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

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.

Intertextualidad: literatura y cine

El presente artículo trata de algunos usos de la intertextualidad entre el cine y la literatura. I Walked with a Zombie (1943) es la segunda de las nueve películas producidas por Val Lewton que dieron forma al género de terror y tuvieron una influencia duradera en el lenguaje cinematográfico. La película, que replantea la clásica novela victoriana Jane Eyre en un escenario caribeño, esboza las fallas del proceso colonizador europeo mucho antes de la llegada de los estudios postcoloniales. La novela parcialmente autobiográfica de Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), reformula Jane Eyre desde una perspectiva feminista y poscolonial por medio del punto de vista de «la loca del ático». En la novela El beso de la mujer araña (de Manuel Puig), el cine y las películas, incluida I Walked with a Zombie, constituyen el medio intertextual para la creación del personaje literario y la figura de un amor que no tiene nombre.

Female Island: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

Two leading articles of feminist hue – “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976) and “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness” (1981) – by two seminal figures, Hélène Cixous and Elaine Showalter respectively, grant a new look at Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea. Two main themes that come to the fore from these two articles with reference to Rhys’s novel are the male-dominated female zone and the importance of female writing for women. Both critics mention the strong hold of patriarchy on women, which is quite obvious in Antoinette’s condition in Rhys’s novel. Next, both Cixous and Showalter claim that while men see the female domain as a dark space, women should stick to their female domain and express themselves through writing. And this is what Rhys does in her novel; she gives a voice to the mad woman in the attic, Antoinette, who has been put there and tagged mad by her husband. By exploring the similarities between feminist criticism in Cixous’s and Showalter’s articles and Rhys’s novel, this study aims to show that although Wide Sargasso Sea is a revolutionary novel with its ability to give the mad woman back her individuality, it is not strong enough to create a world where this woman can experience her individuality.

Rhetoric of Post-Colonial Mindset in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

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.

Wide Sargasso Sea e as cartas de Jean Rhys: dessacralizando o discurso colonial

O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar quão contextual é o processo de escrita de mulheres, em especial, o do texto literário, tomando como objeto as cartas de registro da produção do romance feminista pós-colonial Wide Sargasso Sea, da escritora Jean Rhys. Por meio das cartas de Rhys, abordamos os fatores que envolveram a produção da obra, desde o conflito da autora diante da representação da personagem crioula louca no romance inglês, Jane Eyre (1847), da escritora canônica Charlotte Brontë, às estratégias para validação da sua obra na Inglaterra. Tomamos como referência perspectivas pós e decoloniais para análise dos aspectos elencados nas cartas e suscitados pelo texto literário.

Diversity of Genre in Post-Colonial Literature

The main aim of this article is to outline main tendencies in the development of post-colonial literature in the face of Jean Rhys and her novel Wide Sargasso Sea as a vivid example of starting attempt to break a white-domineering view of Asian countries and build up a new identity. Research attempts to refer to a wider scope of literary texts, including the ones that outline issues and problems related to the so-called invasion narratives. The term invasion narratives is seen as referring to a number of different texts, including English Patient by Michael Ondaatje or the Reader by Bernhard Schlink. One of numerous possibilities of analyzing post-colonial literature is the analysis of the novels by Zadie Smith White Teeth and on Beauty, the latter being a good example of a return to realism and actualizing what is called coined as the meanwhile. Special attention is given to meta-modernism and its function on the contemporary cultural and literary scene, above all with its attempt to start a neo-romantic direct kind of prose, or verse, simple in its form, yet aiming to construct new identities. This kind of prose incorporates the narratives exploring different traumas, including trans-generational traumas.

El poder de los cuerpos: el desarrollo de la sexualidad y la práctica del aborto en Del rojo de su sombra de Mayra Montero, Wide sargasso sea de Jean Rhys y Moi, Tituba, sorcière… Noire de Salem de Marysé Condé. Un estudio comparado.

En este trabajo se analizan las manifestaciones de la sexualidad y la práctica del aborto como elementos de subversión respecto al sistema opresivo colonial y patriarcal que constriñe la libertad de las mujeres protagonistas en tres textos literarios producidos por escritoras caribeñas: Del rojo de su sombra (1992) de Mayra Montero, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) de Jean Rhys y Moi, Tituba sorcière… Noire de Salem (1986) de Marysé Condé. Los procesos de reescritura que dieron lugar a los textos revelan voces soslayadas por la historia y la literatura a partir del distanciamiento con los modelos femeninos imperantes y la (re)valorización del descubrimiento del cuerpo, las experiencias sexuales y sus prácticas.