Wide Sargasso Sea | Jean Rhys's Construction of Blackness as Escape from White Femininity in Wide Sargasso Sea
In the following essay Maria Olaussen examines the author's narrative structure to show the construction of Rhy's own racial identity.
Jean Rhys, while reluctantly trying to settle in England as a white West Indian, started working on her novel Wide Sargasso Sea with the primary intention of describing the Dominica of her childhood. In 1956, she wrote in a letter: ''I still work but write mostly about the vanished West Indies of my childhood. Seems to me that wants doing badly—for never was anything more vanished or forgotten. Or lovely’’ (Letters). This preoccupation with the lost island of her childhood came very early on to be tied to another concern, that of "rescuing" the white Creole madwoman from the...
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