Wide Sargasso Sea, which is set in the 1830s, tells a story about the heroine Antoinette and her misfortune life。 Antoinette is a white Creole girl in Jamaica。 Her father is a slaver master and her mother a white Creole。 Because of the death of her father and the abolition of slavery, poor Antoinette and her mother are hated and discriminated by local black people as well as rich white men。 Finally in a great fire committed by black people, Antoinette loses her house and her mother cracks up and goes mad。 A few years later, under the arrangement of her stepfather, Antoinette marries Englishman Rochester, even though she does not know him at all。 Owing to race, class and cultural differences as well as the slander from Antoinette’s half brother, Rochester regards her wife as an insane woman。 According to then English law, once women get married, their property would be claimed by their husbands。 Without love and property, unfortunate Antoinette is sent to London and imprisoned in an attic。 Finally, she sets fire to the house。 She extricates herself from the cold and dark sea at the expense of her life。 

2。 Literature Review

Much attention from the critical world has been drawn to Jean Rhys and her works since the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966。 The critical studies employed in the novel mainly include the intertextual dialogue between Wide Sargasso Sea and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, post-colonialism and African Caribbean perspectives。     

As Rhys’s Antoinette is indeed a plausible re-creation and interpretation of the one character, Mason Bertha, in Jane Eyre, thus many critics explores the intertextuality between these two novels。 Baer examines Antoinette’s three dreams in details and argues that the respective heroines of Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre are not rivals or antagonists but “doubles” and “sisters” (Baer 133) to one another。 For Spivak, Antoinette is an autonomous subject performed by Jane Eyre itself and the emergence of Antoinette is designed to free her not only from Jane Eyre’s attic, but also from the space of the nineteenth-century colonial discourse in which she is incarcerated as madwoman (Spivak 243-261)。   

In addition, for Antoinette occupies a space between the binaries of master and slave, the English sources and African resources, many researchers employ post-colonialism to study this novel。 For Ciolkowski, it provides a subtle commentary on nineteenth-century discourses of race and sexuality and intersections between them (Ciolkowski 339-359)。 Tiffin stresses that Rhys’s earlier works and final novel are closely linked。 What unites them is the recurrent use of colonialism as the metaphor with which to represent gender relations。 “While the implications of the colonial/imperial relation are laid bare, so too are the very real similarities between Antoinette’s fate and that of black slaves” (Tiffin 328)。文献综述

During the period from the mid 1980s to mid 1990s, many critics have addressed the African Caribbean dimensions of Rhys’s novel。 O’Connor sees obeah as a site of white/black struggle。 In striving to conquer the “mystery and power” embodied in Christophine, Rochester becomes, in O’Connor’s phrase, “much like the [。。。] white colonizers and missionaries” (O’Connor 210)。 However, the critical focus switches from obeah to zombie, which Newman persuasively reads as a powerful trope for forms of colonial, sexual and literary domination (Newman 13-28)。

Wide Sargasso Sea also attracts domestic researchers’ attention。 Domestic Rhysian critics focus mainly on the research of the post-colonial features of the novel, causes for Antoinette’s madness and the feminist approach。 Zhang Feng argues that the post-colonial counter-discourse is composed of the subalter’s articulation through perse ways。 “Due to differences within the liminal space, they speak with not one but multiple voices。 As a whole, these voices constitute a strong Postcolonial counter-discourse” (Zhang 125)。 He Changyi and Ou Lin focus on the causes of gender difference, nationalities, ethnic histories, cultures, and geographical locations which have led to Antoinette’s tragedy of marginal female survival (He and Ou 42-45)。 With the application of feminist theories, Wu Na is concerned with the cultural representations of Wide Sargasso Sea and concludes that female discourses have been historically oppressed in the patriarchy world (Wu 55-60)。来,自,优.尔:论;文*网www.youerw.com +QQ752018766-