The True Existence In The Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys, as one of the most outstanding novelists in the twentieth century, is well known for her focus on the marginal female survival and the bitter quest for identity. Her famous novel Wide Sargasso Sea, since its publication, has received wide attention from critics and readers.This thesis presents an analysis of Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea from the existentialist perspective. Based on the theory of Sartre, a French existentialist master, it analyzes the fate of the protagonists and explores the profound social significance of the novel, the living conditions of people and the meaning of life. This novel is discussed mainly from the following three aspects:firstly, the thesis deals with the alienation and isolation of the hero and heroine. Secondly, the heroine’s search for selfhood and freedom is explored from the perspective of the absurd relationship between human beings and Sartre’s "Hell is each other". The relationship between people in the absurd world is one of the primary focuses of Existentialism. Rhys reveals the complex relation between people. The heroine, Antoinette, realizes that one’s freedom is always contradicting with other’s freedom after keeping contact with her black friend and her husband. The heroine’s last selection, just like a phoenix nirvana, indicates her desire for freedom and the courage to pursue her own identity. The last part goes to the existentialist ending of the two protagonists. This part mainly discusses the heroine’s suicide and the responsibility for her choice, as well as the hero’s final choice and the consequence he should shoulder, which reveals Sartre’s two main existentialist ideas:the suffering essence of life and freedom of choice. It can be found that Rhys’s opinions about life shown in the novel are similar to some existentialist ideas through the analysis of the hero and the heroine’s painful experience and outcome. Rhys, in the novel, expresses her desire for the pursuit of self identity, explores the difficulties and hardships of female survival, the necessity of struggle and the constant pursuit of freedom. In conclusion, this thesis not only analyses the existentialist core viewpoints reflected in the novel but also reminds us of the philosophical thinking about the human being’s true meaning of the survival: human beings are faced with the absurdity and alienation and they are in the continuous pursuit of self identity and freedom.