Reconstructing Female Identity
in Wide Sargasso Sea and Lucy from Foucault’s Counter-Memory
Theory
Fan Yu
Master’s Research Student,
Department of Intercultural Studies
School of English Studies, Beijing International Studies
University, Beijing, China, 100024.
ABSTRACT
The thesis applies Foucault’s counter-memory
theory to interpret the reconstruction of female identity in
Caribbean Neo-Victorian writing. Focusing on contemporary Caribbean
women writers Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Jamaica Kincaid’s
Lucy, the study analyses in depth the colonial symbols that regulate
female identity in the parent texts, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
and Villette, as well as the strategies used by the subtexts to
reconstruct counter-memory narratives through symbolic cleavage. It
reveals how Caribbean women’s identities are fragmented into “the
Other” under colonial power, and how the resetting of symbols
counteracts linear historical narratives, transforming memory into
resistance. The “fragmentation” of Caribbean women’s identities is
not static, but rather a dynamic reconstruction of subjectivity
through symbolic cleavage in counter-memory writing text.
Keywords: counter-memory writing; Caribbean Neo-Victorian writing;
reconstruction of female identity; symbol.
