Proposed Introduction:
In the novel Wide Sargasso Sea (WSS) author Jean Rhys offer the readers a piece of literature that demarcates - within the development of its characters, their narrational perspectives, and the tactful discursive constructions of the former and the latter- an evaluative analysis of western colonial ontology, its epistemological premises, and the experiences of subjectivities that are defined, and reproduced, by these ontological and epistemological formulations. Bertha Mason, WSS’s protagonist, is not a stranger to the tradition of western tradition. Indeed, Bertha Mason is both another and Other version of Charlotte Bronte’s Antoinette in her novel Jane Eyre. WSS will be explored by this paper as a narrative defined …show more content…
Antoinette functions and emerges only as the ontological Other and the epistemological abject/non-subject, she represents the fall from the grace of the kind of white, imperial, and middle-class femininity materialized by Eyre’s narrative. Antoinette is the descent from the colonial subject, and hence deserves her condemnation and Otherness. Paradoxically, Bertha functions as a post-colonial Eve in a maze-like garden of Eden in Rhys’s WSS, a narrative where descent, ascent, and subjective grace are re-cast through Bertha. Indeed, Bertha’s narrative of descent, as re-counted by Rhys, is one that is marked by the interlocking axes of ontology marking Bertha’s subjectivity, namely her racial status, her feminized gender, and her class position, within a 19th century French-Caribbean colony. Rhys places emphasis on Bertha’s Otherness, by highlighting the historicity of the hegemonic and colonial discourse that define the terms of that very Otherness. In other words, we understand Bertha’s negotiation of her nuanced Otherness, in a context where falls from the subjective grace of white femininity, are signified by an epistemological colonial regime of violence that heavily policies boundaries of class, gender, and race, boundaries that Bertha’s corporeality and narrative largely …show more content…
This paper seeks to synthesize two theoretical approaches with in feminist theory, on the one hand, and post-colonial theory, on the other hand, that have been largely constructed as irreconcilable. Indeed, this paper uses Helene Cixous’ understanding of the ways in which a western epistemology premised on the Origin Myth as a set of consultations of separations, sins, and dichotomies is paradoxically problematic. By labelling Adam and Eve as guilty (and by constructing Eve as guiltier than Adam) the story has been reduced to a set of binary oppositions between self and other. These oppositions have been used to construct western knowledge and language, and its constructions of sexual difference. The paradox of this problem is the fact that knowledge after the fall and the loss of Eve’s initial innocence presumes in its logic this binary separation between Self and as not
In the novel Wide Sargasso Sea (WSS) author Jean Rhys offer the readers a piece of literature that demarcates - within the development of its characters, their narrational perspectives, and the tactful discursive constructions of the former and the latter- an evaluative analysis of western colonial ontology, its epistemological premises, and the experiences of subjectivities that are defined, and reproduced, by these ontological and epistemological formulations. Bertha Mason, WSS’s protagonist, is not a stranger to the tradition of western tradition. Indeed, Bertha Mason is both another and Other version of Charlotte Bronte’s Antoinette in her novel Jane Eyre. WSS will be explored by this paper as a narrative defined …show more content…
Antoinette functions and emerges only as the ontological Other and the epistemological abject/non-subject, she represents the fall from the grace of the kind of white, imperial, and middle-class femininity materialized by Eyre’s narrative. Antoinette is the descent from the colonial subject, and hence deserves her condemnation and Otherness. Paradoxically, Bertha functions as a post-colonial Eve in a maze-like garden of Eden in Rhys’s WSS, a narrative where descent, ascent, and subjective grace are re-cast through Bertha. Indeed, Bertha’s narrative of descent, as re-counted by Rhys, is one that is marked by the interlocking axes of ontology marking Bertha’s subjectivity, namely her racial status, her feminized gender, and her class position, within a 19th century French-Caribbean colony. Rhys places emphasis on Bertha’s Otherness, by highlighting the historicity of the hegemonic and colonial discourse that define the terms of that very Otherness. In other words, we understand Bertha’s negotiation of her nuanced Otherness, in a context where falls from the subjective grace of white femininity, are signified by an epistemological colonial regime of violence that heavily policies boundaries of class, gender, and race, boundaries that Bertha’s corporeality and narrative largely …show more content…
This paper seeks to synthesize two theoretical approaches with in feminist theory, on the one hand, and post-colonial theory, on the other hand, that have been largely constructed as irreconcilable. Indeed, this paper uses Helene Cixous’ understanding of the ways in which a western epistemology premised on the Origin Myth as a set of consultations of separations, sins, and dichotomies is paradoxically problematic. By labelling Adam and Eve as guilty (and by constructing Eve as guiltier than Adam) the story has been reduced to a set of binary oppositions between self and other. These oppositions have been used to construct western knowledge and language, and its constructions of sexual difference. The paradox of this problem is the fact that knowledge after the fall and the loss of Eve’s initial innocence presumes in its logic this binary separation between Self and as not