The Postcolonial Gothic: Madness, Memory, and The Haunted Woman in Wide Sargasso Sea and The God of Small Things

Gothic literature, which originally denoted the macabre, the mysterious, or a form of medieval architecture, has changed drastically. Postcolonial Gothic literature brought to the fore the aftermath of colonialism and its impact on the colonised. Themes such as colonial trauma, gendered madness, etc., found their way into the periphery of Gothic literature. The present study examines how madness is not restricted to being a psychological disorder, but a strong reaction against patriarchal and societal oppressions. In this context, female madness emerges as a site of resistance, challenging the traditional notions of sanity, identity, and social order. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things will be examined in a comparative study of how madness and memory haunt and traumatise the characters and drive them into madness. In this paper, the qualitative literary research method is used through textual and thematic analysis.In Rhys, it is a Jamaican creole woman and her daughter who are driven to madness due to their white husbands, representing the coloniser, and the society’s rejection also plays a role in alienating them. In Roy’s case, a Syrian Christian woman and her twin children try to break free of the class-creed difference by flouting the dictates of society and family, destroyed, leaving only inherited trauma. Both writers reconstruct earlier notions of sanity, identity and social order through postcolonial Gothic. (230 words)