DOCSLIB.ORG

Exploring Cultural Identities in Jean Rhys' Fiction

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Exploring Cultural Identities in Jean Rhys' Fiction Cristina-Georgiana Voicu Exploring Cultural Identities in Jean Rhys’ Fiction Cristina-Georgiana Voicu Exploring Cultural Identities in Jean Rhys’ Fiction Managing Editor: Katarzyna Grzegorek Associate Editor: Anna Borowska Language Editor: Barry Keene Published by De Gruyter Open Ltd, Warsaw/Berlin This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license, which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. Copyright © 2014 Cristina-Georgiana Voicu ISBN (paperback): 978-83-7656-066-3 ISBN (hardcover): 978-83-7656-067-0 e-ISBN: 978-83-7656-068-7 Managing Editor: Katarzyna Grzegorek Associate Editor: Anna Borowska Language Editor: Barry Keene www.degruyteropen.com Cover illustration: © IStock/ cdwheatley With profound love to my family for all their support and encouragement Cu profundă dragoste familiei mele pentru susţinere şi încurajare There is always the other side, always. — Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea Contents 1 Identity in the Postcolonial Paradigm: Key Concepts 15 1.1 Cultural Identity and Diaspora 15 1.2 Types of Cultural Identity 20 1.3 Hybridity versus Cultural Alterity 26 1.4 The Postcolonial Social Contract and Caribbean Modernism 33 1.5 The Caribbean (Is)landscape as Homeland 35 1.6 Caribbean Cultural Creolization 37 1.7 Imagining the “Black Atlantic”: Trans-Racial Identity 39 2 Jean Rhys’ Exoticism and the Colonial Imperialism 43 2.1 Empire, Postcolonialism and Postcolonial Identity 43 2.2 British Caribbean: Re-envisioning Cultural Identity 48 2.3 Exoticness in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea 51 3 Constructing Cultural Identity in Jean Rhys’ Fiction 59 3.1 Ethnocentrism versus Eurocentrism 59 3.2 Ethnicity, Identity, Masculinity 60 3.3 Fractal Identity 68 4 Jean Rhys and Intertextuality 75 4.1 Authorship 75 4.2 (Postcolonial) Intratext and (Metaphorical) Intertext 77 4.3 Intertextual Metaphors 81 5 Narrative Discourse in Jean Rhys’ Fiction 86 5.1 (Power-)Text 87 5.2 (Pre-)Text 93 5.3 (Power-)Textualization 108 6 Final Conclusions 117 Bibliography 128 List of Figures 136 List of Tables 137 Index 138 Acknowledgments This book could not have been completed and become reality without the patience, dedication and expertise in British and American Studies of several persons. I would first like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Dr. Odette Blu­ menfeld and Professor Dr. Sorin Pârvu from Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi, Faculty of Letters, English Department, for all their guidance and assistance during the writing and research process of this book. I am also extremely grateful to everyone at the University of Graz (Austria), Center for the Study of the Americas, especially to Professor Dr. Ulla Kriebernegg, for encour­ aging me to do this academic research. There was a wonderful opportunity to meet Professor Dr. Gary Francisco Keller from Arizona State University during my research stays in Graz who continued to guide me through the Caribbean and Latin­American universe. My appreciation also goes to Erienne Rojas for her support and help in editing my manuscript. I am also indebted to my sister, Researcher Dr. Amalia Voicu who encouraged, perhaps unknowingly, my love of, and obstinate belief in conceptual thinking. My greatest thanks, however, go to my parents, Mihai and Melania Voicu for their unfailingly loving support, for sustaining me in my research and for keeping me company up to the very last frantic minute. Foreword Exploring Cultural Identities in Jean Rhys’ Fiction exposes my interest in hybridity, a concept within the larger one of cultural identity, alluding to the mixture, combina­ tion, fusion, mélange especially generated by the processes of migration. It is a long journey through different genres, continents, cultures, critical approaches and men­ talities and a joint result of several important factors. Exploring Cultural Identities in Jean Rhys’ Fiction is a study on the Caribbean and Caribbean literature, and Rhys’ writings in particular, thus addressing various kinds of readership. According to the metaphor of mélange, cultures are present as ‘flowing’ together like body fluids, hence the existence of a ‘fluid identity’. Starting from the acknowledgment that (cultural) hybridity is paradoxical in its essence and that only an ambivalent attitude is able to encompass its contradictory wholeness, the book reveals the concepts of racial identity, ethnicity or masculinity that contribute to the reinvigoration of the aspects specific to Caribbean culture as described in the work of Jean Rhys. In the context of the above, my endeavor in writing this book is concentrated on the study of the identitarian phenomenon. Consequently, Jean Rhys’ use of the 1st person pronoun marks the point in which the pre­existing and repeatable language system articulates with the existence of the self as a unique and unrepeatable person in a specific social and historical situation. In other words, the act of creating