Impact of “Epistemic Violence” of Imperialism in Wide Sargasso Sea Sherry GAO College

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is regarded as a striking Caribbean novel, lying between the world of capitalism and post-Emancipation West Indies. However, many critics frequently tend to overlook the marginality of women in the post-colonial era because white Anglo-American feminists often stress on the rights or liberty of white women, while post-colonial critics are prone to focus on those of men in the post-colonial realms. The post-colonial feminist critic, Gayatri C. Spivak, therefore, provide a theoretical model from feminist angle for post-colonialism studies. According to Spivak, epistemic violence denotes that colonizers try to reject or reshape the local culture of colonies through the imperial discourse of science, universal truth and religious redemption. Thus, to view Wide Sargasso Sea from Spivk’s perspective, and to read this book as a text that restores the voices victimized by historical silences, readers can perceive that the tragedy of the protagonist, Antoinette, actually roots in the impact of “epistemic violence” of imperialism, which can be seen in three elements: Antoinette’s vacuum world, binary constructions between Antoinette and Rochester, and applying of mirror metaphor.

Speaking as if Antoinette...