Abstract
This paper explores the progress of restoring an abject life in Jean Rhys’s work Wide Sargasso Sea, focusing on the main protagonist Antoinette whose life is captured by British imperialism and illusion. Rhys analyzes western colonial ideology, the system and factors that destroy life, and the meaning of social governance mainly through the concepts of Michael Foucault’s biopower and heterotopia and Giorgio Agamben’s dispositif, homo sacer, and bare life. Through this, she suggests a possibility that Antoinette’s bare life, which is constantly separated and excluded from the community by an invisible power, can be revived through her own courageous and independent resistance. To elaborate, she tries to overcome oppression not to be captured by the prejudice and sovereign power of an individual and a nation. Further, she is reborn from a destruction as a complete individual which makes her included in exclusion, going beyond the yoke of imperialism’s intervention of power and capital, conflict between classes, and dispositif that destroys one’s life. She hereby shows the possibility of embodying human freedom, equality, love, and hope in the world of imperialist dystopia. (Daejin University)
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