초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Jean Rhys in her novel Wide Sargasso Sea reincarnates, in the protagonist Antoinette, the minor character Bertha of Jane Eyre who is ‘the madwoman in the attic’ of Thornfield Hall. Antoinette the white creole woman embodies the exploitation and oppression the European imperialists have kept on even after the Emancipation Act in Jamaica. Her body as a postcolonial cartographical mapping indicates the poverty and misery of life wedged between the new English arrivals and the indigenous black West Indians but acknowledged by neither side. The novelist projects into Antoinette her sense of non-belonging or non-being as a marginal writer both in England of her migration and in her home country of West Indies. Antoinette’s madness after her marriage to Rochester from England is symptomatic of the distorted relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in postcolonial Jamaica in particular and newly freed countries in general. Antoinette’s split into madness and non-being is also none other than Jean Rhys’s autobiographical narrative of dearth and loneliness after her arrival in England at the early age of sixteen. Rhys tries to envisage an escape from her existential dilemma as a minority writer in Christophine, who is a Martinican black figure practicing obeah, but castigated as superstitious, irrational and savage by the ‘civilized’ colonizers. This writing back to Jane Eyre is in itself a challenge or an act of subversion to the British literary canon.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jane Eyre, postcolonialism, counter-discourse, autobiographical narrative
