Narrative control: The colonizer’s voice, fragmentation, and naming in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargaso Sea

Abstract

[eng] This paper explores Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea as a postcolonial response to Jane Eyre. It focuses on how Rhys uses narrative voice, naming, and fragmentation to underscore her criticism of colonial discourses. Through theorists such as Said, Spivak, and Bhabha, I use postcolonial theory to explore how Antoinette’s identity might be shaped and controlled. Overall, this paper argues that the novel's language and structure play a crucial role in exposing the process of dispossession and control that Antoinette suffers, as well as in challenging traditional narration and asking the reader for active interpretation.