A Postcolonial Feminist Study Of Antoinette’s Tragedy

Jean Rhys is acknowledged as one of the greatest women writers of the 20 th in Britain.She was born at Roseau,Dominica,one of the Windward Islands.Being a white Creole woman,Rhys suffers from the perplexity of self-identifying lifelong and writes her experiences and thoughts in her novels.Wide Sargasso Sea,as her masterpiece wins Rhys many awards such as the prestigious W.H.Smith Award,the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature,etc.In Wide Sargasso Sea,Rhys relates the tragic life of Antoinette,the protagonist.Being an offspring of the previous landowner,she lives a swing life between the black and the white,while could not integrate into either side.Her delicate situation results from the residuals of colonialism during which hegemony prevails and the hatred between the white and the black grows.Meanwhile,Antoinette suffers from the oppression of the patriarchy.My paper will analyze the novel from the postcolonial feminist perspective and illustrate Antoinette’s tragic life and its reasons: the double oppression of the hegemony and the patriarchy as well as the personal weaknesses of Antoinette.Through my thesis we can see that Wide Sargasso Sea is a typical postcolonial feminist novel which has perfectly embraced the class,race,gender and culture issues and has successfully figured many vivid characters.Meanwhile it has vividly depicted the plight of the third world women.