Wide Sargasso Sea Revisited Elizabeth Nunez’s Bruised...

Elizabeth Nunez writes Bruised Hibiscus (2000) offering some of the most complicated issues of female identity, oppression and quest for liberation in male centered postcolonial Caribbean society with strong resonances to Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Nunez’s central characters Zuela and Rosa Appleton undergo a series of annihilation of their identities and exploitation and oppression from their husbands. By situating Rosa in a similar position as of Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea, Nunez creates yet another story of a Caribbean creole who suffers denial and becomes a victim of male-centred society ending up her life in complete doom and negation without any hope of autonomy and existence. However, Nunez projects some hope of†¦show more content†¦Bhabha contends that mimicry: †¦ is the process of the fixation of the colonial as a form of cross-classificatory, discriminatory knowledge within an interdictory discourse, and therefore, necessarily raises the question of the authorization of colonial representations; a question of authority that goes beyond the subject’s lack of priority (castration) to a historical crisis in the conceptuality of man as an object of regulatory power, as the subject of racial, cultural, national representation. (90) Therefore Cedric merely replicates the colonials and remains a mimic man who aspires to go to England, get English education and become successful, and thereby denying the Caribbean identity and its differences. Rhys’ protagonist, Antoinette Cosway, in Wide Sargasso Sea suffers racial antagonism, sexual exploitation and male suppression. Though the contexts of Rosa and Antoinette’s childhood circumstances are very different they face overtly similar situation of oppression and identity crisis in their journey of claiming their autonomy and respect. Rosa is subjected to her husband, Cedric’s irrational blames and very often his inferiority complex of being a colonized, dehumanized by whites in the colony. On the other