Female Identity

A new graduation thesis:

Female Identity in Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea"

by Nina Šantek
University of Zagreb, Faculty of Philosophy (Department of English), Zagreb, 2024

As a genre, postcolonial works reconsider and criticize colonial norms in traditional literature. As can be seen in many canonical works of literature, countries which had colonies imposed their norms as the standard, and promoted Western culture as the epitome of civilization onto other cultures. While this kind of attitude was analysed by many, Foucault was one of famous scholars for whom construction of Western norms was an endless source of inspiration. In his work The Order of Things (1966), for instance, he explores how the Western culture set its value system as the standard, but there were also others who recognized the tendency of the colonialist cultures to impose their system and beliefs on the colonized. Said in Orientalism and Bhabha in Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse demonstrated how colonizers coined their ideas of ‘the Other’ which they then projected onto colonized ‘subjects’. Such ideas were constructed by those in position of power, therefore – by men. This was particularly evident in periods like the Victorian era when, as Porter (1986) elaborated, prudish rules affected all members of British society, but specifically targeted women. During that period, there appeared the concept of a woman that is either chaste or damned. For colonialists, it was unthinkable that a woman would express her sexuality in any form, but, on the other hand, women of different cultures were presumed to be overtly sexual. Even though, such a notion was constructed by the colonizers, it affected deeply how they viewed the ‘subaltern’. According to Barash (1990), colonialist cultures frequently portrayed women of ‘exotic’ cultures as sexual, wild and unpredictable. As a representative of the British Empire, “Mr Rochester” in Rhys’s postcolonial response to Brontë’s 1857 canonical work Jane Eyre, is a typical colonizer. After marrying a young, traumatized Creole woman because of her dowry, he became possessive and jealous towards his wife Antoinette, until, as the result of his tyrannic behaviour, she became the embodiment of his racist and misogynistic projections