Exoticism in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

The notion of an endless and exotic space reflected in the title of Jean Rhys’s novel includes the possibility of hidden meanings as well as an intense feeling of the unknown and the inexpressible, which permeates the entire story and becomes an important source of the sublime. The self-conscious use of exoticist techniques and modalities of cultural representation might be considered less as a response to the phenomenon of the postcolonial exotic than as a further symptom of it, a result of the commodification of cultural difference.