Ethics and the Gothic in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea.

Abstract

This article revisits Wide Sargasso Sea as a Gothic text focusing on two of the main structuring principles of the novel —excess and in-betweenness. Rhys’s rereading of Jane Eyre in terms of the excessive and the liminal admits of a double interpretation. Firstly, from an ideological perspective, her gesture has valuable implications for feminist and postcolonial agendas. Complementarily, this opens up the text to an ethical mode of reading. By drawing on Andrew Gibson’s ethics of sensibility and on Homi Bhabha’s mimicry and hybridity, I intend to read Wide Sargasso Sea as representative of a post-foundational form of ethics with which the Gothic shares an emphasis on indeterminacy and an aversion to universals and fixed moral categories.