DOCSLIB.ORG

1 Introductory: Jean Rhys and the Landscape of Emotion

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
1 Introductory: Jean Rhys and the Landscape of Emotion Notes 1 INTRODUCTORY: JEAN RHYS AND THE LANDSCAPE OF EMOTION 1. A recent review of listings in the MLA Bibliography (1992–2003) reveals a pronounced critical inclination to favor Wide Sargasso Sea over Rhys’s other nov- els. The database includes one hundred and fifty-four entries on Wide Sargasso Sea, as contrasted with fourteen related to Quartet; thirty-nine to Voyage in the Dark; thirteen to After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie; and fourteen to Good Morning, Midnight, respectively. Despite this inequity of critical treatment, there has been a general revival of interest in Rhys’s work that can be attributed, in large part, to the groundbreak- ing efforts of feminist scholars reclaiming the contributions of forgotten or mar- ginalized women writers. Accordingly, many studies of Rhys deploy feminist perspectives as they attempt to compensate for the earlier lack of critical discus- sion; complementing these is the growing body of assessments by postcolonial critics interested in the complicated permutations of nationhood and racial iden- tity that her fiction enacts. Recent assessments tend to generalize the experience of Rhys’s female subjects as illustrative of the ways in which women are victim- ized by a patriarchal milieu; or/and, to stress the multiple abuses of European colonialism as they inform the vision of this transplanted West Indian author. Those few full-length critical volumes on Rhys that directly acknowledge psy- choanalytic premises, e.g., Mary Lou Emery’s Jean Rhys at “World’s End”: Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile; Deborah Kelly Kloepfer’s The Unspeakable Mother: Hidden Discourse in Jean Rhys and H. D.; and Helen Nebeker’s Jean Rhys: Woman in Passage, provide assessments of her considerable psychological acumen as framed variously by such theorists as Horney, Lacan, Kristeva, and Jung. Among journal articles, Elizabeth Abel’s “Women and Schizophrenia: The Fiction of Jean Rhys,” published in 1979, opened the door to a series of shorter studies that have emphasized the psychology of the individual, especially as she is socially disaffected, in Rhys’s fiction. None of these treatments, however, demonstrates conversance with the exciting discoveries that are of cardinal interest to those within the psychoanalytic community today and that are clearly of relevance to scholars and students of modern literature, as I argue here. 144 Notes 2. Sheila Kineke offers a persuasive discussion of the colonizing aspects of Ford’s patronage of Rhys, in which he attempted “literary possession” of her as Modernist protégée (288). Sanford Sternlicht addresses Rhys’s adoption of a pseudonym as a possible bid for the approbation of select male figures and the literary patriarchy of her day (9). 3. For more on Rhys’s sense of Paris, and her experiences of Hemingway and other notable Modernists, see Coral Ann Howells as well Louis James. 4. I am indebted to Howells for locating the passage from Rhys’s unpublished Black Exercise Book that describes her search for and discovery of the psychoanalytic text at Sylvia Beach’s shop in Paris. Howells offers a perceptive discussion of Rhys’s opinion of the Freudian notion of female hysteria, as she was exposed to it (17). 5. Felman is among several scholars in recent years who have been instrumental in calling for a more sophisticated intertextual engagement of literary and psycho- analytic discourses. In addition to her anthology Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, which contains nuanced reconsiderations of such texts as Hamlet and The Turn of the Screw, Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips’s volume Literature and Psychoanalysis presents an important historical perspective on approaches to literature from the early psychoanalysts through to the cultural commentators of the mid-twentieth century and contemporary French theorists. The emphasis in both anthologies is on the Freud/Lacan legacy, with scant attention given to the insights of other pioneering analytic figures. Several recent studies, however, argue for an incorporation of the work of other groundbreaking figures of psychoanalysis in the treatment of literary texts. Among these are Mary Jacobus’s First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis; and Esther Sánchez-Pardo’s Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia. These form significant, much-needed contributions to a growing critical awareness of the salience of Klein’s thought in discussions of art in general and, by extension, in analyses of the shaping consciousness and self-identifications of Modernism. 6. The pioneers of analysis were on terms of familiarity with some of their patients that would shock even the most progressive in the analytic community of today. Freud’s patient Irma was invited over for a birthday celebration with his family; Klein saw adult patients in the boarding house in Wales where she resided as London was being bombed during World War II (Interpretation 108; Grosskurth 266), to select just a few of many examples of the surprisingly loose, early notion of an analytic “frame.” 