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‘Jean Rhys’s persistent “strangeness” continues to unsettle the theoretical categories used to interpret her work and our own social structures. These new essays by leading Rhys scholars offer fascinating insights into Rhys’s oeuvre and its influence on twenty-first-century understandings of global modernism, ecocriticism, affect studies J Jean Rhys and posthumanist theory. These perspectives, by Rhys and her critics, are essential for these new times.’ e Twenty-First-Century Approaches Judith Raiskin, Associate Professor at the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, University of Oregon a n Presents new critical perspectives on Jean Rhys in relation to modernism, postcolonialism and theories of affect Edited by R Jean Rhys (1890–1979) is the author of five novels and over seventy short stories. She has Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran played a major role in debates attempting to establish the parameters of postcolonial and h particularly Caribbean studies, and although she has long been seen as a modernist writer, y she has also been marginalised as one who is not quite in, yet not quite out, either. The ten newly commissioned essays and introduction collected in this volume demonstrate s Jean Rhys’s centrality to modernism and to postcolonial literature alike by addressing her stories and novels from the 1920s and 1930s, including Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie and Good Morning, Midnight, as well as her later bestseller, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The volume establishes Rhys as a major author with relevance to a number of E r i different critical discourses, and includes a path-breaking section on affect theory that c a shows how contemporary interest in Rhys correlates with the recent ‘affective turn’ in the L . social sciences and humanities. As this collection shows, strangely haunting and deeply J unsettling, Rhys’s portraits of dispossessed women living in the early and late twentieth o h century continue to trouble easy conceptualisations and critical categories. n s o E n d Erica L. Johnson is an Associate Professor of English at Pace University in New York. i t a e n She is the author of Caribbean Ghostwriting and Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of d d b Location in Works by Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell’Oro, and is the y P co-editor with Patricia Moran of The Female Face of Shame. a t r i c Patricia Moran is the author of Word of Mouth: Body/Language in Katherine Mansfield and i a Virginia Woolf; Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma; and co-editor of Scenes of M the Apple: Food and the Female Body in 19th- and 20th-Century Women’s Writing and The Female o Face of Shame. Formerly Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, she is r a now Lecturer in English at the University of Limerick. n Cover image: Detail from Brassai’s photograph of Rue Quincampoix. 1930–1932. © ESTATE BRASSAÏ -RMN Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk ISBN: 978-1-4744-0219-4 www.euppublishing.com Jean Rhys Twenty-First-Century Approaches Edited by Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran © editorial matter and organisation Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran, 2015 © the chapters their several authors, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 0219 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0220 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0456 3 (epub) The right of Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents List of Figures v Acknowledgements vi Notes on Contributors ix Introduction: The Haunting of Jean Rhys Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran 1 PART I Rhys and Modernist Aesthetics 1. Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield Writing the ‘sixth act’ 21 Sue Thomas 2. Making a Scene: Rhys and the Aesthete at Mid-Century 40 Rishona Zimring 3. On the Veranda: Jean Rhys’s Material Modernism 59 Mary Lou Emery PART II Postcolonial Rhys 4. Jean Rhys’s Environmental Language: Oppositions, Dialogues and Silences 85 Elaine Savory 5. Caribbean Formations in the Rhysian Corpus 107 Carine M. Mardorossian 6. ‘From Black to Red’: Jean Rhys’s Use of Dress in Wide Sargasso Sea 123 Maroula Joannou 7. The Discourses of Jean Rhys: Resistance, Ambivalence and Creole Indeterminacy 146 H. Adlai Murdoch iv Contents PART III Affective Rhys 8. The Empire of Affect: Reading Rhys after Postcolonial Theory 171 John J. Su 9. ‘The feelings are always mine’: Chronic Shame and Humiliated Rage in Jean Rhys’s Fiction 190 Patricia Moran 10. ‘Upholstered