A Spatial Narrative Study Of Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea,the representative work of British female writer Jane Rhys,tells the tragic life of the Creole woman Antoinette.The novel subverts Bertha's image of mad woman in Jane Eyre and attracts heated discussion among scholars since its publication.Researches on it also involves colonialism,feminism and discourse power analysis.However,with the development of spatial criticism theory in the twentieth century,many scholars began to pay attention to the spatial elements in the text,emphasizing the importance of space in the text.On the basis of previous researches,this thesis adopts the spatial narrative theories of Gabriel Zoran and Henry Lefebvre to analyze the Wide Sargasso Sea,aiming to explore the influence of the space in the novel on the heroine's fate.The main part of the thesis is divided into four chapters.Chapter one is theoretical foundation which briefly introduces the development of spatial narrative theory in recent years and the spatial narrative theory used in the thesis,including the topographical space proposed by Gabriel Zoran and the social space and psychological space proposed by Henry Lefebvre.Chapter two is the topographical space in the novel,which mainly develops in three places.The first place is the birthplace of the heroine Antoinette Jamaica,the second place is Granbois where Antoinette and Rochester spend the honeymoon,and the third place is Thornfield Hall which has witnessed the heroine's imprison to devastation.The description of the topographical space provides the setting for the novel,and also a background for the growth of the heroine.Chapter three is the social space in the novel,which mainly focuses on two aspects.The first aspect is colonial space mainly reflected in the cultural hegemony,racial discrimination and conflicts between different classes brought by the colonization.The second aspect is gender space which is reflected in man's domination to women and woman's resistance to men.The social space enriches the connotation of the novel and also shapes the character of the heroine.Chapter four is the psychological space in the novel,which mainly pays attention to the psychological development of the two protagonists.Rochester's psychological space of his ambivalence in marriage,his fear to alien culture of witchcraft Obeah,and then his determination to imprison Antoinette are analyzed through his three letters.Antoinette's psychological space,including her fear from the first encounter with a man in the forest to fear but love to the men and then to her rational madness,are reflected in her three dreams.The psychological space reveals the emotional changes of the characters and results in the tragic fate of the heroine.In the Wide Sargasso Sea,Jean Rhys constructs the narrative structure of the novel through the topographical space,social space and psychological space,telling the tragic life of Antoinette.This paper uses the theory of spatial narrative to analyze the the process of the heroine's growth and destruction exposing the plight of marginal women.