7. For a chronological sequencing of first editions of Rhys’s works, given with com- prehensive descriptions, see Melltown; for a listing of subsequent editions and publication dates through to the end of her life, see Jacobs. 2 VOYAGE IN THE DARK: PROPITIATING THE AVENGERS 1. I follow the lead of Kleinian analysts when using the spelling “phantasy” as dis- tinguished from “fantasy,” the latter term describing conscious imaginings and the former the activities of the unconscious (see Mitchell, S. 68). Notes 145 2. The degree to which Mrs. Adam shaped Rhys’s notebooks into fiction is unclear. Rhys’s biographer, Carole Angier, claims that Adam “cut and edited” them, and made divisions within the loosely assembled manuscript pages to create chapters and parts (131). Judith L. Raiskin suggests that the interpolations from Mrs. Adam were more considerable: that she took the diary-like material and “rewrote parts of it in the form of a novel” (133). Rhys’s own account in Smile Please is unspecific; as she tells it, Mrs. Adam asked for permission to alter pieces of the manuscript because it was “ ‘perhaps a bit naïve here and there’ ” and also made some divisions within the text, but Rhys disliked these changes and when she used her material later as a basis for Voyage it was to the original notebooks, not Mrs. Adams’s text, that she returned (155). As numerous readers have pointed out, the ending of Voyage, as Rhys was pressured to change it, offers some possibility of hope for Anna; but this hope is a muted one, and Rhys succeeded in remaining ambiguous in spite of her editor’s wish for optimism (see Kleopfer 77; Morris 4; O’Connor 130). 3. Balint’s work derives from the theories of Klein and other early object relations analysts—“the Londoners,” as he refers to them, because many of them were working in England at mid-century—but he also voices reservations: “The Londoners studied only the vehement reactions after frustration, but the experi- ence of the tranquil, quiet sense of well-being after proper satisfaction escaped their attention altogether or has not been appreciated according to its economic importance [i. e. in proportion to its significance].” He accordingly addresses, as neither Riviere nor Klein does, the “quiet sense of well-being” that may charac- terize the infant’s first experience of object love (“Early” 102). 4. See Freud’s claim in “Female Sexuality” (1931): “Childhood love is boundless; it demands exclusive possession, it is not content with less than all” (231). 5. When Rhys explained in a letter that her impetus for composing Voyage was “the West Indies [. .] knocking at my heart” (171), she recognized, with character- istic attention to physical detail, the tangibility of heartache, which offers imme- diate, inescapable evidence of traumatic loss. Diana Athill notes that in old age Rhys suffered from a heart disorder (Smile 6; also Angier 503; 519), her body offering the inscription of pain borne by her young protagonist Anna. In docu- menting the interweaving of Rhys’s art and life in this novel, Curtis (147–48); Harrison (69); Kloepfer (76); and O’Connor (89) offer perceptive insights. 6. For a similarly disturbing but more sympathetic portrait of a woman whose body has become a caricature of feminine display in a life that has relied on male attentions, see Rhys’s story “La Grosse Fifi,” in which an aging femme fatale tightly corsets her large figure, which nevertheless bulges out of its restraints, and wears rouge that “shriek[s]” and “bright blue” eyeshadow (Collected 80). She is eventually murdered by the gigolo she has supported, a pointed comment on the outcome that awaits the woman who has outlived her sexual appeal: in the eyes of men, she is utterly dispensable. 7. In an interview conducted in her old age, Rhys recalled her “fear of obeah. That’s West Indian black magic. I remember we had this obeah woman as a cook once. She was rather a gaudy kind of woman, very tall and thin and always wore a red 146 Notes handkerchief on her wrist. She once told my fortune and a lot of it has come true. My life was peopled with fears” (Vreeland 228). The strength of the obeah- woman who could foretell the lives of others is recollected in Rhys’s focus on her hand, encircled with cloth the color of blood; an association that links magic, life, and strength to a woman who was in other ways clearly marginalized. Throughout Voyage, in contrast, hands are used as emblems of feminine pow- erlessness. Anna learns to display hands only for sexual lure. She polishes her nails to shine “as bright as brass” (19), as glittering ornaments that will draw men to her, yet this mode of living by the hand is precarious; women’s social position, predicated on sexual availability, is always insecure.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Wide Sargasso Sea
    THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ENGLISH: ANXIETY OF ENGLISHNESS IN CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S JANE EYRE AND JEAN RHYS’S WIDE SARGASSO SEA By Sarah Whittemore Bachelor of Arts, September 2004 ­ May 2008, The George Washington University A Thesis submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English May 18, 2008 Thesis directed by Tara Wallace Associate Professor of English The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Sarah Whittemore has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English as of May 12, 2008. This is the final and approved form of the thesis. THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ENGLISH: ANXIETY OF ENGLISHNESS IN CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S JANE EYRE AND JEAN RHYS’S WIDE SARGASSO SEA Sarah Whittemore Thesis Research Committee: Tara Wallace, Associate Professor of English, Director Antonio Lopez, Assistant Professor of English, Reader ii © Copyright 2008 by Sarah Whittemore All rights reserved iii Acknowledgments I would like to start by acknowledging all of those who played a major role in helping me to successfully complete this project. First and foremost, I would like to thank my family who provided not only the inspiration for my thesis topic, but the constant love and support necessary to carry it out. A special thanks to Matt for keeping me motivated (and caffeinated) throughout the semester and to my three amazing roommates for constantly believing in me. Finally, I would like to thank the GW English department, specifically Tara Wallace and Gil Harris for their patience and guidance throughout the year.
    [Show full text]
  • Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and the Case
    Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and the Case of Postcolonial Haunting *** Kathleen Hemingway is currently in her third year at the University of Toronto Mississauga where she is specializing in English and majoring in History. She has spent the last five summers working as both a counsellor and a teacher at an arts camp. Kathleen is particularly interested in ideas of translation and post-colonial as well as transnational literature. *** The “grand narratives” of history are dominated by stories of victory and heroism, tales of conquest and the “spread of civilization.” What these “grand narratives” fail to tell are the stories of the conquered, the losers of history. These stories remain in the periphery of the historical narrative, mentioned only here and there in passing; a cargo jettisoned from a slave ship or the cackling laughter of the mad Creole woman in the attic. The “histories we choose to remember and recount” (Bhabha 57) provide a one-sided, often Eurocentric view of the state of the world. As a result they push “minor” cultures and people further and further into the margins until they become little more than a footnote. Postcolonialism aims, as Homi Bhabha puts it, for a “radical revision” of this fact. By tearing down the binary oppositions which structure the current historical and literary narratives, postcolonial theory allows for the emergence of the “projective past” or haunting of the present by an unsettled past and the “split narratives” that accompany it (Bhabha 57). The postcolonial narrative acts to represent cultures that have been marginalized through colonization as it “bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation” (Bhabha 46).
    [Show full text]
  • Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Adapted Screenplays
    Absorbing the Worlds of Others: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Adapted Screenplays By Laura Fryer Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of a PhD degree at De Montfort University, Leicester. Funded by Midlands 3 Cities and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. June 2020 i Abstract Despite being a prolific and well-decorated adapter and screenwriter, the screenplays of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala are largely overlooked in adaptation studies. This is likely, in part, because her life and career are characterised by the paradox of being an outsider on the inside: whether that be as a European writing in and about India, as a novelist in film or as a woman in industry. The aims of this thesis are threefold: to explore the reasons behind her neglect in criticism, to uncover her contributions to the film adaptations she worked on and to draw together the fields of screenwriting and adaptation studies. Surveying both existing academic studies in film history, screenwriting and adaptation in Chapter 1 -- as well as publicity materials in Chapter 2 -- reveals that screenwriting in general is on the periphery of considerations of film authorship. In Chapter 2, I employ Sandra Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s notions of ‘the madwoman in the attic’ and ‘the angel in the house’ to portrayals of screenwriters, arguing that Jhabvala purposely cultivates an impression of herself as the latter -- a submissive screenwriter, of no threat to patriarchal or directorial power -- to protect herself from any negative attention as the former. However, the archival materials examined in Chapter 3 which include screenplay drafts, reveal her to have made significant contributions to problem-solving, characterisation and tone.
