The Incarcerating Homescapes of Wide Sargasso Sea: A Foucauldian Reading

Abstract

British-Dominican author Jean Rhys (1890-1979) focused primarily on discussing vital issues of Creoleness and Caribbeaness. In her 1966 postcolonial novel Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys tries to transmit such notions through her protagonist Antoinette Cosway. Such transmission is achieved by utilizing domestic spaces as markers denoting debatable socio-political issues highlighting the nature of the relation of the colonizer/colonized binary.  Using a spatial theoretical framework, this study investigates how Antoinette’s home, Thornfield Hall, becomes a destructive environment for her life and Creole identity. This research examines the connections between Michel Foucault's concept of carceral space and Jean Rhys's novel Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys's novel, a prologue to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, resembles Foucault's theoretical framework of the disciplinary processes of power and control in limited settings. This research employs a Foucauldian perspective to analyze Rhys's rewritten story and the complex relationship between geography, politics, and individuality. Foucault's concept of carceral space is predicated on the premise that certain institutional settings, including prisons, asylums, and schools, serve as systems of power that limit and govern people. These settings often reinforce existing social order by emphasizing control, monitoring, and conformity. Using this theoretical premise, the investigation dissects Wide Sargasso Sea's several ecosystems. The Caribbean's Coulibri Estate is a carceral space in its actual and metaphorical oppressiveness. Antoinette, the novel's protagonist, and her family are repressed by the estate, which symbolizes the repressive powers of colonialism and foreshadows Antoinette's ultimate spiral into madness and her consequent imprisonment in Thornfield Hall, become a destructive environment for her life and her Creole identity.