Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches 9781474402200

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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.   2.   3.

Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield Writing the ‘sixth act’ Sue Thomas Making a Scene: Rhys and the Aesthete at Mid-Century Rishona Zimring On the Veranda: Jean Rhys’s Material Modernism Mary Lou Emery

21 40 59

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 RossiWagner, 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 longstanding 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 generously 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. These conversations have spanned continents, conferences and classrooms in Boston, Boulder, Chicago, Davis, Limerick, London, New York and Sydney, and been a constant in spite of all the momentous life events that formed their backdrop. I am lucky indeed to have a friend who shares so deeply in one of my most abiding passions of the mind. I am also grateful to our contributors, who believed in the value of this collection when we first proposed it to them, and to Jackie Jones, our editor at Edinburgh University Press, whose enthusiasm for it came at a crucial moment. Jackie’s sound advice and guidance gave the collection its final shape: it is a better book because of her. I also want to thank Dhara Patel and Kate Robertson at Edinburgh University Press for their invaluable help during the production process; Kate’s ability to translate our tentative ideas into the final cover image strikes me even now as miraculous.

­viii     Acknowledgements At the University of Limerick I am lucky to have the support and encouragement of my colleagues. I want to thank Neil Robinson and Helen Kelly Holmes of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge in Society for the award of a research fellowship in Fall 2013 that gave me the time to sketch out the ideas about Rhys and shame that form the basis of my chapter in this collection. I also want to thank Dean Tom Lodge and Head of School Margaret Harper for supporting my application for a Research Leave in Fall 2014 that made it possible for me to work on getting the manuscript ready for publication. My colleagues David Coughlan and Sinéad McDermott read numerous drafts of my chapter and offered suggestions for improvement: their friendship and scholarly insight are much appreciated. Many students have given feedback on my ideas about Rhys; I single out for special mention Rachel Hynes, whose work on modernism and fashion in Rhys’s work has proven particularly fruitful. A larger community of scholars and friends has also sustained me. I offer my thanks here to Claire Davison, Joanne Feit Diehl, Jane Garrity, Suzette Henke, Mark Hussey, Sydney Janet Kaplan and Gerri Kimber, all of whom share my enthusiasm for modernism’s women writers. Frann Michel has always read my work with exemplary care: I am grateful for her unflinching insistence on precision and clarity. Kathryn Laing has given me friendship, encouragement and editorial advice, not to mention sumptuous lunches. Other friends daily remind me that there is more to life than books. The ‘knitting ladies’ – Geraldine, Bríd and Veronica – have cheered me up and cheered me on. Cindy Crampsey has been a much-appreciated emotional support for more than thirty years. Special thanks go to Sandra King, to whom I speak almost daily, and whose unflagging good spirits provide an antidote to Rhysian gloom and pessimism. She and her husband Bobby are my family here in Ireland: thank you. Finally, I want to thank my son Patrick Higgins, who continues to delight me in more ways than I can say. Patricia Moran

Notes on Contributors

Mary Lou Emery is Professor of English at the University of Iowa. Author of Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Jean Rhys at ‘World’s End’: Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile (University of Texas Press, 1990), she edited a special issue of the Journal of Caribbean Literatures on Rhys and wrote the foreword for Rhys Matters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Recently, she has published on Rhys in Women: A Cultural Review (2012), and her chapters on Caribbean and global modernisms appear in Disciplining Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (Oxford University Press, 2012). Maroula Joannou is a Professor of Literary History and Women’s Writing at Anglia Ruskin University. She is a specialist in early ­twentieth-century, late Victorian and contemporary women’s writing. Her latest book is Women’s Writing, Englishness, National and Cultural Identity: The Mobile Woman and the Migrant Voice 1938–1960 (Palgrave, 2008). Her first monograph, ‘Ladies, Please Don’t Smash These Windows’: Women’s Writing, Feminism and Social Change 1918–1938 (Berg, 1995), was on the Choice (USA) list of outstanding academic books for 1995. Her second was Contemporary Women’s Writing: From the Golden Notebook to the Color Purple (Manchester University Press, 2000). Her latest edited volume is The Palgrave History of British Women’s Writing (vol. 8). Erica L. Johnson is an Associate Professor and Chair of English at Pace University. She is the co-editor with Patricia Moran of The Female Face of Shame (Indiana University Press, 2013), and the author of Caribbean Ghostwriting (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009) and Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of Location in Works by Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell’Oro (Fairleigh Dickinson

