Trauma in Jean Rhy'sWide Sargasso Sea

Abstract

Jean Rhys explores trauma of black characters in her fiction Wide Sargasso Sea. Antoinette is neglected and discriminated because of her Creole identity. So, she narrativizes the pain, dislocation, madness, identity crisis, class discrimination towards the colonized in the Caribbean society. Throughout the text, female characters are traumatized. Antoinette and Annette become victims of traumatic experience in the socio-economic scenario of nineteenth century England.Her husband, Rochester, treats Antoinette as an animal, barbaric, irrational, monstrous, and abnormal being. So, she expresses traumatic memory, feeling, emotion and torture to reduce the intensity of trauma. Black characters narrativize that the contemporary society was gender-biased, racist and colonialist.