Gynocritical Madness

 Two recent pieces of research on Wide Sargasso Sea:

Hiding in Plain Sight: A Gynocritical Reading of Rochester’s Narrative in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

Student thesis
Hennig, Emma, University of Gävle, Faculty of Education and Business Studies, Department of Humanities. 2022

This essay is the result of a close-reading of the male protagonist’s narrative in Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). His narrative was examined through an interpretive lens layered with a combination of several critical onsets that form the pillars of Elaine Showalter’s theory of a metaphysical female crescent outside of male consciousness. With a combination of gynocriticism, postcolonial feminism, cultural theory and psychoanalysis, this essay charted the inner expedition of the male protagonist as he travels to the Caribbean and marries his new wife. The findings showed how his inner journey takes him to the borderlands of his consciousness and language. On the other side of the border is the female crescent, the wild zone, where women and wilderness taunt him and hide from him in plain sight. Stretching himself to the limits of his conscious mind, the male protagonist Rochester loses his grip on reality and gets overwhelmed by feelings of fear and anger.

Madness in Jean Rhy‘s Wide Sargasso Sea and Han Kang‘s The Vegetarian: A Feminist Study

Musarrat Shameem

Jagannath University Journal of Arts, Vol. 9, No. 2, July-December 2019

Critics have interpreted Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys from diverse approaches among which postcolonial, feminist, and psycho-analytical explanations are worth mentioning. On the other hand, South Korean novelist Han Kang‘s Man Booker-winning novel The Vegetarian‘s (English translation) (2015) interpretation has mostly appeared in the form of book reviews in newspapers around the world. Whereas these two novels originate from two geographically different areas, namely the West Indies and South Korea, and belong to two different centuries, some of their themes overlap in the form of the madness of the protagonists and conflict between societal norms and individual freedom. These two novels also resemble stylistically as both use poetical language, sometimes even to the point of obscurity. The present article comparatively reads these novels in order to argue that stripped to their basic themes, they uphold the proposition that being women, it is not easy to follow one‘s beliefs and the most likely consequence of defying established norms is to be cast away, to perpetually live on the edge. For the purpose of comprehensive analysis, this article limits its focus on the theme of the protagonists‘ madness resulting from their defiance of established norms. The final argument of the article is to see madness as empowering rather than aberrational. To that end, firstly, a short literature review is done upon which the basic argument is to be founded. Next, some theories on madness in literature and two French feminist views are incorporated in order to develop the argument. Then, textual analysis is carried out in support of the argument. Finally, all these strands of thought are tied up to conclude that the madness of the two protagonists, Antoinette from Wide Sargasso Sea and Yeong-hye from The Vegetarian, functions as the key factor in their attaining the ultimate freedom from the norms of behavior imposed on individuals by society