­x     Notes on Contributors University Press, 2003). She has published articles on modernist and postcolonial writers in such journals as MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Meridians, Biography, Contemporary Women’s Writing and The Journal of Caribbean Literatures. Carine M. Mardorossian is an Associate Professor of English at SUNYBuffalo. She is the author of Framing the Victim: Rape, Agency, and Structural Masculinity in the Contemporary United States (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming) and Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism (University of Virginia Press, 2005). She has published articles on Caribbean writers in such premier journals as Callaloo, Research in African Literatures and Small Axe. Patricia Moran is a Lecturer in English at the University of Limerick. Her books include Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma (Palgrave MacMillan, 2007) and Word of Mouth: Body/Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf (University of Virginia Press, 1996). She is the editor, with Tamar Heller, of Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Female Body in 19th- and 20th-Century Women’s Writing (SUNY, 2003) and with Erica L. Johnson of The Female Face of Shame (Indiana University Press, 2013). Her essays and reviews on modernist women writers have appeared in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Feminist Studies, Women’s Studies and Woolf Studies Annual. H. Adlai Murdoch is a Professor of Francophone Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Creolizing the Metropole: Migratory Caribbean Identities in Literature and Film (Indiana University Press, 2012) and Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel (University Press of Florida, 2001), as well as three edited volumes. He edited special issues of Research in African Literature and the International Journal of Francophone Studies, and has published widely on Caribbean literature in other journals as well, including Yale French Studies and Callaloo. Elaine Savory is an Associate Professor of Literature at The New School. She is the author of The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Jean Rhys (Cambridge University Press, 1998, reissued in 2007). She has published numerous works on Caribbean writers in such journals as The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, The Journal of Caribbean Literatures, Wasafiri, The Jean Rhys Review and ARIEL.

Notes on Contributors     xi

John J. Su is a Professor and the Director of Common Core Studies at Marquette University. He is the author of Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Imagination and the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2011). He has published on the topics of ethics, aesthetics and postcolonial literature in such journals as MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, Contemporary Literature and Studies in Contemporary Fiction. Sue Thomas is a Professor of English at La Trobe University. She is the author of The Worlding of Jean Rhys (Greenwood, 1999) and Imperialism, Reform and the Making of Englishness in Jane Eyre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). She has published articles on 19th- and 20th-century British and postcolonial literature in such journals as The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, A/B:Auto/Biography Studies, Discourse and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Rishona Zimring is Professor of English at Lewis and Clark College. She is the author of Social Dance and the Modernist Imagination (Ashgate Press, 2013). Her articles on modernism have appeared in MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Woolf Studies Annual, Literature/Film Quarterly, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Katherine Mansfield Studies and Modernism/Modernity.

Introduction: The Haunting of Jean Rhys Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran

In her unfinished autobiography, Jean Rhys (1890–1979) describes the birth of her writing career as a quasi-memorial for herself as a person: buying some black exercise books and the red, blue, green and yellow quill pens to ‘cheer up’ her table and banish its bareness, Rhys represents her writing out of her unhappy first love affair as a compulsive purgation of the experience, but one that left her bereft in the recognition that something in her had died. ‘I filled three exercise books and half another, then I wrote: “Oh God, I’m only twenty and I’ll have to go on living and living and living.” I knew then that it was finished and that there was no more to say.’1 From this genesis of art in inner death, Rhys went on to write five novels and numerous short stories that present a strikingly consistent world view and aesthetic, both of which hearken back to the affective stance she assumes in her earliest writing and then reiterates throughout her work up to and including her posthumously published autobiography. From her despairing diaries written at the age of twenty to her death nearly seventy years later, Rhys examined in meticulously polished prose a set of themes including the workings of the mind and emotion, gender and race relations, colonial history and, as we argue in this introduction, a certain spectrality of existence. Jean Rhys: TwentyFirst-Century Approaches examines this cogency of style and world view from the major approaches that have defined Rhys criticism, and brings them together with emerging theoretical work to set the course for Rhys studies in the twenty-first century. Much has been written about how Rhys’s work defies periodisation and transcends categories, in the same way that her characters wander nomadically and live on the edges of what Sasha in Good Morning, Midnight thinks of as ‘you, who represent Society’.2 She is viewed as a modernist, postcolonial, Caribbean, British and Creole writer – yet to parse these identities is to fall short of the complexity of her work and the ways in which it troubles the very categories through which she is

