Identity Crisis for the Creole Woman: A Search for Self in Wide Sargasso SeaPosted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Women on 2015-12-22 23:50Z by Steven |
Identity Crisis for the Creole Woman: A Search for Self in Wide Sargasso Sea
McKendree University Scholars Journal
Lebanon, Illinois
Issue 10, Winter 2008
Stephanie Coartney
“‘And how will you like that’ I thought, as I kissed him. ‘How will you like being made exactly like other people?’” (Rhys 22).
In this excerpt from Jean Rhys’s highly acclaimed novel Wide Sargasso Sea, the character Antoinette wistfully ponders the notion of possessing a socially acceptable identity as she tucks her disabled brother in bed. Echoing through the novel with a haunting sense of irony, this question plagues Antoinette while she struggles to develop her own identity in the face of cultural and racial rejection. Because she is a Creole woman living in the English colony of Jamaica, Antoinette quickly learns that the English as well as Caribbean society consider her an outsider, one whose place in the world is ranked disgracefully below the two cultures of which she is composed. Through social ostracism, legal restrictions and negative verbal labeling, the society dominated by male colonizers seeks to confuse the Creole woman’s notion of self, thereby conquering not only a class of people, but also the threat that individuals such as Antoinette pose to socially constructed norms involving race and gender.
Although some literary critics view Rhys’s representation of Antoinette as the classic case of a woman’s descent into madness to escape masculine domination, the novel itself can more effectively serve as “a reconceptualization of the very concept of identity” (Emery 167)…
Read the entire article here.