Double Exile: Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea

Abstract

The problems of cultural displacement and a shaky sense of one's own identity
have been the main concern of the twentieth century Caribbean writer, Jean Rhys. As
a white Creole writer living in England, Rhys attempts to capture the ambivalence of
what it means to be caught between two cultures and never able to identify fully with
any one .Born to a Welsh father and a Creole(white West Indian) mother on the island
of Dominica in the West Indies, Jean Rhys was white but not English, West Indian but
not black. Her sense of belonging to the West Indies was necessarily charged with
awareness of being part of another culture. Thus, the ambiguity of being an
insider/outsider in both the metropolis, England, and the colony, West Indies, shaped
Rhys' world, resulting in her sense of exile and marginality
The purpose of the research is to examine how Rhys gives the same sense of
exile and marginality to Antoinette Cosway, the heroine of her 1966 novel Wide
Sargasso Sea, through whom she reflects the unique experience of dislocation of the
white Creole woman.