the self is not an option in her case, but an obligation. This is only natural since we have to create ourselves; Bakhtin argues our self “does not have an alibi in existence,” so the ‘self’ is not given to us. As far as the opportunity of the chosen topic is concerned, I can state that at the level of content, this book aims at constituting a theoretical framework circum­ scribed to the concept of cultural hybridization within postcolonial experience and the analysis of certain situations of existential ambivalence that operate at the boundary between sign (colonial difference) and symbol (imperial authority). Thus, bringing forward issues related not only to cultural identity, but also to alterity, racism and colo­ nialism in the context of transcending cultural limits. At a methodological level, the topic brings together two reputed fields: the area of postcolonial literature (addressing mainly identitarian concerns) and the field of cultural practices, in an integrated crit­ ical research that combines cultural studies with textual analysis. Consequently, by applying the theory of cultural hybridity as a mirroring­space of identitarian dynamics in Jean Rhys’ work, I have the opportunity to prove that postcolonial identity neces­ sarily becomes a hybrid between two cultures, founded on destruction through adap­ tation – hence the tetrad: take over, adaptation, promotion and development. Colo­ nizers destroyed, annihilated, and yet took viable elements from the former culture. The idea that postcolonial culture is in fact a hybrid culture derives from the notion of deterritorialization, in the sense that we witness an ever­intense traffic between cultures – a consequence of colonization – accompanied by a mélange of uprooted 10 Foreword cultural practices, and producing new hybrid and complex forms of culture. Conse­ quently, I believe that the notion of ‘deterritorialization’, in a larger sense includes what Garcia Canclini calls “the loss of the ‘natural’ relation between culture and the social and geographical territories” (Canclini, 1995, p. 97). Thus, from the point of view of cultural experience, what becomes important to my critical discourse is the way in which this widening of social relations affects the character of the real place. Hence, the duality of the cultural settings in Jean Rhys’ fiction by which the charac­ ters usually move about; on the one hand, familiar aspects, i.e. the protagonists stay ‘at home’ and on the other hand, the alien features rather ‘placed’ in that place by distant forces. In this sense, the experience of ‘dis­location’ in postcolonial society is not an alienating experience, but an experience of cultural identity ambivalence. Coming back to the concept of hybridity, the book refers to a space between two pure areas. On the other hand, though, it is a sine qua non of human cultures that does not contain purity zones; as is the case with transculturality processes (mutual borrowings between cultures). Moreover, the notion of hybrid culture can prove useful in understanding the type of cultural identity that comes to the fore in the ‘transna­- tio n al’ cultural space. Consequently, I have undertaken an analysis of the ‘hybrid’ seen as metaphor and correlated with the exploration of cultural changes suggested by the notion of deterritorialization. This perspective stresses the alienating, individual izing and contractual aspects found in close relation, not with a real space but rather with an anthropological one: “a space that cannot be defined as relational, historical or concerned with identity […], a non­place…” (Augé, 1995, p.63). Consequently, the concept of deterritorialization encapsulates the idea of place transformation with both positive and negative features, yet resisting the temptation of interpreting it as a simple impoverishment or dissolution of cultural interaction. Thus of interest for the topic of this book is an investigation of the intrinsic ambivalence of deterritorialization; when applied to the ‘life experience’ of the characters in Jean Rhys’ works, wherein becom­ ing ‘naturalized’ is taken as such in the current flow of experience. In the first part of the book, I establish the key concepts most appropriate for my investigation and insist upon the dialectic relationship between identity/self and alterity. In the second part, I continue with the exploration of the transliterary content of Jean Rhys’ fiction, identifying the Creole and racial
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Wide Sargasso Sea
    THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ENGLISH: ANXIETY OF ENGLISHNESS IN CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S JANE EYRE AND JEAN RHYS’S WIDE SARGASSO SEA By Sarah Whittemore Bachelor of Arts, September 2004 ­ May 2008, The George Washington University A Thesis submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English May 18, 2008 Thesis directed by Tara Wallace Associate Professor of English The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Sarah Whittemore has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English as of May 12, 2008. This is the final and approved form of the thesis. THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ENGLISH: ANXIETY OF ENGLISHNESS IN CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S JANE EYRE AND JEAN RHYS’S WIDE SARGASSO SEA Sarah Whittemore Thesis Research Committee: Tara Wallace, Associate Professor of English, Director Antonio Lopez, Assistant Professor of English, Reader ii © Copyright 2008 by Sarah Whittemore All rights reserved iii Acknowledgments I would like to start by acknowledging all of those who played a major role in helping me to successfully complete this project. First and foremost, I would like to thank my family who provided not only the inspiration for my thesis topic, but the constant love and support necessary to carry it out. A special thanks to Matt for keeping me motivated (and caffeinated) throughout the semester and to my three amazing roommates for constantly believing in me. Finally, I would like to thank the GW English department, specifically Tara Wallace and Gil Harris for their patience and guidance throughout the year.
    [Show full text]
  • Beyond Internationalization: Lessons from Post-Development
    Peer-Reviewed Article © Journal of International Students Volume 11, Issue S1 (2021), pp. 133-151 ISSN: 2162-3104 (Print), 2166-3750 (Online) ojed.org/jis Beyond Internationalization: Lessons from Post-Development Kumari Beck Simon Fraser University, Canada ABSTRACT Despite the critiques generated in critical internationalization studies in response to the neoliberal and neocolonial orientation of internationalization of higher education, the direction of internationalization appears to be unchanged. This paper takes up the challenge of imagining internationalization otherwise by drawing from the field of post-development (PD) studies, which, it is argued, has parallels to the realities and debates on internationalization. An overview of the debates in PD and why they offer important ideas for critical internationalization studies will be followed by a discussion of how key analyses and arguments in PD can be applied to internationalization. This argument leads to the question of whether it is time to recognize an emerging post-internationalization movement, acknowledging that internationalization as we know it is in decline. The paper concludes with an exploration of a new commons in internationalization, refocusing on educational principles and values, while recognizing the complexities and contradictions inherent in seeking international education that is “in between, with and from multiple worlds.” Keywords: internationalization of higher education, international education, post- development, critical internationalization studies, new commons INTRODUCTION The last three decades have seen a rapid growth in the internationalization of higher education, which needs to be understood alongside the conditions of globalization and the consequential market orientation of higher education (Darder, 2016) and colonial contexts of history, culture and power (Dolby & Rahman, 2008).
    [Show full text]
  • Navigating Multiple Knowledge Systems and Responding to Climate Change in the Maldives Rachel Hannah Spiegel Pitzer College
    Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont Pitzer Senior Theses Pitzer Student Scholarship 2017 Drowning in Rising Seas: Navigating Multiple Knowledge Systems and Responding to Climate Change in the Maldives Rachel Hannah Spiegel Pitzer College Recommended Citation Spiegel, Rachel Hannah, "Drowning in Rising Seas: Navigating Multiple Knowledge Systems and Responding to Climate Change in the Maldives" (2017). Pitzer Senior Theses. 76. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/pitzer_theses/76 This Open Access Senior Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Pitzer Student Scholarship at Scholarship @ Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in Pitzer Senior Theses by an authorized administrator of Scholarship @ Claremont. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Drowning in Rising Seas: Navigating Multiple Knowledge Systems and Responding to Climate Change in the Maldives Rachel H. Spiegel In partial fulfillment of a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Environmental Analysis and International/Intercultural Studies April 2017 Pitzer College, Claremont, California Readers: Professor Joseph Parker and Professor Susan Phillips DROWNING IN RISING SEAS 1 Image: Maldivian Cabinet member and Minister of Fisheries & Agriculture Dr. Ibrahim Didi signs a document calling on the world to address global climate change October, 2009 DROWNING IN RISING SEAS 2 ABSTRACT The threat of global climate change increasingly influences the actions of human society. As world leaders have negotiated adaptation strategies over the past couple of decades, a certain discourse has emerged that privileges Western conceptions of environmental degradation. I argue that this framing of climate change inhibits the successful implementation of adaptation strategies. This thesis focuses on a case study of the Maldives, an island nation deemed one of the most vulnerable locations to the impacts of rising sea levels.