    [Show full text]
  • The White Creole in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso
    HSS V.1 (2016) DOI: 10.1515/hssr -2016-0006 The White Creole in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea: A Woman in Passage Imen Mzoughi * Félix Houphouët-Boigny University, Cocody-Abidjan, Ivory Coast (West Africa) Abstract Studies on Jean Rhys have been fragmentary concentrating on one or two aspects of Rhys’s thematic concern with the alienation of the white creole without laying emphasis on Rhys’s exploration of the Creole’s identity. There has been no attempt to examine if the creole has to struggle harder and more than whites and blacks to come to terms with her personal identity until now. The answer is affirmative because the creole is a composite human being. Indeed, the white creole is the ‘fruit’ of a mixed union. Born into miscegenation, hybridity and creolization, the creole is physically, linguistically, socially and religiously a diverse human being. Within the scope of this paper, the term identity is used in a broad sense. The creole’s personal identity refers to the different identities the Creole can have at different times and in different circumstances. Correspondingly, she must negotiate the white and black elements of her identity. The Creole must deal with the complexity of her identity through a web of tangled relationships with both whites and blacks. Read from this light, the personal identity of the creole is not “either/ or,” but reluctantly “both/ and.” In various ways, the creole is an ‘Everyman.’ The Creole undergoes an awareness, and is eventually, redefined through the image of the ‘other.’ Indeed, her jump toward her black friend Tia reflects Rhys’s basic concern for a Caribbean society in which assimilation and personal identity must blend in a single humane goal, that is, to co-exist beyond the lines of race, gender, class and sex in order to avoid annihilation.
    [Show full text]
  • The Postcolonial Framework and Reinterpretation of Great
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Diposit Digital de Documents de la UAB The Postcolonial Framework and Reinterpretation of Great Expectations and Jane Eyre in Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. TFG Estudis Anglesos Supervisor: Dr Felicity Hand Cristina González Varo June 2015 Acknowledgments I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr Hand, who from the very beginning showed me her support, suggesting works and different approaches to improve my project. Thank you for your time, patience, and especially for allowing me to express my ideas in my own way. I would also like to thank Dr Owen, who might not be aware of the impact his Literary Theory course had on me. Thank you for introducing me to this world, for teaching me to seek my voice and for encouraging me to keep on writing. Special thanks to my parents, who have suffered my many doubts and moments of self- consciousness; and to my partner, Lewis, who has supported me from afar with his constant support and encouragement. Table of Contents Abstract....................................................................................................................................... 1 1. Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 2 2. Background on Postcolonialism ................................................................................... 3 3. Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • 1 INTRODUCTION Jean Rhys Was Born Ella Gwen Williams on 24
    1 INTRODUCTION Jean Rhys was born Ella Gwen Williams on 24 August, 1891 in the island of Dominica, West Indies. She was the fourth of five children born to Minna Williams (n£e Lockhart), and William Rees Williams. William Rees Williams was a Welsh doctor who went to Dominica in the late 19th century, as a young man. He had been to sea for some years as a ship's doctor, and finally decided to settle in Dominica. He died in 1908 while Jean Rhys was a student at the Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Minna Lockhart was born in Dominica in the mid-1800's, the offspring of a white Creole family that had once owned land and slaves, but whose wealth had declined over the years. Jean Rhys's great-grandfather, James Gibson Lockhart, went to Dominica at the end of the 1700's from Scotland. The Lockharts still owned a large estate called 'Geneva,' near Grand Bay in the south of Dominica, when Rhys was a child. The great house on this estate was burnt down more than once after the Lockharts established themselves there, and one of these burnings was recaptured by Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea. She also wrote about the garden at Geneva estate in this novel. When Jean Rhys was a girl, her family lived some of the time at Geneva estate, and sometimes in Roseau, the capital of Dominica, about ten rugged miles away and two hours on horseback. Dr.Williams, her father, owned a house at the corner of Cork and Queen Mary Streets in Roseau where he had his office, and where the family lived when they were in town.
