Towards Centralizing The Periphery In Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea(1966) As A Counter Narrative To Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre(1847)

Abstract

The binary opposition between the centre and the periphery has received great attentions in postcolonial studies, among themliterature of writing back to the empire. The latter aims at comparing, revisiting and correcting the misleading portrayal ofcolonized people by the West. The present paper examines colonial traces in Charlotte Brontë‟sJaneEyre (1847) and Jean Rhys‟ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by looking closely atthe equivocal commonalities between the two works and the way they dialogize.In her response to the Victorian writer, Rhys forgesa prequel counter-narrative as well as builds a clean portrait of the „mad woman in the attic‟: Bertha Mason, who appears dehumanized in Brontë‟s novel. Owing to the nature of the study, the analysispivots thoroughly on comparative approach with reliance on postcolonial theory. To a lesser degree, the arguments fall implicitly in line with Julia Kristeva‟s concept of Intertextuality. The paper argues that „decolonizing the mind‟ from the fixity of stereotyped images is necessary in that the idea of „moving the centre‟is possible. To this end, centralizing the centre and marginalizing the periphery is but an illusion that is induced in some people's minds in the same way as of the notion of the centre and the periphery colonize their thoughts. The findings suggest that the Orient subaltern can speak for herself without the need to be (mis)represented by the Occident.