Corpus-assisted Systemic Socio-Semantic Stylistics: Exploring 'white' and 'red' in Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea

This article presents a new step in an ongoing research project on the role of corpus linguistics in Ruqaiya Hasan's Systemic Socio-Semantic Stylistics (SSS), which is a framework for the analysis of literature rooted in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) . Focus in on Jean Rhys’ 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, a postcolonial prequel to Jane Eyre reconstructing the life of Bertha/Antoinette Mason, including the honeymoon with Mr. Rochester and the gradual demise of their marriage. The study combines quantitative results from corpus-assisted investigation (including a comparison, in terms of keywords, between Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre as reference corpus) with qualitative 'Appraisal' analysis of select patterns emerging as potentially relevant in Rhys' novel, involving the lemmas 'white' and 'red'. In so doing, it aims at unveiling some of the ways in which Wide Sargasso Sea concretely links up to its canonical urtext, re-shaping it from a postcolonial perspective.