    [Show full text]
  • Unhomely Homes: Postcolonial (Re)Locations and Self-Fashioning in Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, and Chang-Rae Lee
    UNHOMELY HOMES: POSTCOLONIAL (RE)LOCATIONS AND SELF-FASHIONING IN JOSEPH CONRAD, JEAN RHYS, AND CHANG-RAE LEE By JUNG-HWA LEE A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2008 1 © 2008 Jung-Hwa Lee 2 To my Mom 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My deepest gratitude goes to the members of my dissertation committee who have shown me what it takes to be a good scholar and teacher. R. Brandon Kershner, my advisor, supported this study from the beginning and generously provided professional and personal advice. I admire his love of life and commitment to literature. Leah Rosenberg asked me hard questions and helped me articulate ideas at various stages of drafting. Pamela Gilbert constantly reminded me of the importance of gender in this study. Jessica Harland-Jacobs, my outsider reader, brought a fresh perspective to this dissertation and provided invaluable comments. This study would not have been possible without their expertise, commitment, encouragement, and friendship. I wish to thank my old teachers and mentors in Korea who inspired me to pursue graduate study in English; friends in Korea and the U.S. whose numerous e-mails and phone calls helped me keep my sanity for the past seven years; colleagues at the University of Florida who read my draft at different stages of writing; and finally my family, especially my mother, for supporting my decision to come to the U.S. and always believing in me even when I doubt myself.
    [Show full text]
  • In Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso
    Intertextuality, narrators and other voices in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea Intertextualidade, narradores e outras vozes em Wide Sargasso Sea, de Jean Rhys Rosalia Angelita Neumann Garcia Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil Mariana Lessa de Oliveira Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil RESUMO: O romance Wide Sargasso Sea, de Jean Rhys, é geralmente considerado uma resposta pós-colonial à obra Jane Eyre, de Charlotte Brontë. Embora ambos os romances apresentem conexões intertextuais, a estrutura narrativa de Rhys distancia sua obra da narrativa de Brontë, mas também a complementa. Assim, é o objetivo deste artigo estudar o nível de intertextualidade presente em Wide Sargasso Sea em comparação a Jane Eyre, além de apresentar análises sobre os tipos de narrador e focalização observados nas três unidades narrativas distintas da obra por meio de teorias sobre narradores homodiegéticos com base em Bal e Nieragden. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Wide Sargasso Sea; Jane Eyre; Intertextualidade; Narradores homodiegéticos. ABSTRACT: Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea is often perceived as a postcolonial response to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Although the two novels present intertextual relations, Rhys’ narrative structure both distances itself from Brontë’s narrative as well as complements it. It is the objective of this article to study the level of intertextuality Wide Sargasso Sea presents in relation to its 19th century counterpart as well as carry out an analysis on the types of narrators and focalization noticeable in the three separate units of the novel through the theories of homodiegetic narrators presented by Bal and Nieragden.
    [Show full text]
  • Implicitly Political: the Aesthetics of Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark
    eSharp Issue 16: Politics and Aesthetics Implicitly Political: The Aesthetics of Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark Villy Karagouni (University of Glasgow) In Voyage in the Dark,1 the story of the downward spiral of a culturally displaced and socially debased young woman, Jean Rhys draws from real events that occurred in her life in the 1910s (Angier 1985, p.11-12). I begin by hypothesizing that the time gap between Rhys‘s writing of the novel (it was published in 1934) and the actual events that inspired it allowed her to disconnect herself from and depersonalize, to a degree, her own experiences without aestheticizing them and defusing their intensity. This time gap can instead be seen to enrich the ideology critique achieved in the novel: Rhys is looking back to and writing about English metropolitan society in the mid-1910s from the point of view of a literary writer in 1930s England, a time and place associated with urgent callings for politically committed writing, as will be discussed below. I view Rhys‘s resistance to literature‘s turn to politics at the time she was writing Voyage as a pivotal fact that, far from signalling an apolitical or asocial writing, actually promotes an exploration of the unique interpenetrations of aesthetics, ideology reproduction and ideology critique, as an exploration, in all, of an implicitly political aesthetics. The social poignancy of the Rhysian heroine has been emphasized by Judith Kegan Gardiner. With regard to Rhys‘s work in general, she has remarked: 1 Voyage in the Dark will be referred to as Voyage for the rest of this essay.
