제국주의적 가부장적 남성 주체의 확립과 식민지 아내

The Formation of Imperial and Patriarchal Masculinity and A Colonial Wife in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

This study examines Rochester’s marriage life of West Indies in Wide Sargasso Sea which was not described in Jane Eyre. In Rochester’s narrative, his marriage life is the story of how he came to establish his patriarchal masculinity. For him, the most important thing is not so much the relationship with his wife and the West Indies as the relationship with his father and English society. His subject position as a younger son left him underprivileged and the marriage with a rich white Creole girl ensures him the place of a gentleman. In that sense, his marriage was a bargain for forming patriarchal masculinity and this resulted in the hatred for his father and contempt for himself. His attitude toward his wife is ambiguous. While he was attracted to his wife’s sexuality, his wife’s racial, cultural and sexual difference caused fear and hostility in his mind. That’s why he tries to distance from his wife, refusing to understand his wife’s psychological and social reality. Internalizing the 19th century’s dominant ideology which tends to see women and colony as a place of sexuality and madness, he easily constructs his wife as a mad woman. The immorality and cruelty of this process is emphasized first, by presenting the social and historical context of his wife’s life and then by demonstrating how his ‘mad wife’ keeps sanity and spirit in her miserable situation of confinement.