    [Show full text]
  • Indigenous-Hybrid Organisations in Colombia: a Multi-Level Analysis Within the Buen Vivir Model
    Open Research Online The Open University’s repository of research publications and other research outputs Indigenous-Hybrid Organisations in Colombia: A Multi-Level Analysis within the Buen Vivir Model Thesis How to cite: Morales Pachon, Andres (2019). Indigenous-Hybrid Organisations in Colombia: A Multi-Level Analysis within the Buen Vivir Model. PhD thesis The Open University. For guidance on citations see FAQs. c 2018 The Author https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Version: Version of Record Link(s) to article on publisher’s website: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21954/ou.ro.0000f316 Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. oro.open.ac.uk INDIGENOUS-HYBRID ORGANISATIONS IN COLOMBIA: A MULTI-LEVEL ANALYSIS WITHIN THE BUEN VIVIR MODEL ANDRÉS MORALES A thesis submitted to the Open University in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The Open University Business School Department for Public Leadership and Social Enterprise November 2018 Acknowledgements I thank the following people for their support and immense contribution towards this study. First of all, I am grateful to Dr Michael Ngoasong, Professor Roger Spear and Dr Silvia Sacchetti for their input and guidance throughout the research process. It has been a privilege for me to be working under their distinguished, meticulous and persevering PhD supervision. I also thank Michael Murphy for his proofreading supervision and support.
    [Show full text]
  • The Waves of Post-Development Theory and a Consideration of the Philippines
    The Waves of Post-Development Theory and a Consideration of the Philippines Joseph Ahorro University of Alberta Introduction In the 1990s, post-development theorists argued against modernization and development for its reductionism, universalism, and ethnocentricity. Tracing the theoretical debates, I will identify two waves of post-development theory. While the first wave of post-development theory has been criticized for its rejection of development without qualification, there has been a second wave that responded and subsequently deepened the concept of post-development. Although there has been great strides to make post-development more inclusive and reflexive, the discipline has largely been rooted in experiences from Latin America, Africa, and India. What has been under-researched in the post-development literature is a consideration for countries in South East Asia. Acknowledging the diversity of culture, language, religion, heritage, and colonial experience, this paper will reflect on how the Philippine experience can make a contribution to post-development theory. In this paper, I will address three questions. First, what led to the second wave of post-development theory? Second, why consider post- development theory from a Philippine perspective? Third, what contributions can an analysis of a Philippine perspective offer towards the furthering of post-development theory? I will argue that categorizing post-development into two waves suggests that the theory has not stalled as a consequence of its initial shortfalls, but does in fact have room for growth as it will be demonstrated in the Philippine case. This paper will proceed in five steps. First, there will be a review of what I classify as the first wave of post-development theory.
    [Show full text]
  • 'Missionaries' in Bangladesh
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ResearchArchive at Victoria University of Wellington Exploring the mission-development nexus through stories from Christian ‘missionaries’ in Bangladesh Anna Thompson 2012 A thesis submitted to Victoria University of Wellington in partial fulfilment of requirements for the degree of Master of Development Studies School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences Victoria University of Wellington Abstract Over the past decade, development research and policy has increasingly paid attention to religion and belief. Donors and researchers have progressively engaged with faith-based organisations and recipients. However, Christian mission and ‗missionaries‘ remain underexplored aspects within religion and development discourses. In response, this research explores stories from eleven Christian ‗missionaries‘ in Bangladesh. Firstly, I assess how the changing non-governmental sector in Bangladesh influenced participants‘ activities. Secondly, I contextualise their stories within religion and development discourses with reference to analyses of development workers. Finally, I reflect on the significance of spirituality in participants‘ lives. I also describe how spirituality played a role in my research. I frame this research within feminist and poststructuralist ways of knowing. Methodologically, I conducted semi-structured interviews and ‗hung out‘ with participants. I ‗wrote myself-in‘ to this research to highlight how the process intersected with my own subject positions. I found that participants‘ engaged with development in similar ways to development workers as analysed by others. They reproduced discourses of modernisation, expertise, altruism, and the ‗third world‘. They additionally responded to Christian discourses, such as ‗calling‘. Participants‘ activities and subjectivities were shaped by these intersecting discourses, and were also shaped by the historic and current setting of Bangladesh.
