Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Halloran, Vivian Nun

Titel

Race, Creole, and National Identities in Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Phillips's Cambridge

Ist Teil von

• Small axe : a journal of criticism, 2006-10, Vol.10 (3), p.87-104

Ort / Verlag

Bloomington: Duke University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2006

Quelle

Literature Online (LION eBooks)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Antoinette, Mannie, David Henderson, and Emily Cartwright declare themselves to be, or live as, either "black Englishmen" or "white niggers" only within a private realm of discourse or experience, away from the public eye. [...]the cross-racial performance of white characters who claim or are assigned the social role of "niggers" and black characters who see themselves or are considered "Englishmen" in Wide Sargasso Sea and Cambridge neither confirm the predominant social stereotypes at work in the respective nineteenth century societies they depict, nor do they overtly challenge commonly held assumptions about racial purity. Because he is on the receiving end of an insult he suspects might be based on truth, Mannie's disgrace is equivalent to the shame of the Masons' and Cosways' loss of economic status and their previous involvement in the slave trade. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys anachronistically locates this cultural and ethnic marker squarely within a twentieth century paradigm of creoleness that links a person's birthplace to his or her national identity regardless of race.30 According to this logic, a character's birth in England proper imbues the (white, male) subject with an indelible Englishness that is incorruptible, not affected even by a protracted stay in the tropics. [...]Antoinette's British stepfather, Mr. Mason, and her husband, Mr. Rochester, maintain their Englishness untainted throughout Wide Sargasso Sea despite the former's marriage to a Catholic Martinican Creole woman, Annette, and the latter's poverty and lack of prospects as the second son of an aristocratic father. In Antoinette's case, it also trumps the child's own birthplace as an indicator of both nationality and ethnicity. [...]Antoinette always effectively occupies the same subject position in Wide Sargasso Sea as her does her mother, Annette-they are both forever "Martinique girl[s]"-despite the fact of Antoinette's hybrid lineage: she was born in Jamaica and her father was an Englishman.