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The Feminine Creole: Identity in the Works Of The Feminine Creole: Identity in the Works of Jean Rhys, Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Pauhe Melville Jordan Stouck A thesis submitted to the Department of English in conforrnity with the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen's University Kingston, Ontario, Canada September 200 1 Copyright Q Jordan Stouck, 200 1 BiMiothèque nationale du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Sibliographic Services services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395. nia Wellngtan OliawaON KfAON4 ûltawaON KiAONI Canada CaMda The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive Licence dowing the exclusive permettant à la National Librry of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distri'bute or seli reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of tfiIs thesis in microfom, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la fome de rnicrofiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique. The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. aut onsation. Abstract This dissertation challenges existing theories on creolmtion to offer a sustained exploration of what it means to be feminine and creole. Despite several ment calls for a "woman version'' of creolization, current critical discourse has faiied to produce it. Developing a theoretical intersection between Edouard Glissant's concept of cross- cultural exchange and Julia fisteva's ferninist version of subject formation, I argue for a new approach to identity which fuses creolition and gender as fiindamental dynarnics of being. The resulting mode1 of the ferninine mole not onIy deconstmcts but also re- formulates the constituent~of identity as elements of an unceasing process of transformation. In other words. feminine creole identity tiinctions as a series of ruptures and connections with the demands of social existence. The infinite variations within this process allow me to compare without subsuming the specificities of each w-riter. Jean Rhys's ( 1890- 1979) white creole heroines intervene in the dynarnics of history and postcoIoniality hma critically dissonant viewpoint. Thematking feminine creole alienation and revealing the assumptions upon which European culture is based, the Rhys novel and short story I examine expose alterity as inherent to identity while also confinning the resonant power of social discourses. Alice Dunbar-Nelson's ( 1875- 1935) New Orleans women of colour display the crises produced by Southern racial and ethnic segregation. Dunbar-NeIson's short stories portray creoiization as bound to social, Syrnbolic meaning even as they demand recognition of the contradictions and inconsistencies embedded in American racism. Pauline Melville's (1948 -) story collection, Shape-shifler, offers a new approach to the confiict between identity and iii difference articulated by Rhys and Dunbar-Nelson. bkl~illtengages with colonial history and mythology in an attempt to reveal their oppressive legacies and inaugurate the potential for a different future. Each version of the ferninine creole is as much a process of identity formation, historical revision and politicai intervention as it is a form of aesthetic and linguistic innovation. 1 offer, in short, an interpretive strategy which maps the conflictual and diverse intersections among race, gender and ethnicity in these texts. I would like to thank my supervisor, Asha Varadharajan, for her caretiil readimg and comments and for encouraging me to look for questions rather than for answers. 1 am also gratefiil to my second reader, Laura Murray, for her support and insightflll suggestions. 1 thank both Queen's University and the Social Sciences and Hurnanities Research Council for the financial support which enabled me to complete this dissertation. 1 am gratettl to my father, David, for his advice and my mother, Mary-Ann, for her encouragement. And last but not leas, special thanks to Scott Zeman for his patience and support at every stage of this project. Table of Contents Abstract Ac knowledgements Introduction Toward a Ferninine Creole Practice Chapter 2 Rupture and Co~ection:The Errant Identities of Jean Rhys's White Creole Heroines Chapter 3 Identities in Crisis: Alice Dunbar-Nelson's New Orleans Fiction Chapter 4 "Return and Leave and Return Againn: Pauline Melville's Transatlantic Fictions Conclusion Works Cited Vita Introduction: Toward a Feminint Crde Practice The paradigm the lem through which somerhing is viewed. determines what is seen. Pauiine MelYille. Shaw-shifter in a much-quoted passage, Gayatn Spivak laments the limitations of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasse Sea which "rewrites a canonical English [and feminist] text . in the interest of the white Creole rather than the native" (253). Yet why should the creole woman be dismissed within this postcoloniai dyaamic? Couid her perspective not productively complicate and even deconstmct the confluence of feminist and colonial discourses that Spivak seeks to expose? The following study addresses this negiected viewpoint through a new, feminine creole discursive lens. As the epigraph States, one's paradigmatic fiame determines what is seen, so that by changing the critical lens used to address creole women's writing, one shifis the focus fiom what has so fâr ben seen in these texts. The feminine creole discursive lem I propose produces a strategic distortion that illuminates a hitheno neglected aspect of creole identities and representative practices. PauIine Melville, Jean Rhys and Alice Dunbar-Nelson d de6ne themsehes and their work as creole and share a preoccupation with the elusive and duplicitous nature of feminine identity. Each work represents new, chaiienging, and poiysemous variations on the theme of the feminine creole in order to idect the ethnic, racial, and historical dimensions of creole existence with sexuai difference. The elastic application of the tem "creole," therefore, invites a theoreticai intervention which compares without subsuming the spdcities of each woman writer. 'This study explores the implications of precisely such a non-essentidking theoreticai intersection between feminism and creolization while also offering new criticai perspectives on al three writers. Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935) was born in New Orleans of rnixed racial ancestry. Although able to "pass" as white, Dunbar-Nelson identifid herself with the civil rights movement and worked both as a journaiist and educator on behalf of equality. Much of Dunbar-Nelson's fiction explores the complexities of New Orleans creole experience, adapting and reformuIating the "locd colour" genre established by writers such as George Washington Cable. The mixed criticai response which Dunbar-Nelson's work has received emphasizes the need for a study which integrates feminine and creole concems. Gloria T. HulI, while emphasizing the importance of recovenng ûunbar- Nelson's work for fican-American feminist scholarship, nevertheless questions the artistic ment of that work. Hull describes Dunbar-Nelson's stoties as bound by "divisiveness and inarticulation," a creative failing (in Hull's opinion) that originates from her complex personality and background (xxix). This divisiveness is precisely, however. what links Dunbar-Nelson's work to that of Jean Rhys and Pauline Melville, and what prompts a new interpretive emphasis on the conflict between being ferninine and being creole. The ambivalence in Dunbar-Nelson's narratives, the way in which she adapts and twists conventional rnelodramatic mede plots, points to her thematic preoccupation with the nature of that identity rather than to her artistic incornpetence. Dunbar-Nelson's texts do not merely accept turn-of-the-cenniry New ûrieans identity categones, but in exposing moments of crisis, these narratives Mersuggest that femininity and ethnicity intersect in more complex and contradictory ways than has so far been addressed either in creolization theory or in relation to this author's work.1 Jean Rhys (1 890- 1979) articulates a white colonial perspective very different fiom Dunbar-Nelson's version of creolization. Born on the isiand of Dominica, Rhys was a fourth-generation West Indian of European descent who lived much of her adult life in Europe, and the conflict between those two culturd traditions is a pervasive theme in her fiction. Although, as a white creole, Rhys engages with cultural rather than racial discrimination, Rhys shares Dunbar-Nelson's preoccupation with the transformation of extant identity categories. Rhys's heroines repeatedly describe the double marginalization of being female and colonial not only in Europe, but also in Caribbean contexts, where white colonials or b2ki.s lost land and privilege after emancipation in 1838. Rhys's texts Grther insist on experiences of econornic and ethnic marginalization which prevent their unproblematic aliment with Western bourgeois feminist aspirations. As a result of these double exclusions, Rhys's writing has been criticized by both postcolonialists and feminists for its ambivalent politics. Coral Ann Howells writes that "Rhys questions patriarchal pronouncements, though her fictions stiIl bespeak a coflusion with the principle of male authority..." (13). Like Dunbar-Nelson's 'divisiveness,"
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