Identity Crisis for the Creole Woman: A Search for Self in Wide Sargasso Sea

Posted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Women on 2015-12-22 23:50Z by Steven

Identity Crisis for the Creole Woman: A Search for Self in Wide Sargasso Sea

McKendree University Scholars Journal
Lebanon, Illinois
Issue 10, Winter 2008

Stephanie Coartney

“‘And how will you like that’ I thought, as I kissed him. ‘How will you like being made exactly like other people?’” (Rhys 22).

In this excerpt from Jean Rhys’s highly acclaimed novel Wide Sargasso Sea, the character Antoinette wistfully ponders the notion of possessing a socially acceptable identity as she tucks her disabled brother in bed. Echoing through the novel with a haunting sense of irony, this question plagues Antoinette while she struggles to develop her own identity in the face of cultural and racial rejection. Because she is a Creole woman living in the English colony of Jamaica, Antoinette quickly learns that the English as well as Caribbean society consider her an outsider, one whose place in the world is ranked disgracefully below the two cultures of which she is composed. Through social ostracism, legal restrictions and negative verbal labeling, the society dominated by male colonizers seeks to confuse the Creole woman’s notion of self, thereby conquering not only a class of people, but also the threat that individuals such as Antoinette pose to socially constructed norms involving race and gender.

Although some literary critics view Rhys’s representation of Antoinette as the classic case of a woman’s descent into madness to escape masculine domination, the novel itself can more effectively serve as “a reconceptualization of the very concept of identity” (Emery 167)…

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Unwed Mothers, Race, and Transgression in William Faulkner’s Novels

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2015-12-22 23:49Z by Steven

Unwed Mothers, Race, and Transgression in William Faulkner’s Novels

McKendree University Scholars Journal
Lebanon, Illinois
Issue 24, Winter 2015
16 pages

Mindy Allen

As a modernist writer, William Faulkner is conflicted with the autonomy he can allow for his female characters, particularly unmarried mothers. Ideology about women during the early twentieth century, including the debates of birth control and the loss of the Southern Belle,
influence the creation of Faulkner’s female characters. The purpose of this paper is to explore how Faulkner’s unmarried mothers transgress sexual boundaries imposed by patriarchal values in the novels As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom! Absalom! and Go Down, Moses. Faulkner’s female characters can no longer strive towards the status of the Southern Belle as New South ideals emerge. Faulkner includes many unmarried mothers in his novels, as well as mixed race unmarried mothers. He leaves the impression that, through his novels, he attempts to make since of females transgressing sexual and racial boundaries.

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