COLONIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF MADNESS IN WIDE SARGASSO SEA: A FANONIAN ANALYSIS

Abstract

This study explores the madness represented in Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys as a result of colonial domination and racial othering. The research draws from the theory of colonial psychology put forward by Frantz Fanon, and argues that the fragmentation of Antoinette's mind is not a personal pathology, but the product of sustained colonial violence which has shaped the identity, consciousness and emotional stability of the colonized. The study adopts the qualitative interpretive method which is close reading and thematic analysis of the novel. It focuses on salient issues like racial rejection, narrative control, spatial confinement, and the construction of “madness” in colonial discourse. Results indicate that Antoinette's psychological breakdown is caused by her unstable identity as a Creole subject, her exclusion to both the black and white communities, and her eventual erasure through Rochester's colonial power. The study concludes that madness in the novel is not a clinical state but a way of controlling, and that the novel itself demonstrates that it is socially constructed and that the novel's subject matter, of alienation, inferiority and fragmentation of identity in colonial contexts, is a Fanonian concern.