碩士 / 輔仁大學 / 英國語文學系 / 94 / This thesis aims to read and analyze the mother-daughter plots in the first and the last of Jean Rhys’s novels, Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea, which present Rhys’s perspective on and individual concerns about the mother-daughter relationship and its effects on the daughter’ sense of identity. Relying on Marianne Hirsch, Evelyn O’Callaghan and Carolyn Rody, my analysis of “mother” has twofold interpretations. Mother means both the social mother and the psychical mother: the absence of the social mother intensifies the traumatic impact of the psychical mother on the female protagonists. In addition, mother also means mother-island in my analysis. Compounded by the socio-historical backgrounds of race, gender, class and nationality, Rhys’s mother-daughter plots are usually entangled, seemingly ending with madness or falling in a vicious circle. However, I will argue that the daughters, with their preoccupation with her Caribbean “mothers,” are not completely passive, not to mention suicidal or mad. Rather, they struggle for survival in the patriarchal and colonial society.
Chapter One discusses the seemingly passive and unresistant Anna in Voyage in the Dark, with the intention to show what she actually manifests are constant efforts to fight against the recurrent threat of death. She is not completely unresisting as she goes through the series of losses. Instead of assigning her an easy role of passivity, this chapter examines Anna’s complex emotions and traces them to an underlying cause: her separation from the mother, mother surrogates, and the motherland. Chapter Two examines how Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea strives to defend her mother as well as herself and tries to free herself from the various forms of confinement. Through an analysis of Antoinette’s development, which is a series of oscillation between isolation and attempts at understanding and “socialization,” this chapter shows that the development of both the mother-daughter relationship and Antoinette’s personality in Wide Sargasso Sea interact mutually with her economic predicament, as well as social pressure, racial turbulence, and patriarchal dominance to form a mother-daughter plot of fatality and estrangement, against which the daughter finally attempts a breakthrough. The concluding chapter attempts to suggest that Rhys, through her literary creation with artistic vision, is not only one of the Caribbean women writers, but also a literary mother for the Caribbean literature.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TW/095FJU00238007 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Gretchen Kuei-fen Lee, 李桂芬 |
| Contributors | Kate Chiwen Liu, 劉紀雯 |
| Source Sets | National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations in Taiwan |
| Language | zh-TW |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Format | 109 |
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