The Dead Mother Metaphor: Unravelling the Maternal Enigma in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea | ||
| نقد زبان و ادبیات خارجی | ||
| مقاله 6، دوره 22، شماره 35 - شماره پیاپی 12، مهر 1404، صفحه 63-73 اصل مقاله (370.99 K) | ||
| نوع مقاله: مقاله علمی پژوهشی | ||
| شناسه دیجیتال (DOI): 10.48308/clls.2025.239700.1342 | ||
| نویسنده | ||
| بهاره بهمن پور* | ||
| استادیار، گروه زبان و ادبیات انگلیسی، واحد تهران شمال، دانشگاه آزاد اسلامی، تهران، ایران | ||
| چکیده | ||
| Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), one of the set texts of the postcolonial canon, has long been read through the cultural/ethnic as well as the feminist/modernist lens. Toppling such priorities via a predominantly psychoanalytic lens, the present study draws attention to how an overemphasis on cultural displacement and racial discrimination has very explicitly overshadowed the mother-daughter bond at the heart of the fictional world of Rhys' masterpiece. Drawing on André Green's theory of the dead mother complex and the mother-centered theoretical framework it invokes, the present article regards Antoinette and Rochester's star-crossed love/hate story of infatuation as a plot which gives representability to the rather unrepresentable maternal trauma around which Antoinette's life revolves. Through a Green-ian reassessment of the maternal absence/presence as the most pivotal substrate upon which the whole text is built, this study, thus, reevaluates the fractured Annette/Antoinette bond as the focal point around which the more (post-)colonial aspects of the novel simmer. It is only in the hitherto untapped space opened up by Green's concept of the dead mother leading to a reconsideration of the decisive role that the dysfunctional Annette plays in the trajectory of her daughter's life that Antoinette's relationship to the private/public world around her, her later entrapment within a loop of doomed relationships, her melancholically-inflected word-view, and her gradual descent into a mental space beyond normative sanity can be read as substitutive signifiers for a traumatism associated with an enigmatic maternal void whose haunting absence/presence is constantly-but-variably voiced throughout Wide Sargasso Sea. | ||
| کلیدواژهها | ||
| Dead Mother Complex؛ Maternal Absence/Presence؛ Trauma؛ Mourning؛ Melancholia؛ Jean Rhys؛ André Green | ||
| عنوان مقاله [English] | ||
| The Dead Mother Metaphor: Unravelling the Maternal Enigma in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea | ||
| نویسندگان [English] | ||
| Bahareh Bahmanpour | ||
| Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, NT.C., Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran | ||
| چکیده [English] | ||
| Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), one of the set texts of the postcolonial canon, has long been read through the cultural/ethnic as well as the feminist/modernist lens. Toppling such priorities via a predominantly psychoanalytic lens, the present study draws attention to how an overemphasis on cultural displacement and racial discrimination has very explicitly overshadowed the mother-daughter bond at the heart of the fictional world of Rhys' masterpiece. Drawing on André Green's theory of the dead mother complex and the mother-centered theoretical framework it invokes, the present article regards Antoinette and Rochester's star-crossed love/hate story of infatuation as a plot which gives representability to the rather unrepresentable maternal trauma around which Antoinette's life revolves. Through a Green-ian reassessment of the maternal absence/presence as the most pivotal substrate upon which the whole text is built, this study, thus, reevaluates the fractured Annette/Antoinette bond as the focal point around which the more (post-)colonial aspects of the novel simmer. It is only in the hitherto untapped space opened up by Green's concept of the dead mother leading to a reconsideration of the decisive role that the dysfunctional Annette plays in the trajectory of her daughter's life that Antoinette's relationship to the private/public world around her, her later entrapment within a loop of doomed relationships, her melancholically-inflected word-view, and her gradual descent into a mental space beyond normative sanity can be read as substitutive signifiers for a traumatism associated with an enigmatic maternal void whose haunting absence/presence is constantly-but-variably voiced throughout Wide Sargasso Sea. | ||
| کلیدواژهها [English] | ||
| Dead Mother Complex, Maternal Absence/Presence, Trauma, Mourning, Melancholia, Jean Rhys, André Green | ||
| مراجع | ||
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