The Birth of Identity Out of the Spirit of Language: Semiotic vs Symbolic in Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31861/pytlit2025.112.080Keywords:
identity, semiotic, symbolic, madness, dreams, nature, narration, discourseAbstract
The literary analysis of British woman writer J. Rhys’s novel “Wide Sargasso Sea” (1966) – as the subject of the present paper – is based on French literary scholar J. Kristeva’s concept of the differentiation of the semiotic and symbolic modalities of language as a source of the process of personal identification. The study of the poetical structure of the text made it possible to reveal and investigate the mechanism of the protagonists’ identity formation as a complex, long-term, dynamic process that arises as a result of dialectical fluctuations between the semiotic and symbolic aspects of the author’s writing. The pre-Oedipal speech of the subconscious, expressed in disorderly drives and impulses, connected with the maternal body and nature, constitutes the semiotic aspect of the identification process. In J. Rhys’s novel, it is realized in madness discourse, oneiric visions, and the natural world, which indicate the ambivalent essence of the female protagonist, Antoinette. Instead, the novel’s composition, based on the “grammar” and “syntax” of the symbolic aspect of the character’s identification, reveals the simultaneous presence of the semiotic in it. The narrative structure of the novel, marked by phenomena of discursive shifts, omissions, gaps, or repetitions, demonstrates the destruction of the symbolic and, at the same time, the subordination of the semiotic to it. It manifests itself at the level of narrative diversity and chaos, characterized by the variability and fluidity of central and secondary, male and female narrators and the shift in the perspective of their narratives, built on the principle of linearity, cyclicality, or zigzagging; nevertheless, it is founded on the rules of internal symmetry, proportionality, and binarism inherent in the narrative discourses of the text.
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