Failure of Identity Formation in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea: A Study of Hybridity and Mimicry
Dr. Sayyed Rahim Moosavinia,  Mr. Rasool Mohammad A. Al Al-Muslimawi
The Indian Review of World Literature in English, Vol 18. No1 (January-June 2022)

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is considered as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Rhys describes the life of Antoinette, the lunatic woman in Mr. Rochester’s house in Jane Eyre, in order to delineate the psychological impact of British colonialism. Mimicry is a postcolonial term developed by Homi. K. Bhabha to describe a situation in which the colonized imitates the colonizer’s behavior. Rhys’s novel represents Antoinette’s attempt for hybridity in conformation with English culture. However, it can be claimed that hybridity, at least in this novel, prevents the individuals from forming a stable identity. Therefore, they try to imitate the behavior of the colonizer. The present study aims to analyze Bhabha’s notion of hybridity and mimicry in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea in order to show that hybridity acts as a block of identity formation.