents an attempt to find a common basis in these academic traditions as they relate to discourse analysis and to describe the role of praesens historicum forms in Russian translated adventure narratives. The corpus includes 22 original texts and 72 Russian translations, and the case study involves six Russian translations of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, focusing on the translation made by Korney Chukovsky, who employed historic present more often than in other translations of the novel. It is shown that the translation strategy of substituting the original English-language past forms with Russian present forms is realized in foregrounded and focalized segments of the text, giving them additional saliency. This strategy relates the use of historic present to the functions of deictic words and words denoting visual or audial perception, locating the deictic center of the narrative in the spacetime of the events and allowing the reader to join the focalizing WHO (a narrator or a hero). Translations that regularly mark the foreground through the use of the historic present and accompanying lexical-grammatical means are often addressed to young readers.

scholarly journals Género y antiimperialismo en Ancho Mar de los Sargazos de Jean Rhys

2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (58) ◽  
pp. 173
Author(s):  
Aida Chacón-Castellanos
Keyword(s):  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
Wide Sargasso Sea

Concuerdo con Maricruz Castro (2009), quien señala que género es un concepto mediante el cual quedan manifiestas las construcciones culturales alrededor de la mujer y de lo femenino, así como también del hombre y lo masculino. Considero que la autora Jean Rhys puede brindar una visión de primera mano sobre el tema no solamente de lo femenino sino también del prejuicio racial y el discurso imperialista a partir del cual se construye la identidad del otro. Fundo mi acercamiento en <em>Wide Sargasso Sea</em>,  <em>Ancho mar de los Sargazos</em>, de Rhys. La construcción de la figura femenina, ligada a la locura y el prejuicio racial, desde el punto de vista imperialista, son elementos que la autora trata de desvincular desde su muy particular narrativa.

“(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.

Rhys, Jean (1890-1979)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliette Taylor-Batty
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Wide Sargasso Sea ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
Modernist Fiction

Jean Rhys was a Dominican novelist and short-story writer. Her career can be divided into two main periods: her modernist fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, which depicts the bohemian demi-monde in Europe of the time as experienced by vulnerable female protagonists on the margins of respectability, and her later work, which came after a long hiatus with the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Wide Sargasso Sea, her best known novel, is a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and an important text within postcolonial studies.

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