Uppsatsens syfte är att visa hur Jean Rhys i sin roman Sargassohavet ifrågasätter de narrativa strategier och diskurser som avgör vilka romanpersoner och perspektiv som får komma till uttryck. Rhys gör detta bland annat genom att placera en icke-västerländsk kvinna, som dessutom påstås vara galen, i protagonistens position. På så vis legitimeras romanpersonens perspektiv och detta är ett sätt att låta den Andras röst få komma till uttryck, från det fria subjektets position. Rhys lyfter också fram att det alltid finns fler än en sida av en berättelse. Den mångstämmighet som kännetecknar romanen visar att en berättelse kan framföras från flera olika perspektiv; genom att utrymme ges åt flera röster försvåras en reducerande läsart av romanpersonerna. Romanens polyfoni är också ett sätt att belysa de olika positionerna i de konflikter som strukturerar romanen, exempelvis konflikten mellan det västerländska och det icke-västerländska, mellan kvinnor och män och mellan rationalitet och fantasi. / The aim of this thesis is to show how Jean Rhys in her novel Wide Sargasso Sea questions the narrative strategies and the discourses that decide which characters are allowed to speak. Rhys does this by placing a non-western woman, who is also allegedly insane, in the position of the protagonist. By doing so, this perspective is legitimized and it is a strategy that lets the voice of the Other be expressed. Rhys also emphasizes the existence of multiple versions of a story. The polyphony that characterizes the novel shows that a story can be told from different points of view. By letting several voices be heard, a reductive reading of the characters is prevented. The polyphony in the novel is also a way of bringing out the different positions in the conflicts that structure the novel, for example the conflict between the western and the non-western, between women and men and between rationality and fantasy.

The purpose of this essay is to look into how Jean Rhys describes the complexity of colonialism in the Caribbean and how it affected the colonized people and the European colonizers. Her novel Wide Sargasso Sea is considered to be a re-writing of Jane Eyre, but it also demonstrates social rankings and racial groupings in the colonial society. She does not only describe Mr. Rochester’s first wife, she also depicts the forbidden love story between Antoinette and her “coloured” cousin Sandi. The analysis will have a postcolonial approach by using postcolonial theory and concepts, for example, Said’s concept about the Other, Fanon’s ideas about the psychological effects on the oppressed and Bhabha’s theory about colonial mimicry.

The aim of this dissertation is to study postmodern British Female Gothic fiction in terms of its abject representations of female desire which subvert the patriarchal definition of female sexuality as repressed and female identity as the object of desire. The study analyzes texts from postmodern Female Gothic fiction which are feminist rewritings of the traditional Gothic narratives. The conventional Gothic plot is based on the Oedipal development of identity which excludes the (m)other and deprives the female from autonomous subjectivity. The feminist rewritings of the conventional Gothic plot have a subversive aim to recast the Oedipal identity formation and they embrace the (m)other figure in order to blur the strict boundaries between the subject and the object. Besides, these rewritings aim to destroy the image of the victimized heroine within the imprisoning conventional Gothic structures and transgress the cultural, social and sexual definitions of women constructed by patriarchal sexual politics. The study bases its analyses on Jean Rhys&rsquo / s Wide Sargasso Sea, Angela Carter&rsquo / s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, and Emma Donoghue&rsquo / s Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins as examples in which patriarchal definition of the female desire as passive is destroyed and the female desire as active is promoted by the adoption of abject representations, which challenge the strictly constructed hierarchical relationships between men and women. Basing its argument on Julia Kristeva&rsquo / s psychoanalytical theories, which re-vision the traditional psychoanalytical theories, this study puts forward that by the emergence of postmodernism, which has overtly provided a ground for the marginalized discourses to get into dialogue with the oppressive ones, the abject representations of female desire have gained a positive characteristic that can liberate female body from the control and authority of the male-dominated ideology. Thus, one can chronologically follow the positive development of abject representations of female sexuality in Rhys&rsquo / s, Carter&rsquo / s and Donoghue&rsquo / s works which promote a liberation for the Gothic heroines from patriarchal psychoanalytical identity development, which render female desire active and female body expressive, which rehistoricize female sexuality from a feminist lens and which call for a new world order built upon an egalitarian basis that destroys hierarchically constructed gender roles. As a result, postmodern British Female Gothic Fiction is proved to be offering a utopian ideal of an egalitarian society, but although utopian and radical, not an impossible one to be realized.

<p>This dissertation traces invocations and theories of electric power in modernist literature by women, showing how four modernist authors—Edith Wharton, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Olive Moore, and Jean Rhys—deploy electricity in their fiction and highlight its varied and contradictory cultural meanings. Modernist literature by women leverages the open and strange impressions from the era of what electricity might mean, so that authors might make their own arguments about where artistic impulses originate, how homes would change when they became wired, how modernization would change modernist art forms, or why some social spaces gleam brighter than others. Edith Wharton and Jean Rhys highlight cultural and class system dynamics with their electric metaphors and electrically wired settings, in which they fuse mental states with modern atmospheres. H.D. and Olive Moore explore how women experience artistic inspiration, as either a transcendent space of unlimited possibility for the former, or as proof of the limitations of gender for the latter. </p>

This essay will discuss Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea from a postcolonial and historical perspective, to show how Rhys’s recreation of Bertha Rochester’s past (Charlotte Brontë’s madwoman in Jane Eyre) can make her end appear triumphant. The analysis will be based on a combination of aspects from the novel’s contemporary English and Caribbean societies and Edward Said’s thoughts about Orientalism, mainly the binary opposition between Europe and the Orient and the creation of Orientalist knowledge. Said’s theories and historical actualities will be used to identify how colonial and patriarchal values in the novel influence the development of the heroine Antoinette through her upbringing and later how they are used to reduce her into a madwoman. The analysis will conclude that Antoinette’s rebellion against patriarchal and colonial oppression in the last part of the novel provides an opportunity to interpret her predetermined end in Jane Eyre as triumphant.

