This document summarizes key ideas from Jean Rhys' novel Wide Sargasso Sea and discusses it through a postcolonial feminist lens. It touches on several themes: 1) Rhys explores the notion of being a "double outsider" as a white Creole woman who belongs fully to neither England nor the West Indies. 2) The protagonist Antoinette grapples with madness, racial identity, and a missing mother figure as a result of colonial oppression and patriarchal norms. 3) The novel draws from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts to depict different levels of madness and the demonization of othered identities.

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12. •Victorian Literature from feminist
Perspective
•Published in 1979

13. •A hall mark of Second wave of feministic criticism
•It gives analysis of troupe found in 19th Century
literature
•Gilbert & Gubar discuss the angel/monster troupe in
the novels written by female writers
•The rage is often shown through the figure of
madwoman
Virginia Woolf says
Women writers must kill
the aesthetic ideal through
which they themselves
have been killed into art

15. •A structure that oppresses him
•A plot of masculine transgression of social taboos
•A rebellious hero
•Alienated from society
•Promotes independence
The Monk by Mathew Lewis

16. Idea presented by Allan Moore
•Traditional female pattern is circular
•Female gothic emphasize mother-
daughter relation
•Reverse Oedipal stage
•“A bourgeois aesthetic, as it creates a
circle of defamiliarization and
estrangement by re-establishment of
conventional life.”
(Kilgour,38)

17. “I dreamed I was
walking in forest Not
alone. Someone who
hated me was with
me”
Lacan’s concept:
Between the two
Deaths
Parallel dreams are used by Rhys like Bronte in Jane Eyre

18. “Is it true that
England is like a
dream, one of
my friends wrote
and said London
is like a cold dark
dream.”
Theme of
Dreams
&
Foresight

20. Thornfield Hall

21. Everything is too much, I felt as I
rode wearily after her. Too much
purple, too much green. The
flowers too red, the mountains
too high, the hills too near”
Caribbean Landscape

22. “There is no looking glass here and
I don’t know what I am like now”

23. •The notion of “segregation”
•Sargasso Sea
•A double outsider
•White nigger for Europeans and ‘ White Cockroach for blacks
•Neither white nor black
“Like Sargasso Sea, a mass of seaweed
surrounded by swirling currents in the
Atlantic Ocean, the novel’s troubled
heroine is suspended between England
and West Indies and belongs fully to
neither.”
(McKenzie)
“They say when
trouble comes
close ranks, and
so white people
did. But we were
not in their
ranks”

24. •Colonial
Ownership
•Cockpit of
Europe

25. West Indies….. Mistake by Christopher Columbus 1492
Possession & re-naming
Jamaica- Coulbri (Spanish colony)
Britain seized it in 1655
Spanish history is still there
Sargasso Sea……
Dominica / Honeymoon Island
England…..

26. Woman and madness…. Hysteria
Missing Mother figure
As a result of oppression they drink, sleep too much or attempt suicide to
forget their painful experience

27. Rhys creates a
mother in Annette
who is genuinely
incapable of offering
love to her daughter,
who repeatedly fails
to mirror
Antoinette’s
attitudes and
behavior. (Anne
Simpson)
Jacques Lacan’s Psyche
structure:
1. The Real
2. The Imaginary
3. The Symbolic

28. Depiction of different levels of
madness
Many archetypes for the
demonstration of hatred

29. In her unfinished autobiography, published after
her death Smile please: An unfinished in 1979 she
said
“I must write if I stop writing my life will have been
an abject failure. It is that already to other people.
But it could be an abject to myself. I will not have
earned death”

30. Kristeva asserts that “other” is threat to
the final boundaries to the human identity
shaped by additional psychoanalytical
theories. The traditional notion of the
identity of boundaries on hierarchically
constructed binaries oppositions such as
white/black, sane/insane, pure/impure,
rational/emotional, and male/female

31. David Punter:
“Gothic fiction is a erotic at root, it knows that to channel
sexual activity into the narrow confines of conventionality
is repressive. In the end it is highly dangerous that is
denial of Eros and that Eros so slighted returns in the form
of threat and violence. The beast within cannot be killed,
but that is because it drives it strength from the pressure
with which it is held down by smooth faced man on the
outside. It is our repressions that kill us because they
conjure up forces within which are far stronger than our
fragile conventionality can withstand.” (Terror Vol 2 191)

32. Along with the sight clouding dizziness,
nausea makes me balk at that milk cream,
separates me from mother and father who
prefer it. ‘I’ want none of that element, sigh
of their desires. ‘I’ do not want to listen, I do
not assimilate it, ‘I’ expel it. But since the
food is not an other for me, who am only in
their desire, ‘I’ expel ‘myself’, I spit myself out
, I abject ‘myself’ within the same motion
through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself.
(Kristeva, Powers 2-3)

33. •Annette & Antoinette
•Bertha & Antoinette
•Bertha & Jane

34. •Autobiographical elements.
•Alienated
•Creole
•Mocked by the “other” in England
•Belonged to the same setting
•Marginalized