A couple of new scholarly Brontë (or
Wide Sargasso Sea) related:
Injustice in Childhood: Jane Eyre and the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Christian Barkman, College of the Holy Cross
The Criterion: Vol. 2022, Article 8
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, are autobiographical novels narrated by the fictional Jane Eyre and the real Frederick Douglass. Both stories evoke an outpouring of pity for their respective narrator: Jane, for the unmerited abuses dealt against her by family and school administrators, but most of all Douglass, who reserves the greater portion of lament on account of his dreadful persecution under the evil of slavery. The environments Jane and Douglass inhabit throughout their childhood inflict an immense burden on their physical body and psyche. This essay specially examines the violent and alienating childhood trauma endured by Jane and Douglass. In this unlikely comparison, the rottenness of injustice remains universally palpable.
Baek Seung-bong, Daijin University
Modern Studies in English Language & Literature
Vol. 66, No. 1 (2022) pp.87-106
This paper explores the progress of restoring an object life in Jean Rhys's work Wide Sargasso Sea, focusing on the main protagonist Antoinette whose life is captured by British imperialism and illusion. Rhys analyzes western colonial ideology, the system and factors that destroy life, and the meaning of social governance mainly through the concepts of Michael Foucault's biopower and heterotopia and Giorgio Agamben's dispositif, homo sacer, and bare life. Through this, she suggests a possibility that Antoinette 's bare life her, which is constantly separated and excluded from the community by an invisible power, can be revived through her own courageous and independent resistance her. To elaborate, she tries to overcome oppression not to be captured by the prejudice and sovereign power of an individual and a nation. Further, she is reborn from a destruction as a complete individual which makes her included in exclusion, going beyond the yoke of imperialism's intervention of power and capital, conflict between classes, and dispositif that destroys one's life. She hereby shows the possibility of embodying human freedom, equality, love, and hope in the world of imperialist dystopia.
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