چکیده:
Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is a prequel to Charoltte Bronte’s famous novel Jane Eyre. It is the story of Antoinette Cosway, a white but Creole heiress, from the time of her youth in Jamaica to her unhappy marriage to a certain English gentleman who is never named by the author. This English gentleman soon renames her Bertha; declares her mad; seizes her property and then forces her to come to England. Arresting an oppressive patriarchal society in which she belongs neither to the white Europeans nor to the black Jamaicans, Rhys’s novel re-imagines Bronte’s devilish madwoman in the attic. As with many postcolonial works, the novel deals largely with the themes of racial inequality and the harshness of displacement and assimilation. According to Linda Hutcheon any adaptation must be examined in its context of creation. John Duigan’s 1993 film adaption of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is in fact an appropriation re-canonizing Rhys’s novel as an extension of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Duigan’s intentions become more manifest in the light of Australia’s problems and anxieties over its native population of aborigines. By introducing very conspicuous changes and deviating from the original text, the movie re-silences the oppressed characters of Jean Rhys’s novel (who can stand for Australia’s native population) and re-grants the oppressor characters (who can stand for white Australians) full agency and power. In this process, the movie reclaims the superiority of the British culture, justifies the rightness of the British colonial and “civilizing” missions, and grants a kind of psychological pleasure to its white audience ensuring them that they still have power and control over their former aboriginal ‘slaves’. In this paper the researcher attempts to show the hidden purposes of the movie. Keywords: Counter-discursive novel, adaptation, aborigines, civilizing mission, othering.
خلاصه ماشینی:
John Duigan’s 1993 film adaption of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is in fact an appropriation re-canonizing Rhys’s novel as an extension of Char- lotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.
By introducing very conspicuous changes and deviating from the original text, the movie re-silences the oppressed characters of Jean Rhys’s novel (who can stand for Australia’s native population) and re- grants the oppressor characters (who can stand for white Australians) full agency and power.
132-3) These critics suggested that the anxiety of authorship which resulted from the stereotype that literary creativity only belonged to men produced a psycho- logical duplicity in women writers projecting a monstrous counter figure to the idealized heroine epitomized by Bertha Rochester, the mad woman in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (Lane, 2006a, p.
Su says, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea succeeds in breaking the British imperial project in general and the master narrative of Jane Eyre in par- ticular by giving the suppressed Bertha Mason a voice, giving her a different name (Antoinette, thus showing how she has been defined and forced into an- other identity than her own by the colonizing figure of Rochester), relocating the action to the West Indies, and changing the frame of reference (Lane, 2006b, p.
Bearing in mind the psychological loss of control over the aborigines that the white population felt after this High Court decision, it becomes clear why in adapting Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea into a film, the Australian John Duigan changed so many things.