    [Show full text]
  • Exploring Ecological Swaraj Or Radical Ecological Democracy : a Path Towards Postdevelopment in India
    International Journal of Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Studies (IJIMS), 2021, Vol 8, No.1,21-35. 21 Available online at http://www.ijims.com ISSN - (Print): 2519 – 7908 ; ISSN - (Electronic): 2348 – 0343 IF:4.335; Index Copernicus (IC) Value: 60.59; Peer-reviewed Journal Exploring Ecological Swaraj or Radical Ecological Democracy : A Path Towards Postdevelopment In India Akash Jash M.A. in Sociology, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India Abstract The new phase of Postdevelopment theory is the phase of both deconstruction and reconstruction. Besides being a critique, it delves into the search for alternatives to development. Because of the claustrophobia of Development and recently neoliberalism and globalization, changes started to occur in almost all the axes of life (social, cultural, political, economic, ecological and scientific and spiritual). Many age-old concepts like Buen Vivir in Latin America, Ubuntu in Africa, Swaraj in India are getting envisioned in a new way through various social movements and alternative ways of living around the whole world, especially in the global South. Various 'Transition Discourses'(TD) are coming into existence which not only resist the arrogant intervention of development, but also resurface the other forms of life in this world. "A world of The third", non- capitalist in nature, is emerging which was hidden for so many years under the dominance of the Development Age. And these all are making the alternatives possible. A new experimental journey of postdevelopment is on its way to create a 'Pluriverse' - " a world where many worlds can be embraced". In the context of India, the purpose 'Development' serves is double.
    [Show full text]
  • Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and the Case
    Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and the Case of Postcolonial Haunting *** Kathleen Hemingway is currently in her third year at the University of Toronto Mississauga where she is specializing in English and majoring in History. She has spent the last five summers working as both a counsellor and a teacher at an arts camp. Kathleen is particularly interested in ideas of translation and post-colonial as well as transnational literature. *** The “grand narratives” of history are dominated by stories of victory and heroism, tales of conquest and the “spread of civilization.” What these “grand narratives” fail to tell are the stories of the conquered, the losers of history. These stories remain in the periphery of the historical narrative, mentioned only here and there in passing; a cargo jettisoned from a slave ship or the cackling laughter of the mad Creole woman in the attic. The “histories we choose to remember and recount” (Bhabha 57) provide a one-sided, often Eurocentric view of the state of the world. As a result they push “minor” cultures and people further and further into the margins until they become little more than a footnote. Postcolonialism aims, as Homi Bhabha puts it, for a “radical revision” of this fact. By tearing down the binary oppositions which structure the current historical and literary narratives, postcolonial theory allows for the emergence of the “projective past” or haunting of the present by an unsettled past and the “split narratives” that accompany it (Bhabha 57). The postcolonial narrative acts to represent cultures that have been marginalized through colonization as it “bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation” (Bhabha 46).
    [Show full text]
  • Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Adapted Screenplays
    Absorbing the Worlds of Others: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Adapted Screenplays By Laura Fryer Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of a PhD degree at De Montfort University, Leicester. Funded by Midlands 3 Cities and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. June 2020 i Abstract Despite being a prolific and well-decorated adapter and screenwriter, the screenplays of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala are largely overlooked in adaptation studies. This is likely, in part, because her life and career are characterised by the paradox of being an outsider on the inside: whether that be as a European writing in and about India, as a novelist in film or as a woman in industry. The aims of this thesis are threefold: to explore the reasons behind her neglect in criticism, to uncover her contributions to the film adaptations she worked on and to draw together the fields of screenwriting and adaptation studies. Surveying both existing academic studies in film history, screenwriting and adaptation in Chapter 1 -- as well as publicity materials in Chapter 2 -- reveals that screenwriting in general is on the periphery of considerations of film authorship. In Chapter 2, I employ Sandra Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s notions of ‘the madwoman in the attic’ and ‘the angel in the house’ to portrayals of screenwriters, arguing that Jhabvala purposely cultivates an impression of herself as the latter -- a submissive screenwriter, of no threat to patriarchal or directorial power -- to protect herself from any negative attention as the former. However, the archival materials examined in Chapter 3 which include screenplay drafts, reveal her to have made significant contributions to problem-solving, characterisation and tone.
