Multiculturalism in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and E. M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread

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.

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

Temas de Nuestra América Revista de Estudios Latinoaméricanos ◽

10.15359/tdna.31-58.10 ◽

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.

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On the Veranda: Jean Rhys’s Material Modernism

Jean Rhys ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474402194.003.0004 ◽

2015 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

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.

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“(The Knocking) Has Never Stopped”

Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism ◽

10.1093/oso/9780199980963.003.0008 ◽

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.

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