by Open Science Repository Language and Linguistics
(February 2013)
Abstract: This paper attempts to take the wraps off the notion of ‘segregation’, using the literary expertise of the Welsh-born Caribbean writer Jean Rhys, in her ground-breaking novel Wide Sargasso Sea. Through a psychoanalytic reading and interpretation of Rhys’s text, the paper argues that segregation has often been wrongly masked through common human preconceptions, such as racial, gender and religious prejudice, which, as the study posits, are mere catalysts. Conversely, segregation purports to be psychological: its real nature is hinged on some human psychological debility which tends to be tenuous, yet elusive. Segregation tears apart the human psyche and enables the eruption of suppressed and repressed id not only in the segregationist but also in the segregated. Its usual aftermath on us as human beings is nothing but foolhardiness and cataclysm.
Keywords: segregation, psychoanalysis, id, ego, stereotype, catalyst, intertextuality.