Assignment 203 - The Postcolonial Studies

 Name : Anjali M. Rathod

Enrollment no. : 4069206420220024

Roll no. : 02

Batch : M.A. Sem. 3 (2022-24)

Paper no. : 203 - The Postcolonial Studies

Email Address: rathodanjali20022002ui@gmail.com

Submitted to : Smt. S.B. Gardi, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University, Bhavnagar - 364002

          Wide Sargasso Sea with the

      perspective of post colonialism 

Introduction of the Author : 

          Jean Rhys, (born August 24, 1890, Roseau, Dominica, Windward Islands, West Indies—died May 14, 1979, Exeter, Devon, England), West Indian novelist who earned acclaim for her early works set in the bohemian world of Europe in the 1920s and ’30s but who stopped writing for nearly three decades, until she wrote a successful novel set in the West Indies.

Jean Rhys's work is animated by a spirit of wanting to speak for those who are voiceless. The daughter of a Welsh doctor and a Creole mother, Rhys lived and was educated in Dominica until she went to London at the age of 16 and worked as an actress before moving to Paris. 

    Jean Rhys was encouraged to write by the English novelist Ford Madox Ford. Her first book, a collection of short stories, The Left Bank (1927), was followed by such novels as Postures (1928), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). After moving to Cornwall she wrote nothing until her remarkably successful Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a novel that reconstructed the earlier life of the fictional character Antoinette Cosway, who was Mr. Rochester’s mad first wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Tigers Are Better-Looking, with a Selection from the Left Bank (1968) and Sleep It Off Lady (1976), both short-story collections, followed. Smile Please, an unfinished autobiography, was published in 1979.  In 1907, at the age of 16, Rhys traveled to England to attend school.

   

     Jean Rhys later worked as a chorus girl and a mannequin, experiencing the bohemian lifestyle of London in the early 20th century. In 1919, she married Jean Lenglet, a Dutch journalist and writer, taking his last name as her pseudonym, Jean Rhys.

 

Jean Rhys faced numerous personal challenges throughout her life. Her marriage to Lenglet was tumultuous, marked by infidelity and financial struggles. She battled with alcoholism and struggled to find her place in a society that often marginalized and misunderstood her.

Despite early literary success, Rhys faced a period of relative obscurity, with her works out of print and her reputation dwindling. It wasn't until the mid-20th century that her literary fortunes would change.

About the Novel : 

  "Wide Sargasso Sea" is a novel written by Jean Rhys and first published in 1966. The novel is considered a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's classic novel "Jane Eyre," as it explores the backstory of one of "Jane Eyre's" characters, Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic.

In the early 19th century, "Wide Sargasso Sea" tells the story of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole woman who eventually becomes the first wife of Mr. Rochester in "Jane Eyre." The novel delves into Antoinette's childhood, her troubled relationship with her family, and her marriage to Rochester. It explores themes of racial identity, colonialism, and the oppression of women.

The title "Wide Sargasso Sea" refers to the sea between the West Indies and the coast of Florida, which is known for its swirling currents and the Sargasso Sea's floating seaweed. Rhys' novel is praised for its lyrical prose and its exploration of post-colonial and feminist themes. It offers a complex and nuanced perspective on the character of Bertha Mason, providing a voice to a character who was marginalized and silenced in the original "Jane Eyre." The novel is considered a significant work in the postcolonial literary canon and has been studied and analyzed in various academic settings.

Wide Sargasso Sea with the perspective of post-colonialism

   Wide Sargasso Sea emerged as part of postcolonial literature where, both a national and a regional consciousness try to assert difference from the imperial centre. Such literature subverts the imperial privilege of the "centre" in order to give voice to that "periphery" which has been silent for so long. According to ChinuaAchebe, the form of the novel, like the whole postcolonial literature, works to disrupt the literary and philosophical basis of Western civilization.

     This tendency to underline and reject stereotypical aspects of imperialist literature and conscience is a practice of postcolonialism which aims at disrupting, disassembling or deconstructing the kind of logic and ideologies of the West. Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea is a product of postcolonialism and the use of language she does represents her extraordinary ability to subvert the ideologies of the West. In The Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft and Tiffin distinguish between the Standard British English inherited from the Empire and the English which the language has evolved in postcolonial countries.

    Jean Rhys uses in her novel both Standard British English and the Jamaican varieties of English as the language of the periphery, i.e. Creole and the English of black community. Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea, by means of language, emphasizes and constructs the setting; the Creole, Black, and European identity; and the race relationships of the novel. Rochester, representative of the European discourse and power, rejects the varieties of English, and he refuses Creole as a

language which he dislikes and cannot understand.

    Jean Rhys practices the postcolonial tendency to write back to the oppressive imperialist novels. The deliberate act to rewrite canonical narratives of Western discourse is a common colonial practice wherein the telling of a story from a different point of view is considered an extension of the deconstructive project to explore the gaps and the silences in a text. In this case, the novel Jean Rhys is writing back to is

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. In the Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys confronts the possibility of another side to Jane Eyre and she gives voice to Edward Rochester's mad wife, Bertha.

   Wide Sargasso Sea thus becomes a creative response to Charlotte Bronte's text. Rhys's story is set in Jamaica during the years immediately following the Emancipation Act (1833) when race relations were very tense and conflicted. Jean Rhys was deeply influenced by her Creole heritage: she was born in Roseau, Dominica, West Indies; her father was a Welsh doctor and her mother a Dominican Creole. At the age of sixteen she left the West Indies for Britain and shortly thereafter moved to Paris, where she wrote five books between 1927 and 1939. She experienced being Creole both in the Caribbean and in England, and she was personally aware of the conflicting culture she depicts in the figure of Antoinette who, being Creole, is accepted neither within the black community nor by the white representatives of the colonial power. 

       Jean Rhys speaks from a self-consciously marginal position raising issues of gender and colonial difference in fiction of resistance which are always compromised by the conditions of female dependency. In response to Jane Eyre, Rhys gives a presentation of Antoinette different from Bronte's Bertha Mason and sets out to write a colonial story that is absent from Bronte's text. 

 

Conclusion : 

  In Wide Sargasso Sea, not only does she express the viewpoints of characters who had no voice in Jane Eyre, but she also takes a different structural approach to the first-person narrative technique employed by Charlotte Bronte. Wide Sargasso Sea is written as a multiple narrative, where in the first part Bertha starts telling her story. In Part Two, Rochester, even though never named, takes over the narration, and at the opening of Part Three Grace Poole has been given a voice in order to give the reader greater understanding. Then Bertha again has the role of narrator and ends her side of the story.

References : 

  

   Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Jean Rhys". Encyclopedia Britannica, 9 Nov. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-Rhys . Accessed 8 December 2023.

Justin, Biju. Postcolonial Discourse in JeanRhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. vol. 09, December 2019, https://www.ijmra.us/project%20doc/2019/IJRSS_DECEMBER2019/IJRSSDec19BijuRy.pdf . Accessed 08 12 2023.

Image : 1 

Words : 1332

Thank You … .