Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

1993

Thesis Director

Anne R. Zahlan

Abstract

As the daughter of an English father, Jean Rhys inherited from her father and his sister the assertion that England was her motherland. On the other hand, growing up in Dominica which is inhabited mostly by African-Caribbean people, and surrounded by black servants--some of whom were her childhood playmates, Rhys naturally identifies herself with blacks. In her unfinished autobiography (Smile Please 1979), Rhys points out that she used to envy black people, feeling that they laugh a lot and seem to have a better time than whites do. Nevertheless, the problematic tensions of colonial and postcolonial society obstructed the development of intimacy and trust between blacks and whites. Rhys was quite conscious of the hatred of the black people: in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)·she shows the white heroine run after and called by the name "white cockroach" by blacks. Meanwhile, lacking any sense of belonging to her supposed motherland, England, Rhys, in most of her works, presented it as a cold and dull place inhabited by people who are rude and indifferent. Therefore, no matter whether in Dominica or in England, Rhys was always burdened by a feeling of belonging nowhere. Consequently, her awareness of alienation and placelessness is truthfully reflected in almost every one of her West Indian creole heroines: they are exhibited as women deprived of racial, cultural, and social identities and thus can live only as underdogs.

In my thesis, I explore how Rhys's heroines creole heroines, Anna in Voyage in the Dark (1967) and Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), are isolated by both English and Caribbean communities, and how they are, therefore, doomed to suffer from their loss of identity. I also examine how the language that Rhys employs in the two novels--according to M. M. Bakhtin, a double-voiced discourse, while erasing the boundary between different voices, distinguishes the heroines' inner struggle and awareness of alienation. With the simultaneous presentation of various speeches and styles in one single syntactic unit (either a sentence or a passage), Rhys implicitly yet impressively reveals her creole heroines' confusion, anguish, and desperation.

Download

Share

COinS