Uncertainty Of Identities In Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea

Before the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, the Caribbean-born British writer Jean Rhys had spent years of obscurity and even thought dead. However, in the seventies of her life, she was finally granted much belated recognition for her literary creation. Her masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea, which won her the prestigious W.H. Smith Literary Award and the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature, has established her reputation as a great modernist writer and triggered world-wide interest in the study of her works. Jean Rhys is acclaimed by some critics as"the best English novelist of the 20th century, whose impact upon contemporary is profound."She is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea, written as a "prequel" to Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre. The novel was published in 1966 when Jean Rhys was toward the end of her writing career. It is regarded as the most successful novel of Rhyss literary works. It is a story of the first Mrs. Rochester, Antoinette (Bertha) Mason, a white Creole heiress; the time is from her youth in the Caribbean to her unhappy marriage and relocation to England. The novel has a rich vein of uncertainty. Absoluteness is nowhere to be found. The focus of the this thesis is the uncertainty of identities in this novel and the reasons behind it.The unstable identity is a key to the study of this novel. Therefore, this thesis is intended to make a thorough analysis of the characters'identities (i.e., Antoinette, Rochester, Christophine, and Grace Poole), and provide a more balanced understanding of them.In fact, the double, or divided, or fluid, unstable nature of personal identity is the characteristic of post-colonialism. The recognition of such identity helps better understand the actions of the characters and sheds light on the complexities of the situation around them. Therefore, by analyzing the identity issue concerning major characters (Antoinette and Rochester) as well as minor ones (Christophine and Grace Poole) and by identifying these seemingly conflicting elements around their identities, the author of this thesis attempts to render a more comprehensive interpretation of the novel. It is hoped that this thesis will broaden and enrich the scope of the current study of Wide Sargasso Sea and provide some new thoughts for future research of the novel.