A Postcolonial Interpretation Of Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea is the prequel of Jane Eyre, which tells the story of Rochester's madwife Bertha Mason. It tells how Antoinette—Bertha Mason's original name in Wide SargassoSea—is cajoled into marriage, deprived of her property and diagnosed as a mad woman. Theauthor of Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys is a white Creole. On the basis of her experience as awhite Creole, she tells the awkward situation of in-betweeness of white Creoles in the society,especially as a white Creole woman. Antoinette, the heroine of the story, as a descendent offormer white ruling class, is rejected by the blacks. On the other hand, as she is born in thecolonized country and is of mixed blood, she is also rejected by her remote home countries.Such Creoles are destined to suffer from in-betweeness, being regarded as Other by both sides.When Antoinette is rejected by the blacks, she attempts to seek her belonging in her marriagewith Rochester. However, when Rochester gets her money, he dumps her the way thecolonizers dump the colonized. At the end of Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette burns downThornfield which is a symbol of the tyranny of white male authority and colonizer's wealth.In the fire, Antoinette gets her revenge and her identity.This thesis presents the subversion of Eurocentrism in Wide Sargasso Sea from thePostcolonial perspective. It can be divided into three parts. The first part gives a simpleintroduction of Wide Sargasso Sea and its critical responses to this piece of work. The secondpart is the main body of the thesis, which contains two chapters. Chapter one brieflyintroduces the development of Postcolonialism and generalizes its definition and study object.Chapter two deals with the Postcolonial issues concerned in the Wide Sargasso Sea and it canbe divided into three aspects: racial conflicts, gender oppression and religious confrontation,all of which are the problem left to the formerly colonized people by the colonizers. Fromthese three aspects, we can see that the author not only subverts the Eurocentric authority, butalso corrects the distorted images of the Europeans imposed on the formerly colonized andrewrites its history. The final part is the conclusion.