2024年2月13日发(作者：)

二元对立视角下《藻海无边》人物身份认同的异化

1. Introduction

Caribbean author Jean Rhys’

Wide sargasso sea is based on

Charlotte Brontë's novel

Jane Eyre, which rewrites the story of

Antoinette, Mr. Rochester's ex-wife madwoman. In the second and third

parts, this paper will analyze the alienation of the identities of

Antoinette from the perspective of binary opposition.

2. Antoinette: Black vs. White

The theme of this novel is about "race, gender, and the legacies

of West Indian plantation history" (Morrell 181). The story takes

place in the West Indies, a region with the discrimination and hatred

between races are still quite strong. Antoinette is of white ancestry,

the daughter of the island's slave owners, and is therefore considered

a "white cockroach" by the local natives, because she was born in the

West Indies to a Creole mother, she was not considered purely English

by the whites and was therefore considered a "white nigger".

Antoinette experiences a double identity barrier in her native land,

it impossible for her to both identify with the black community and

integrate with the white community.

The failure to establish an identity with whites deepens

Antoinette's identity barriers. After marrying Rochester, a white

European male, Antoinette tries to find her identity in him. However,

when Rochester receives a letter who told that Antoinette has a family

history of neurological problems, and had an affair with her cousin

before marriage, Antoinette's identity with whites is further

alienated. By forcing to give Antoinette the English name "Bertha,"

Rochester also denies her the right to look in the mirror. The image

of the mirror appears several times in the text, is the basis for

Antoinette's identification. Depriving Antoinette of the right to look

in the mirror is the same as depriving her of the ability to perceive

her own identity; without the mirror, she can't be sure what she

really looks like or who she really is, and that means pushing her

into the insanity of identity collapse.

For Antoinette, she is excluded from the center and marginalized;

scorned by both the purebred white and the purebred black. She is a

marginal figure under binary opposition and faces multiple identity

crises, in which her identity gradually alienates and eventually

drives her mad and on the road to self-destruction.

3. Conclusion

In

Wide sargasso sea, Jean Rhys records the tragic life of a

flesh-and-blood "madwoman" who loses her mind and dies of insanity

during the binary opposition and fails to find her identity. By

analyzing the alienation of the characters' identities in

Wide

sargasso sea from the perspective of binary opposition, we can

conclude that the extreme binary opposition of identity is distorted,

such as man vs. woman, heterosexual vs. homosexual, racially dark skin

vs. white skin, etc., which are This over-emphasis on binary opposition has caused the labeling of people's

identities, thus creating a pide in identity, it helps us to think

about how we will find our identity.

References

Ciolkowski, E. "Navigating the Wide Sargasso Sea: Colonial History,

English Fiction, and British Empire."

Twentieth Century

Literature 43.3 (1997): 339-359.

Morrell, A. C. "The world of Jean Rhys's short stories."

Journal

of Postcolonial Writing 18.1 (1979): 235-244.

Rhys, Jean. "Wide sargasso sea."

Text. Palgrave, London, 2001. g Fiction: Opening the