    [Show full text]
  • 1 1. Introduction As a Work of Postcolonial Fiction, Wide Sargasso
    1 1. Introduction As a work of postcolonial fiction, Wide Sargasso Sea captures the pathos of a society undergoing deep and bitter change. Jean Rhys chooses to relate the essence of this conflict through the relationship of the white Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway, and her English suitor Edward Rochester. Their relationship is set against the backdrop of extreme racial tension in nineteenth century Jamaica: the harrowing animosity that grows between white plantation owners and newly liberated black slaves, and the suspicion and hatred felt for natives of different Caribbean islands. Even more complex is the position of people of mixed race within this ethnic crucible, people such as Antoinette, who is European to the eye, but who identifies with the culture of black Jamaica. She will never be accepted by the people who view her as a “white cockroach,” a remnant of colonial cruelty, and she stands even less chance of acceptance into the sphere of elitist British society. Her birthplace dually condemns her. As a postmodern novel, Wide Sargasso Sea exemplifies the literary ideals of the period. Rhys’ use of varied narrative voices is one of the most striking aspects of the novel, and this in turn promotes a beautifully expository style, capable of disclosing the personal perspectives of both central characters. This feature becomes of paramount importance as we analyse the relationship between Antoinette and Rochester, two characters who come from diametrically opposing cultures, and yet who exhibit many biographical parallels. As Rhys allows us into the minds of Antoinette and Rochester, we see that they struggle with a sense of belonging, both culturally, as well as within their families.
    [Show full text]
  • The Geography of Jean Rhys: the Impact of National Identity Upon the Exiled Female Author
    The Geography of Jean Rhys: The Impact of National Identity upon the Exiled Female Author Alexandra Philp Abstract Critical considerations of Jean Rhys’ texts are often intent on geopolitically ‘placing’ the female author. Feeling exiled from her birth country of Dominica and her resident country of England, Rhys felt as if she ‘had no country really now’. National identity seems to have impact upon both public and private practices of Rhys’ authorship. A lack of national identity implies that Rhys is placeless; a concept which is further problematised when considered under Virginia Woolf’s arguments in A Room of One’s Own (1929). If Rhys does not have country, how can she have a private space from which to write? For an exiled female author, private space is an issue pertinent to studies of her authorship. Through the frameworks of A Room of One’s Own and Hélène Cixous’ concept of ‘country in language’, this article demonstrates that Jean Rhys may use her writing practice as an imagined place in which to search for home. For the exiled female author, the textualisation of place and her identity as ‘author’ is an alternative dwelling space. * * * * * ‘So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why I was ever born at all.’1 Throughout her life Jean Rhys struggled with feelings of exile and isolation. As a ‘White’ Creole and critic of colonialism, she felt detached from her ‘motherland’ of England and excluded from belonging among the ‘Black’ Creole population in her birth country of Dominica.
    [Show full text]
  • JEAN RHYS • 1890: Born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams at Roseau, Dominica, She Was the Daughter of a Welsh Doctor and a Creole (White West Indian) Mother
    Mid-20th century novelist from Dominica, she is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), written as a “prequel” to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which drew equally on her own Caribbean childhood and on a reimagining of Brontë’s masterpiece from the perspective of Rochester’s mad West Indian wife. SECTION SUMMARY 2 JEAN RHYS • 1890: born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams at Roseau, Dominica, she was the daughter of a Welsh doctor and a Creole (white West Indian) mother. • 1916: she moved to England where she spent World War I. • 1920s: she married a Dutch poet and lived a rootless, wandering life on the Continent (mainly in Paris and Vienna) working as a chorus girl, a mannequin an artist’s model. • 1927: the first of her three marriages broke up – she published The Left Bank, a collection of stories. 4 JEAN RHYS Despite the enthusiastic comments of the literary critic Ford Madox Ford (who also discovered D. H. Lawrence) none of her first four novels was particularly successful: they were decades ahead of their time in theme and tone. ❑ They deal with women exploited for and exploiting their sexuality in a brutally honest manner. ❑ They show a “passion for stating the case of the underdog (=perdente)” and a “singular instinct for form” which together create an “original art, at the same time exquisite and deeply disturbing”. 5 JEAN RHYS 1939: after Good Morning, Midnight (her fifth novel) Jean Rhys disappeared and her five books went out of print – it was generally thought that she was dead. 1958: she was rediscovered, living reclusively in Cornwall – in the twenty years which had gone by she had accumulated a collection of unpublished stories.
    [Show full text]