![]() ![]() Finally, I turn to the ways in which the two 20 th century novels retell Jane Eyre and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl respectively. I argue Sethe’s murder of her child provides her agency, but an agency tainted by slavery that still requires a second sacrifice to affirm a female African American community. I then consider Beloved, contesting that sacrifice’s dually ritual and violent nature functions in the context of motherhood. ![]() ![]() Beginning with Wide Sargasso Sea, I argue that Antoinette’s self-sacrifice offers escape from her double racial and gendered oppressions and disrupts an otherwise endless cycle of colonial violence. Employing René Girard’s theory of sacrifice, I argue that the women’s self-harming violence serves as a form of self-sacrifice in both texts, halting otherwise endless cycles of vengeful violence and affirming communities outside of the dominant white patriarchal order. Scenes of Sacrifice: Violence as Female Agency in Wide Sargasso Sea and Belovedįacing domination and restriction at the hands of husbands, masters, and wider society, how can women reclaim agency and resist their oppressors? Examining two 20 th century novels, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, as well as their 19 th century origin texts, this article posits that violence directed towards the self emerges as one of the few forms of agency available to women, and particularly women of color in the texts, who are harshly limited by their white patriarchal contexts.
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