Women's Voice through Madness and Trauma in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark
Abstract
Madness and trauma are the issues reflected in Jean Rhys’s Works, Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark. In her works, Rhys portrays the life of Creole women that are marginalised by the White colonisers and the Black inhabitants. The Black inhabitants reject them and the White colonisers consider them inferior. In this way, Rhys’s works portray the lives of women caught under colonialism, between the colonised and the coloniser, and under patriarchal oppression. This situation drives the Creole women into the oppression under double colonisation that silences the women’s voices. Therefore, this dissertation aims to analyse how double colonisation silences women’s voices and leads them to the madness and trauma in two heroines of Jean Rhys’s work, Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark through the lens of Feminist Postcolonial by Spivak and Mohanty. Further, this qualitative research conceptualises and classifies double colonisation by mapping out two themes: (1) colonialism, (2) the patriarchal oppression of two heroines in Jean Rhy’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark, Anna and Antoinette. Therefore, the effect of double colonisation is used to describe the development of madness and trauma experienced by the Creole women, Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea and Anna in Voyage in the Dark. The results reveal that Rhys presents the madness and trauma condition of the Creole women from different perspectives, from being an insider and an outsider, Antoinette in the West Indies and Anna in England. The West Indies becomes a prison for Antoinette, exiled by the White coloniser and the Black inhabitants. England becomes the metropolis that colonises Anna in the continuous suffering of patriarchal and colonial oppression. Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark construct the Creole women’s voices that are violently silenced and repressed under colonial and patriarchal oppression. Under the tense of double colonisation, Rhys’s female protagonists, Antoinette and Anna, continuously experience traumatic events, exploited, marginalised, discriminated and exiled both sexually and culturally.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18415/ijmmu.v12i2.6478
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