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.

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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.

Zugl.: Mannheim, Univ., Diss., 2008

Thesis (M.A. )--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1997. / Restricted until May 1998. Bibliography: leaves 105-114. Also available online.

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 considers elements of autobiography and autobiographical fiction in the writings of three female Modernists: Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes. In chapter 1, after drawing distinctions between male and female autobiographical writing, I discuss key male autobiographical fictions of the Modernist period by D.H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust and James Joyce, and their debt to the nineteenth century literary forms of the Bildungsroman and the Künstlerroman. I relate these texts to key European writers, Andre Gide and Colette, and to works by women based on two separate female Modernist aesthetics: first, the school of "lyrical transcendence"—Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf—in whose works the self as literary subject dissolves into a renunciatory "female impressionism;" the second group—Rhys, Stein and Barnes--who as late-modernists, offer radically "objectified" self-portraits in fiction which act as critiques and revisions of both male and female Modernist fiction of earlier decades. In chapter 2, I discuss Jean Rhys' objectification of female self-consciousness through her analysis of alienation in two different settings: the Caribbean and the cities of Europe. As an outsider in both situations, Rhys presents an unorthodox counter-vision. In her fictions of the 1930's, she deliberately revises earlier Modernist representations, by both male and female writers, of female self-consciousness. In the process, she offers a simultaneous critique of both social and literary conventions. In chapter 3, I consider Gertrude Stein's career-long experiments with the rendering of consciousness in a variety of literary forms, noting her growing concern throughout the 1920's and 1930's with the role of autobiography in writing. In a close reading of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, I examine Stein's parody and "deconstruction" of the autobiographical form and the Modernist conception of the self based on memory, association and desire. Her witty attack on the conventions of narrative produces a new kind of fictional self-portraiture, drawing heavily on the visual arts to create new prose forms as well as to dismantle old ones. Chapter 4 focuses on Djuna Barnes' metaphorical representations of the self in prose fiction, which re-interpret the Modernist notion of the self, by means of an androgynous fictional poetics. In her American and European fictions she extends the notion of the work of art as a formal, self-referential and self-contained "world" by subverting it with the use of a late-modern, "high camp" imagery to create new types of narrative structure. These women's major works, appearing in the 1930's, mark a second wave of Modernism, which revises and in certain ways subverts the first. Hence, these are studies in "late Modernism" and in my conclusion I will consider the distinguishing features of this transitional period, the 1930's, and the questions it provokes about the idea of periodization in general. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Th. univ.--Litt.--Paris 8, 1978. / Bibliogr. p. 701-723.

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>