Post Colonial Literature in Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys is the author of many short stories and novels, of which perhaps Wide Sargasso Sea is best known. Rhys is known as a modernist writer, writing throughout the twentieth century, and is often paralleled with Joseph Conrad and T.S. Eliot. Like the modernist authors, Rhys' writing often centres around themes of "isolation, absence of society or community, the sense of things falling apart, dependence and loss" (Carr, 15). She uses poetic language, irony, and a concern for subjectivity and language to develop her themes of anxiety and loss (16). She often uses, like other modernist writers, a cosmopolitan, indeed metropolitan setting for her writing. Wherever the setting, she seems to keep to consistent patterns of imagery; in Wide Sargasso Sea she contrasts the lush tropical sensuality with the cold English calculation (Gardiner, 125). Like Sylvia Plath, she uses her life experiences; the pain, the rawness and the wounds as the material from which she writes her fiction (Carr, 3). In fact, many of her heroines have been made up of fragments of her own self. Many critics ask then why her heroines do nothing to get out of their situations? Walter Allen describes Antoinette, the heroine in Wide Sargasso Sea by saying, "she is a young woman...who is hopelessly and helplessly at sea in her relations with men, a passive victim doomed to destruction" (Carr, 4). Much debate has centred on the idea of helpless victims in Rhys's writing. Indeed, Rhys allows Antoinette to rise above her situation by seeking final revenge on Rochester and gaining back her independence, her sanity and her life. Rhys has recently gained popularity in the field of feminist literature. In the seventies, when she was still alive, feminism, or "woman's lib" as it was called, centred on sexual oppression, which excluded Jean Rhys' literature. What the feminists of the seventies did not realize, is that Rhys was years ahead of them. While they centred solely on sexual oppression, Rhys questioned economic, racial, class, colonial and sexual oppression (Carr, 11-12). It has only been through the eighties that she has become more widely recognized as a valuable feminist writer has. Not only has she been recognized as a feminist writer, but recently, V.S. Naipaul suggested that she should be reread in terms of colonial origins (Carr, 15). In fact, until her publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, her Caribbean origins went largely unmentioned. The publication of Wide Sargasso Sea coincided with the recognition of West Indies' literature being recognized as a valuable addition to worldly literature. With Naipaul's suggestion, she has been largely included into the world of postcolonial literature, and her novels are reread through the theories. Rhys has a powerful connection to the language debate in postcolonial literature. Indeed, her novels use languages other than English. Carr mentions in her book on Jean Rhys, that "Rhys unpicks and mocks language by which the powerful keep control" (81). Rhys is able to get past the clichés of the English language, and rejects much of the language of the empire, colonialism, class, bourgeois and morality by construction a new language. Her novels especially contain language that is largely fragmented,