    [Show full text]
  • The White Creole in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso
    HSS V.1 (2016) DOI: 10.1515/hssr -2016-0006 The White Creole in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea: A Woman in Passage Imen Mzoughi * Félix Houphouët-Boigny University, Cocody-Abidjan, Ivory Coast (West Africa) Abstract Studies on Jean Rhys have been fragmentary concentrating on one or two aspects of Rhys’s thematic concern with the alienation of the white creole without laying emphasis on Rhys’s exploration of the Creole’s identity. There has been no attempt to examine if the creole has to struggle harder and more than whites and blacks to come to terms with her personal identity until now. The answer is affirmative because the creole is a composite human being. Indeed, the white creole is the ‘fruit’ of a mixed union. Born into miscegenation, hybridity and creolization, the creole is physically, linguistically, socially and religiously a diverse human being. Within the scope of this paper, the term identity is used in a broad sense. The creole’s personal identity refers to the different identities the Creole can have at different times and in different circumstances. Correspondingly, she must negotiate the white and black elements of her identity. The Creole must deal with the complexity of her identity through a web of tangled relationships with both whites and blacks. Read from this light, the personal identity of the creole is not “either/ or,” but reluctantly “both/ and.” In various ways, the creole is an ‘Everyman.’ The Creole undergoes an awareness, and is eventually, redefined through the image of the ‘other.’ Indeed, her jump toward her black friend Tia reflects Rhys’s basic concern for a Caribbean society in which assimilation and personal identity must blend in a single humane goal, that is, to co-exist beyond the lines of race, gender, class and sex in order to avoid annihilation.
    [Show full text]
  • The Postcolonial Framework and Reinterpretation of Great
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Diposit Digital de Documents de la UAB The Postcolonial Framework and Reinterpretation of Great Expectations and Jane Eyre in Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. TFG Estudis Anglesos Supervisor: Dr Felicity Hand Cristina González Varo June 2015 Acknowledgments I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr Hand, who from the very beginning showed me her support, suggesting works and different approaches to improve my project. Thank you for your time, patience, and especially for allowing me to express my ideas in my own way. I would also like to thank Dr Owen, who might not be aware of the impact his Literary Theory course had on me. Thank you for introducing me to this world, for teaching me to seek my voice and for encouraging me to keep on writing. Special thanks to my parents, who have suffered my many doubts and moments of self- consciousness; and to my partner, Lewis, who has supported me from afar with his constant support and encouragement. Table of Contents Abstract....................................................................................................................................... 1 1. Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 2 2. Background on Postcolonialism ................................................................................... 3 3. Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • 1 INTRODUCTION Jean Rhys Was Born Ella Gwen Williams on 24
    1 INTRODUCTION Jean Rhys was born Ella Gwen Williams on 24 August, 1891 in the island of Dominica, West Indies. She was the fourth of five children born to Minna Williams (n£e Lockhart), and William Rees Williams. William Rees Williams was a Welsh doctor who went to Dominica in the late 19th century, as a young man. He had been to sea for some years as a ship's doctor, and finally decided to settle in Dominica. He died in 1908 while Jean Rhys was a student at the Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Minna Lockhart was born in Dominica in the mid-1800's, the offspring of a white Creole family that had once owned land and slaves, but whose wealth had declined over the years. Jean Rhys's great-grandfather, James Gibson Lockhart, went to Dominica at the end of the 1700's from Scotland. The Lockharts still owned a large estate called 'Geneva,' near Grand Bay in the south of Dominica, when Rhys was a child. The great house on this estate was burnt down more than once after the Lockharts established themselves there, and one of these burnings was recaptured by Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea. She also wrote about the garden at Geneva estate in this novel. When Jean Rhys was a girl, her family lived some of the time at Geneva estate, and sometimes in Roseau, the capital of Dominica, about ten rugged miles away and two hours on horseback. Dr.Williams, her father, owned a house at the corner of Cork and Queen Mary Streets in Roseau where he had his office, and where the family lived when they were in town.
    [Show full text]