Abstract
While Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is foundational to postcolonial and feminist responses to the Victorian imperial canon, critical readings frequently misdiagnose the precise mechanics of its trauma narrative by conflating structural, epistemic violence with clinical character pathology. Engaging with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s critique of imperialist literature, this essay shifts the analytical framework from Eurocentric trauma paradigms to the intersection of Frantz Fanon’s sociogeny and Lacanian psychoanalysis. We argue that Antoinette Cosway’s psychological fragmentation is a continuous ontological rupture generated by the obsolescence of the post-Emancipation Creole identity. By tracing the catastrophic failure of specular identification, the sociogenic collapse of the colonial Manichean allegory, and the spatialization of trauma through imperial quarantine, we demonstrate how Rhys’s narratives formally replicate the absolute erasure of the colonial subject. Ultimately, we reject the Western liberal-humanist teleology of psychological “healing.” Instead, we reconceptualize Antoinette’s final descent into the flames as a Caruthian actingout (i.e., a repetitive, belated reliving of trauma without resolution), an insurgent, self-annihilating jouissance that serves as her definitive refusal of the British Symbolic order.
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