Postcolonialism In Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea
Postcolonial literature attacks the colonial empire from the point of view of the marginalized, rendering voices to the stereotyped and quieted and establishing a claim to cultural identity. It seeks to assert the richness and validity of indigenous cultures in an effort to restore pride in practices and traditions that were systematically degraded under colonialism. It restores a disregarded ontology that applauds everything that is indigenous and cursing everything that is colonial.
Jean Rhys’(1890-1979)Wide Sargasso Sea (1968) is celebrated as an excellent postcolonial deconstruction of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and is appreciated for its subtle and sympathetic portrayal of a Creole madwoman caught in an oppressive and patriarchal society, struggling to find her own identity, in a society that belongs to neither White Europeans nor Black Jamaicans. “It reinvests its own hybridized world with a provincially authoritative perspective, but one which is deliberately constructed as provincial since the novel is at pains to demonstrate the subjective nature of point of view and hence the cultural construction of meaning.” (Tiffin, 24)
By recreating Bronte’s colonial text from a postcolonial point of view, Rhys
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"All women characters in Rhys 's fictions are mercilessly exposed to the financial and gendered constraints of an imperial world" (Humm, 187). This imperial world in its cultural context is one in which a dominant group of white men create, control and oppress dormant groups of women, slaves and so on, and being a woman means negotiating the suffering caused by this ascendency. Annette negotiates this torment minutely, or rather, doesn’t at all, and Antoinette 's unsettled relationship with her rejecting mother exposes her to a deep sense of instability and mistrust. As Teresa O 'Connor notes, "maternal indifference and failure coincided with the failure of colonialism in
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