Living Between The Cracks

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Jane Eyre, is her last butbest-reviewed novel which is regarded as a classic of anti-colonial discourse thatrewrites the narrative tradition of western imperialism. Since its publication, WideSargasso Sea has received widely acclaim of critics who have studied this book fromperspectives such as feminism, modernism, post-colonialism and intertextuality.However, few articles have delved deeply into the ambivalent relationships betweenthe two protagonists and people around them as well as the imitative behaviors of thecolonized. This thesis attempts to read Wide Sargasso Sea applying Homi Bhabha’spostcolonial theoretical terms, ambivalence and mimicry, to reveal that the colonizerand the colonized are not in a simple mode of oppression and resistance but in acomplex state: the authority of colonists is not absolute but could be challenged bytheir ambiguous relations with the discriminated, and the colonized are not completelypassive any more. Their cultural forces will be strengthened by the hard interactionwith the colonists, which makes the colonized be able to resist the colonial power in asubtle yet effective way.