She defines this feature as “what disturbs identity, system, order. Just as Bhabha describes the “ of the mimic man” with no presence of individuality behind its mask, Kristeva remarks “the discourse of borderline subjects” is comprised entirely by “abjection”. Bhabha’s theory raises the question of whether the colonized can maintain his/her sanity, being in an ambivalent space, “always the split screen of the self and its doubling”. Therefore, “mimicry emerges as the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal” (86). He further remarks that “the display of hybridity – its peculiar ‘replication’ – terrorizes authority with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery” (115).

In his Location of Culture, Bhabha argues that “Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities it is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the ‘pure’ and original identity of authority)” (112).

During her life time Jean Rhys was unable to assimilate into the English culture due to her outsider status, through her character Antionette in her work she has portrayed the loss of identity pertaining to this ‘in-betweenness’. “These hybrids live “’border lives’ on the margins of different nations, in-between contrary homelands.” ( McLeod 217). The concept of hybridity, a central term within postcolonial criticism, has in recent years grown in importance and popularity it is used to understand and interpret what it means to be a migrant, to not belong to one place only, to be a hybrid. “Especially with the impact of second wave postcolonialism, the postcolonial writers in literature started to write for a specific purpose, using the language of the mainstream power and aiming at the same target.” ( Ashcroft 23). In postmodern literature, after the fading away of the colonial discourses and the rising of literary voices from the former colonies on issues like self-identity, there appears a new literary genre, in which the writers try to give voice to the margins’ cultural, political and sociological identity and question the imposing power of the supposedly superior mainstream society. The novel can be considered as a description of the impact of postcolonialism on the psychological state of the protagonist.

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