An Ecocritical Reading in Wide Sargasso Sea

Abstract

The present study attempts to underscore the significance of re-conceptualizing human values, in order to redefine the ways we have established humanity’s relationships to the universal ecologic system. These relationships are depicted in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). By examining the thematic concerns of the novel through the lens of ecocriticism, we can harvest something of the destructive patterns and practices that participate to the contemporary ecological dangers, imbalances, and crisis. Jean Ryhs in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) depicts the troubled relationships between land ownership, law, justice, and inheritance. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys stimulates us to question the values formed through the historical and legal story lies in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847). Rhys’ story breaks the restrictions of Bronte’s fiction by concerning the nineteenth century socio-economic situations that Bronte depicts. Although Rhys depicts a Caribbean setting of the early 19^th century, her fiction is obviously related to the issue of colonization in the 20^th century. In her novel, Rhys explores dimensions of colonization in terms of its impacts on people stayed in vastly various landscapes. Rhys shows the influence of capitalist interests on females who try to navigate the social and political movements wrought in their communities and environments by appearing universal economic issues, and the ways through them capitalism change the earth. The story offers that we reshape our plan of progress, that we extend our idea of space and time to involve future generations in our present reasoning.