Abstract

This thesis stages a meeting between the postmodern cultural theory of Zygmunt Bauman and the novels Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. These novels portray marginal women who are excluded from the very community which has created them. Rhys illustrates how the need to sustain an artificial order gives rise to a psychic fragmentation which is typical of the decentered self. By depicting such characters Rhys criticizes modernity's tendency to order reality by constructing binary oppositions which reduce people to homogeneous categories. Rhys illustrates how this view is mistaken and destructive. Rhys highlights the heterogeneity of human existence and exposes the provisionality of truth and the instability of meaning by employing multi-vocality, irony, parody and images of doubles.