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Postcolonialism and Creole - Wide Sargasso Sea

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Jean Rhys was a modernist novelist from Dominica. She was born in 1890 as a daughter of a Creole mother and a Welsh father in Dominica, which then was a British colony. William Rees Williams, her father, was a Welsh doctor and her mother, Minna Williams, was a third generation Dominican Creole of Scotch ancestry. She was influenced by the English writer Ford Madox Ford, under whose patronage Jean Rhys developed as a writer. Most often she presented the mistreated, rootless woman or creole who is alienated in her motherland. She is also noted for her modified use of stream of consciousness in Good Morning, Midnight which was published in 1939. She was leading a life of oblivion after its publication. Wide Sargasso Sea once again presented Jean Rhys as a writer to the world. Wide Sargasso Sea became her most famous novel, which was written as a “prequel” to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. The themes of dominance and dependence, especially in marriage is depicted throughout Wide Sargasso Sea. In the novel she presents a mutually painful relationship between a fortunate European man and a woman made helpless on being deceived and coerced by him and others. The gives quite a different perspective of the "madwoman in the attic" an idea drawn from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. As a teenager who read Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys was shocked by the pathetic condition of Bertha Mason, a Creole, who was locked up in the attic. More than being a prequel Wide Sargasso Sea is a deconstruction of one of the classics of the Victorian period. In order to exploit a foundation moment in Jamaican history, the abolition of slavery in 1834, Jean Rhys has pushed up the chronology of the novel almost thirty years later when compare to Jane Eyre. Postcolonialism and Wide Sargasso Sea Like in many other fields, the decline of colonialism and emergence of newly independent states has left many influences over literature. Thus postcolonial literature started voicing the silenced and established a cultural identity of their own. In general it revives a way of thinking that celebrates everything native and cursing everything t

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