Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

7-1995

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Department

Humanities

Degree Program

Humanities, MA

Committee Chair

Boehm, Beth C.

Committee Member

Slavin, Arthur

Committee Member

Byers, Thomas B.

Author's Keywords

Charlotte Brontë; Criticism and interpretation; Women in literature; Social psychology in literature; Minorities in literature

Abstract

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is often considered a classic Bildungsroman and an early example of feminist fiction because its plot concerns the progress of a lonely and outspoken orphaned girl whose self-determination and independence eventually lead her to wealth and a successful marriage. However, as the novels by three twentieth-century Caribbean authors illustrate, the paradigm of female development presented in Jane Eyre is not applicable to females from the West Indies who are faced with racial and cultural barriers that are part of growing up in a colonized society. Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy (1990), and Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone To Heaven (1987) are novels that explore the West Indian female experience and speak directly, and indirectly, to the "Jane Eyre" experience. By employing the same themes of alienation and integration that are present in Jane Eyre and yet giving them new meaning through West Indian perspectives and political contexts, these three novels are postcolonial Bildungsromane. All four texts are also linked by their diverse portrayals of how the development o f a young woman is affected by the absence or death of her mother. Wide Sargasso Sea is the "background" text to Jane Eyre because it privileges the life and perspective of Antoinette Cosway who becomes the "mad" West Indian woman, known as Bertha Rochester, in Bronte's text. Lucy presents the psychological workings of an Afro- Caribbean teenager who leaves her home for New York City and finds the ramifications of her postcolonized condition remain with her as she pursues "independence." Clare Savage in No Telephone To Heaven is a West Indian woman with a mixed racial background who chooses political action as the path to bringing "self' and society, and the past and present, together.

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