earticle

영어

This paper aims to explore the psycho-political implications of multiple, intergenerationally transmitted traumas portrayed in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea(WSS). As the novel depicts the process in which Antoinette, a white Creole in the West Indies, is victimized by her English husband Rochester, it also foregrounds a striking similarity between Antoinette and her mother Annette. That the mother and the colonized motherland remain always “Other,” in the sense of being inaccessible, marginalized, and even debased, is one of the root causes of the multiple traumas in WSS. Antoinette’s and Annette’s predicaments illustrate the particularly pernicious type of trauma that compels subaltern subjects to live in a prolonged state of helplessness and terror. Another type of repetitive trauma, early deprivations and losses in childhood, brings Antoinette and Rochester together in their search for self- validating security in marriage, which only locks them in an abusive relationship.