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.