Who’s There? Counter-Discursive Strategies in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

Abstract

In an attempt to achieve more encompassing analyses of certain literary and cultural phenomena, postcolonial criticism has allied with the methods of feminist studies. A combined framework such as this provides an interesting perspective for the study of Jean Rhys’s most reputed novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a text whose subversive power springs from an anxiety to resist and change the dominant discourse of patriarchy and imperialism. Starting from this assumption, this dissertation seeks to identify in a first level, the counter-discursive elements present in Rhys’s novel paying especial attention to the process, implication and purpose of the construction in the narrative of such ideas as identity and the Other. Without forgetting to locate the textual forces of power, among which language reveals itself indispensable, an examination of the contextual conditions is intended to clarify the extent to which they determine the nature of the former concepts. Departing from such premises, this essay will also examine Rhys’s novel within the aesthetics of the so-called Postmodern literature