“Partnership and the Feminine in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and George Lamming’s Natives of My Person: An Ecosophy of the Soul”

This essay studies Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and George Lamming’s Natives of My Person (1972), within the biocultural partnership-dominator paradigm developed by Riane Eisler, and intends to evidence the relevant presence of a different model of feminine relationships that can exemplify an ecological or ecosophical approach, a positive alternative to the violent, colonising, imperialist and dominator exploitation of the planet. A key element of dominator power and control manifests within language definitions and categories – Negro, Mulatto, Creole, Madwoman – are all “terms” that serve as potent repressive designations meant to denote the other’s inferiority and guiltlessly operate any factual monstrosity against the colonised peoples, plundering their land, violating, raping, destroying their bodies, souls, cultures, languages and myths. On the other hand, the novelists’ quest for dialogic and partnership modes of relating to the other offers possible biocultural alternatives that can ‘save our souls’.