The Dead Mother Metaphor: Unravelling the Maternal Enigma in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea

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Document Type : Original Research Article

Author

Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, NT.C., Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), one of the set texts of the postcolonial canon, has long been read through the cultural/ethnic as well as the feminist/modernist lens. Toppling such priorities via a predominantly psychoanalytic lens, the present study draws attention to how an overemphasis on cultural displacement and racial discrimination has very explicitly overshadowed the mother-daughter bond at the heart of the fictional world of Rhys' masterpiece. Drawing on André Green's theory of the dead mother complex and the mother-centered theoretical framework it invokes, the present article regards Antoinette and Rochester's star-crossed love/hate story of infatuation as a plot which gives representability to the rather unrepresentable maternal trauma around which Antoinette's life revolves. Through a Green-ian reassessment of the maternal absence/presence as the most pivotal substrate upon which the whole text is built, this study, thus, reevaluates the fractured Annette/Antoinette bond as the focal point around which the more (post-)colonial aspects of the novel simmer. It is only in the hitherto untapped space opened up by Green's concept of the dead mother leading to a reconsideration of the decisive role that the dysfunctional Annette plays in the trajectory of her daughter's life that Antoinette's relationship to the private/public world around her, her later entrapment within a loop of doomed relationships, her melancholically-inflected word-view, and her gradual descent into a mental space beyond normative sanity can be read as substitutive signifiers for a traumatism associated with an enigmatic maternal void whose haunting absence/presence is constantly-but-variably voiced throughout Wide Sargasso Sea.

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References

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Critical Language and Literary studies

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Available Online from 05 June 2025

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