Gender, Race and Identity in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic (2011).

Abstract

This study has compared Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1996) and Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic (2011). It has examined the way these two authors bring to the fore issues related to the exploitation and the marginalization of women in the Caribbean and the American spaces, respectively. In the discussion of these issues, focus has been put on the way oppressions of gender and race constitute a barrier to the process of constructing an independent self and identity. For this purpose, the theoretical framework of this dissertation has been borrowed from Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed (2000) and Williams Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of “Intersectionality.” On the one hand, it has been assumed that both Rhys and Otsuka incorporate into their narratives various methodologies of resisting the oppressions of such external forces as gender and race. On the other hand, it seemed appropriate to make reference to Crenshaw’s theory given that both authors shed light on how identity intersects with social categories like gender and race. The analysis of the two selected novels has, indeed, revealed that social categories like gender, race and identity generally interact and influence each other.