Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons^™

"And The Woman Is A Stranger": The Double-Voiced Discourse In Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea And Voyage In The Dark, Hsiao-Chien Lee

Masters Theses

As the daughter of an English father, Jean Rhys inherited from her father and his sister the assertion that England was her motherland. On the other hand, growing up in Dominica which is inhabited mostly by African-Caribbean people, and surrounded by black servants--some of whom were her childhood playmates, Rhys naturally identifies herself with blacks. In her unfinished autobiography (Smile Please 1979), Rhys points out that she used to envy black people, feeling that they laugh a lot and seem to have a better time than whites do. Nevertheless, the problematic tensions of colonial and postcolonial society obstructed the …