University of Groningen the Mirror Image Muda, G.E
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University of Groningen The mirror image Muda, G.E. IMPORTANT NOTE: You are advised to consult the publisher's version (publisher's PDF) if you wish to cite from it. Please check the document version below. Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Publication date: 2011 Link to publication in University of Groningen/UMCG research database Citation for published version (APA): Muda, G. E. (2011). The mirror image: The representation of social roles for women in novels by Charlotte Brontë, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Jean Rhys. s.n. Copyright Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). The publication may also be distributed here under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the “Taverne” license. More information can be found on the University of Groningen website: https://www.rug.nl/library/open-access/self-archiving-pure/taverne- amendment. Take-down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Downloaded from the University of Groningen/UMCG research database (Pure): http://www.rug.nl/research/portal. For technical reasons the number of authors shown on this cover page is limited to 10 maximum. Download date: 01-10-2021 Chapter 6 Life After Leaving Mr Mackenzie If there is one hypocrisy I loathe more than another, it’s the fiction of the ‘good’ woman and the ‘bad’ one. Jean Rhys in “Vienne.” 1 6.0: INTRODUCTION The last book under discussion in this study is After Leaving Mr Mackenzie by Jean Rhys (1890-1979). 2 Jean Rhys was born in Dominica, the daughter of a doctor of Welsh descent and a Creole mother. She came to England in 1907 and briefly attended the Perse School in Cambridge, and later the Academy of Dramatic Art in London. But after her father died, she discontinued her studies and went to work to support herself. She worked as a chorus girl, and a film extra, and, during the First World War (1914-1918), as a secretary and volunteer cook. In 1919 she left England to marry the first of three husbands, Jean Lenglet, and remained abroad for many years, living mainly in Paris, where she began to write and where much of her early work is set. The short story collection The Left Bank appeared in 1927 with an introduction by Ford Madox Ford. The novel that will be discussed here, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, was published in 1930. I began this chapter with a quotation from one of Rhys’ short stories. Rhys evidently hated the division of women into stereotypical opposites because she was quite often stigmatized in her own life. However, it is clear that she found the division useful in the writing of fiction and, in spite of this statement, much of Jean Rhys’ work is organized around those split Jean Rhys (The University of Tulsa) or mirrored images. Her novel After Leaving Mr Mackenzie is no exception. In this novel, 1 “Vienne” is a short story by Jean Rhys. It was first published in the Transatlantic Review II.2 (December 1924): 639-645. 2 Some authorities give Rhys’ date of birth as 24 August 1894, but Diana Athill mentions in a ‘Foreword’ to Rhys’ posthumous autobiography Smile Please, 24 August 1890. Jean Rhys was born in Roseau, Dominica, in the West Indies. She was named Ella Gwendolin Rees Williams. She changed her name various times, but her novels and short stories were published under the name Jean Rhys. 190 Life After Leaving Mr Mackenzie the sisters Julia Martin and Norah Griffiths are contrasted. Julia is the so-called ‘bad’ woman. She is pretty, she has style, and her marriage has enabled her to leave the drabness of home and move to Paris. Norah has denied herself excitement to stay at home with their ailing mother. Superficially, she is the ‘Angel in the House’ and the ‘good’ woman, but she is unmarried, embittered, and imprisoned in suburban Acton by poverty and the invalid mother. 3 The relationship between the two women is not good, and the resentment the two sisters feel is mutual (Athill, 11-12). Norah’s feelings cut deeper, though; she hates, whereas Julia shows only dry-eyed spite. It is especially in the middle section of the novel that the sisters are mirrored, but the limitation of the various social roles for women is shown throughout the book, and the comparison with Norah is important, because it shows an alternative to Julia’s existence and reveals what might have happened to her, if she had behaved in a more traditional way. A short summary may clarify the development of the story-line. In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, the central female protagonist is Julia Martin. 4 She lives in Paris, and we enter the story on a Tuesday in the spring of 1929 or 1930. Since the previous October, when her ‘lover’ Mr Mackenzie left her, Julia has been living on the weekly three hundred francs which his lawyer, Henri Legros, sends her. Her life is characterized by little freedom, and the social and economic constraint she experiences is becoming worse. The allowance is suddenly stopped with a final payment of fifteen hundred francs. In a fit of rage, Julia seeks out Mr Mackenzie in his local restaurant, slaps him, and flings his money back at him. This incident is witnessed by George Horsfield, and after she leaves the restaurant, he tracks her down and approaches her in a nearby café. They have a drink, go to the cinema, and talk. When Mr Horsfield realizes that she has no money, he gives her fifteen hundred francs, and he also advises her to return to London. Julia goes there for various reasons; “to see her family (a dying mother, a jealous sister, a selfish uncle), to seek financial help from the wealthy older man who was her first lover (he had promised that they would always be friends), and to continue her affair with Mr Horsfield.”5 The mother is by now an invalid; and she dies while Julia is in London. After the cremation, Norah and her paternal Uncle Griffiths send Julia away. Julia briefly takes George Horsfield for her lover, but then returns to Paris. In Paris, she sticks to the same routines as before, and the novel ends with her asking Mr Mackenzie to lend her one hundred francs. Jean Rhys always denied being a feminist, yet her depiction of the available social roles for women, and the unequal and unfair division of power structures leaves no doubt that she was fully aware of the oppressive social structures of patriarchy. In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, we find the bleakest depiction of the contemporary social system. Instead of being mildly ironic about society and the various social roles, as Edith Wharton would have 3 Diana Athill stresses this, calling Norah “the good sister, the one who has stayed at home and sacrificed her youth to caring for their mother.” Jean Rhys: The Early Novels (London: André Deutsch, 1984) 11. Many other critics mention the opposition of the “good sister Norah” and the “bad sister Julia,” as well, though. Lorna Sage refers to it in the “Introduction” to the latest Penguin edition (London: Penguin Classics, 2000) v. 4 The original title of After Leaving Mr Mackenzie does not have a period after Mr ; I have generally followed this form. 5 Arnold E. Davidson mentions this in “The Art and Economics of Destitution in Jean Rhys” Studies in the Novel 16:2 (Summer 1984) 215-227, 216. 191 THE MIRROR IMAGE been, Jean Rhys can be downright sarcastic about the economic and social dependence of women. Perhaps this is also a sign of the times; After Leaving Mr Mackenzie is the most recent of all of the novels under discussion here, published in 1930. 6 By this time, women writers could be more outspoken about the social system; and the plight of the individual, also the female individual, had become an important issue. What is noteworthy about Rhys’ writing style is that it is less ‘realistic’ than the style of the earlier women writers. Many critics, amongst them Ford Madox Ford, regarded her as a modernist writer, because of the techniques that she uses. In general, modernist literature is characterized by a rejection of nineteenth-century traditions. The conventions of realism are abandoned and many modernist writers considered themselves an avant-garde upsetting bourgeois values. They adopted new forms and styles, ‘played’ with the chronological order and attempted new ways of describing the flow of characters’ thoughts in their ‘stream-of-consciousness’ styles. Many writers introduced new or forbidden subject- matters. Overall, it seemed to be their aim to shock the sensibilities of the conventional reader and to challenge the norms and values of bourgeois culture. This modernist revolt against traditional literary forms and subjects demonstrated itself strongly after the catastrophy of World War I shook people’s faith in the foundations and continuity of Western civilization and culture. 7 In her writings, Rhys experiments especially with the structuring of the story, with the juxtaposition of characters and events and with the introduction of risky subject matters. In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, this sometimes leads to an almost grotesque portrayal of the female main characters and the representation of their plight borders on the absurd.