• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.3
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• pp.441-458
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• 2009

The Imperial Road is Jean Rhys s unfinished manuscript, rejected by publishers for its openly racist tone. Although it describes Rhys s actual visit to Dominica in 1936, it is not a transparent recollection of the travel but a recreation informed by racial dynamics of the 1970s when she wrote the text. This paper examines the manuscript as a troubled (and troubling) response to what Rhys perceived as racial rejection from Dominica at the wake of political independence. Rhys s representation of white Creole womanhood significantly depends on an interwoven configuration of racial dynamics and sexual politics, where an oppressive white European man facilitates a white Creole woman s cross-racial identification with Afro-Caribbeans. However, the political and literary landscape of the West Indies in the 1970s made such cross-racial identification untenable. As a result, The Imperial Road is full of disturbing racial hatred, prejudice, and resentment. And yet, it also reflects Rhys s honest and serious concern over a white Creole s racial identity in postcolonial Dominica, raising a difficult question: How would a postcolonial age change a white Creole identity that belongs neither to the colonized nor to the colonizer (or both)? In The Imperial Road, unable to identify with Afro-Caribbeans, the white Creole is disoriented in time and space, lost at home, stuck between the past and the present, not knowing how to participate in a postcolonial homeland. Through the narrator s racial disorientation, The Imperial Road exposes the white Creole s fundamental dependence on other Creoles.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.6
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• pp.1199-1212
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• 2011

This paper is to scrutinize Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea through a Marxist criticism. While critics were industriously excavating discourses of feminism, post-colonialism, and racism in the novel, they tended to regard the Marxist attribute as supplementary material and to diminish the significance not considering as an independent subject to be examined. However, the novel, in which all the major relationships are based on capital, exemplifies class conflict between the bourgeois and the proletariat. Marx and Engels believe that the foundation of our society is capital and that society evolves through class conflict to obtain more capital, and thus they assert people's relations are the product of the commodification of individuals. Furthering their study, Louis Althusser specifies the power system through the (repressive) state apparatus and the ideological state apparatus. With the theories of the thinkers' above, this paper analyzes the relationship between Annette and Mason, Antoinette and her nameless husband, allegedly Rochester, Rochester and Amelie, and Rochester and Daniel Cosway. This paper offers an alternative reading of a classical feminist and post-colonial text.