Ghosts’: Jean Rhys’s Posthuman Imaginary 209 Erica L. Johnson Bibliography 228 Index 238 List of Figures 3.1 New York production of Macbeth directed by Orson Welles, New Lafayette Theatre, 1936, The Library of Congress, American Memory Collections, Federal Theatre Project 74 3.2 The front of the Sans-Souci Palace in Milot, Haiti. Photograph by Rémi Kaupp, Wikimedia Commons 74 6.1 Christophine in Martinique style handkerchief 128 6.2 Antoinette in the dirty dress 130 6.3 Antoinette in her long white dream dress 134 6.4 Antoinette wearing the ‘tricorne hat, which became her’ 135 6.5 The red dress 139 9.1 Wenceslaus Hollar, The basilisk and the weasel, University of Toronto Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection 196 Acknowledgements This volume has been a great pleasure to edit and write thanks to Jean Rhys’s singular artistry, and the many scholars she has inspired. First, though, I thank Patricia Moran. She and I have spent countless hours talking about Rhys over the years, whether in the context of a graduate seminar, a conference panel, or in our many phone conversations and I count myself lucky to have her as a partner in study and a close friend. She continues to inspire me with her sharp insights and fearlessness. I am also grateful to all of the extraordinary Rhys scholars who contributed to this volume and appreciate our author’s ironic ability to create such community – one thing she never experienced in her own life. Thank you: Mary Lou Emery, Carine Mardorossian, H. Adlai Murdoch, John J. Su, Elaine Savory, Mary Joannou, Rishona Zimring and Sue Thomas. Jackie Jones at Edinburgh University Press has been an extraordinary editor with whom to work; her vision and guidance from the beginning of this project has been invaluable. It has also been a pleasure to work with Dhara Patel, and I am grateful for her editorial wisdom. Thank you both for shepherding this project to publication so supportively and swiftly, and thank you to Kate Robertson, whose transformation of our request for a ‘haunting’ cover image into real art is brilliant. I am grateful to Pace University for supporting my work on this volume by funding my visit to the Rhys archives, and in particular I thank Deans Nira Herrmann and Richard Schlesinger for supporting my research in general. I so appreciate the support of my colleagues in the English Department and the scholarly community I share at Pace with Mark Hussey, Helane Levine-Keating, Sid Ray, Martha Driver, Eugene Richie, Charles North, Sarah Blackwood, Catherine Zimmer, Stephanie Hsu, Ebele Ellease Oseye, Kristen di Gennaro, Steven Goldleaf, Amy Foerster, Eve Andree Laramee, Sonia Suchday and all of my brilliant colleagues there. I am also grateful to those with whom I have shared a conference panel during this project, and to my larger intellectual com- Acknowledgements vii munity – thanks to Claire Davison, Eloise Brezault, Anne Schotter, Ann Hurley, Jean Halley, Natalie Edwards, Chris Hogarth, Johanna Rossi- Wagner, Roy Kamada and Matt Reeck for continuing inspiration and camaraderie. I thank Marc Carlson and the staff at the University of Tulsa McFarlin Library for sharing Rhys’s archival material with me. I am also grateful to the New York Public Library and NYU’s Bobst Library for providing me with access to anything and everything I needed to review Rhys scholarship for this volume. Finally, I thank my friends and students for entertaining my long- standing fascination with Rhys. Patricia Moynagh and Wendy Nielsen have always been there for me, and I thank them for their friendship and unconditional support. I thank my sister Meagan Schipanski for her endless generosity. Thanks to my family for sharing my literary passions and taking interest in my various projects. My husband Patrick Johnson has gone an extra mile on this volume by providing crucial technical support on the manuscript and, as always, by listening to my no doubt fascinating blow-by-blow reports as the volume took shape. I thank my son Max for inspiring me by following his own passions and for his intuitive calm and balance; Patrick and Max, this is dedicated to you. Erica L. Johnson It is a pleasure to thank the friends and colleagues who have gener- ously given their time and support to me as I worked on this collection. My greatest debt is to my co-editor Erica Johnson, who has been my staunchest friend and most stimulating intellectual sounding board for almost two decades now: this collaboration fittingly memorialises the many conversations we have devoted over the years to the enigmatic and endlessly fascinating figure who is the focus of this volume, Jean Rhys.

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