Creole identity from shifting points of view: The West Indies from Shakespeare to Jean Rhys

The term "Creole" has been given various meanings throughout the last four centuries. In the early colonial days, the term was created by the Spaniards following their invasion of the New World to refer to the people of Spanish descent who were born in South America and the West Indies. From the beginning, the term was used within the Spanish-American context, and gradually spread within the context of the islands' cultures to include the French, the English, and also the Afro-Caribbean colonial cultures.; Given this historical context, the peoples and cultures native to those areas called "Creole" were mentioned in various texts and described in literary works.{09}Nowadays, the concept "Creole" is considered useful by literary theorists to denote issues like "hybridity" since the rise of "Post-colonial Studies" in the 1980's. However, before that, the descriptions of the West Indies did not receive attention except when it was thought exotic or important from the imperial point of view.{09}In the literary works of the nineteenth century such as Belinda (1801) and Jane Eyre (1847), the Creoles were described negatively. In contrast, the great Creole writer of the twentieth century, Jean Rhys, described the Culture from its own perspective in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). This thesis focuses on the English Creole in the first and second chapters: the original meaning of the term "Creole," and the differences between the descriptions of the Creole in the historical texts and literary works. In the third chapter, the Creoles present in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea are compared, and Rhys's intention in rewriting the Creole in Jane Eyre and the meanings of Rhys's point of view as a modern twentieth century Creole are discussed.