In this essay I have read the novels Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys 1966), Desirada (Maryse Condé 1997) and Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino 1972) through Édouard Glissant’s notion of the primary scene in Philosophie de la relation. Poésie en étendue. I have examined how the primary scene can be seen as a political/an aesthetical strategy in the three novels. This was done in order to question the blunted tool of the notion of the identity, which is often considered in studies regarding ”postcolonial novels”. Invisible Cities is not belonging in this tradition, the method I used was ”The travelling theory” of Edward W. Saïd that proposes to let theories travel through different fields instead of trying to understand their ”original” meaning. I compared these novels in accordance to Glissants theory of questioning the notion of origins. The analysis compares how the novels depending on in wich tradition they have been read is being seen with different eyes. Novels interpreted as ”postcolonial novels” are usually read as a symptom of lack of origin. Whereas the protagonist tryes to understand the loss of identity. Glissants theory eases the analysis to reach other possible meanings of the novels, where they both meet and differs. My results indicate that The Wide Sargasso Sea and Desirada create a complex relation to time and space, where the primary scenes in these novels are steeped through different time levels. The two novels present a new way to understand time that rejects historicity, create new tools for thinking and evaluates new strategies to exist in the world, without origins in the classical meaning; Rhys through her imagery and Condé through her weave of times. The same goes for Invicible Cities, only though Venice the primal scene in the novel stays the center of interest, and even though borders of time and space are being questioned, the novel tends to make Venice the guzzling synthesis. / Édouard Glissant, Jean Rhys, Maryse Condé, Italo Calvino, Édward W. Saïd, Mary Lou Emery, Spivak.

This essay is focused on the search for a true homeland in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea from a Postcolonial point of view. The main protagonist, Antoinette Cosway, struggles with her mixed heritage which is both Caribbean and European. As a result, she suffers from a split identity and searches for a place of belonging. Vital Postcolonial concepts, such as Diaspora and displacement are used in order to investigate the struggle to find a true homeland. Moreover, the main purpose of this essay is to investigate how Rhys uses depictions of nature and colour to convey this search, and thereby introduces yet another aspect for the characters to interact with. Nature provides comfort, sense of belonging and the opposite, but also explores the relationship between the characters. The colours red and white are highly frequent, and refer to Antoinette’s Caribbean and European identity, which alters through the novel. The images of nature are nostalgically depicted and Antoinette longs for a lost Caribbean without the effects of Colonialism, which is merely history. It is also discovered that the homeland she longs for, England, is not what she was searching for. The struggle for the homeland becomes futile, since Antoinette longs for an England of the romantic novels and a Caribbean that does no longer exist.

This thesis investigates a neglected sub-genre of women’s writing, which I have termed the literature of the boarding house. Focusing on unmarried women, this is a study of the alternative rooms ‘of one’s own’ that existed in the nineteen thirties: from the boarding house and hotel, to the bed-sitting room or single room as a paying guest in another family’s house. The 1930s is defined by the conflict between women’s emerging social and economic independence and a dominant ideology that placed increased importance on domesticity, the idea of ‘home’ and women’s place within the familial structure. My research highlights the incompatibility between the idealised images of domestic life that dominated the period and the reality for the single woman living in temporary accommodation. The boarding house existed outside conventional notions of female domestic space with its connotations of stability and family life. Women within the boarding house were not only living outside traditional domestic structures; they were placing themselves outside socially and culturally defined domestic roles. The boarding house was both a new space of modernity, symbolising women’s independence, and a continued imitation of the bourgeois home modelled on rituals of middle-class behaviour. Through an examination of novels by Elizabeth Bowen, Lettice Cooper, Stella Gibbons, Storm Jameson, Rosamond Lehmann, Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and E. H. Young, this study privileges the literary as a way in which to understand the space of the boarding house. Not only does the boarding house blur the boundaries between public and private space, it also challenges the traditional conceptions of the family home as the sole location of private domestic space. I argue that by placing their characters in the in-between space of the boarding house, the authors can reflect on the liminal spaces that existed for women both socially and sexually. In the literature of the boarding house, the novel becomes a site for representing women’s experiences that were usually on the periphery of traditional narratives, as well as a literary medium for articulating the wider social and economic issues affecting the lives of unmarried women.

<p>My aim with this essay is to examine the relationship between identity positions and spatial positions in Jean Rhys novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Through this I wish to show how Wide Sargasso Sea problematize the analytical cathegory "women", as well as classic western canon, and feministic eurocentric readings of the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte to which Wide Sargasso Sea correspond.</p>

My aim with this essay is to examine the relationship between identity positions and spatial positions in Jean Rhys novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Through this I wish to show how Wide Sargasso Sea problematize the analytical cathegory "women", as well as classic western canon, and feministic eurocentric readings of the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte to which Wide Sargasso Sea correspond.