­2     Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran read. For example, the Caribbean where Rhys spent her youth, on the island of Dominica, bubbles up most prominently in her first manuscript and in her last novel alike; streets in Paris lead to those in London or Roseau; mirrors do not reflect the women who gaze into them but rather ‘throw back a ghost lightly’ – in short, Rhys builds repetitions of key tropes into her work in such a way that to encounter a memory, a street, or a visage is to experience estranged familiarity.3 This quality of her writing has led Mary Lou Emery to identify Rhys’s narratives as uncanny, and to observe, in a crucially defining remark, ‘what really matters [about Rhys] is her strangeness’.4 Rhys’s strangeness has produced a rich splintering of critical responses, most of which appear in a wide array of journal articles and chapters. However, the bookshelf surrounding her work remains relatively empty. Of the books that are on the shelf, the earliest studies were published during the rise of feminist theory and address Rhys primarily as a woman writer (Staley, Nebeker, Harrison, Howells).5 Carole Angier’s Jean Rhys: Life and Work (1990) provides the most comprehensive biographical presentation of Rhys’s life.6 Other studies written in the 1980s and 1990s, including Emery’s Jean Rhys at World’s End (1990), Sue Thomas’s The Worlding of Jean Rhys (1999), Veronica Marie Gregg’s Jean Rhys and the Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole (1995) and Teresa O’Connor’s Jean Rhys: The West Indian Novels (1986) continue to be influential decades after their publication because they work across Rhys’s complex positionality as a colonial Caribbean British subject.7 The more recent Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys (2009) by Elaine Savory occupies a similarly important spot in its holistic assessment of her career.8 Other than Savory’s book, twenty-first-century Rhys criticism has appeared primarily in comparative studies or in special issues of journals, such as the 2003 special issue of The Journal of Caribbean Literatures and the 2012 special issue of Women: A Cultural Review. In terms of filling out the bookshelf, though, Jean Rhys: Twenty-FirstCentury Approaches joins two other volumes of essays, the first of which, Critical Perspectives on Jean Rhys, appeared in 1990 under the editorial vision of Pierette Frickey and includes pieces by creative writers as well as critics.9 The 2013 essay collection Rhys Matters features work by emerging scholars and is edited by Mary Wilson and Kerry L. Johnson, who argue in their introduction that ‘Rhys matters: matters to our understanding of modernism, of Caribbean studies, of postcolonial studies, of feminist studies – and, most importantly, matters to our understanding of the intersections and divergences of these various fields.’10 Indeed, Rhys’s multiple appearances in the groundbreaking

Introduction: The Haunting of Jean Rhys      3

Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (2013) speaks to her centrality to this coming-together of modernist and postcolonial studies.11 Reflecting the increasing overlap between these areas of study and the trend toward global modernisms, Len Platt argues that ‘postcolonial theory [. . .] has become virtually inseparable from modernist studies’.12 Similarly, Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches works across the fields of modernism and postcolonial studies to demonstrate Rhys’s anticipation of global modernisms; to this we add the field of affect studies in recognition of her primal affective portraits. Our contributors have been instrumental in situating Rhys’s work within the two distinct periods during which her work was published. Indeed, the sheer scope of her fifty-year career has prompted critics to approach her work in a compartmentalised manner, and hence most Rhys criticism falls into modernist, postcolonial, or psychoanalytic frameworks although Rhys’s own writing practice supports and challenges such distinctions in equal measure. Rhys wrote continuously throughout her life: she wrote journals, stories, poetry, letters upon letters and even drama during the twenty-seven-year interval between the publication of her first four novels and that of her fifth. Sentences that were published in Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 appear in diaries written in the 1930s. Her practice of crafting a passage over many years, and of shifting material between the registers of autobiography and fiction, makes her corpus a comprehensively and thoroughly intraconnected one. This volume explores Rhys as a modernist and as a postcolonial writer, respectively, in order to illustrate that all of her work is of tremendous value to both fields and in appreciation of her status as a global modernist who brings together different geographies and periods. For example, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is often taught and studied as a postcolonial text, and Voyage in the Dark (1931) as a modernist text, yet the earlier is also relevant to understandings of colonial displacements and the later novel to modernist stylistics. In the first two sections of this volume, ‘Rhys and Modernist Aesthetics’ and ‘Postcolonial Rhys’, we explore the dominant periods of her publishing because it has so defined her critical reception. Moreover, the contributors to this volume have been on the forefront of not only shaping these critical categories but of putting them into dialogue with one another, with Emery and Thomas having established Rhys as a Caribbean modernist, Rishona Zimring and Maroula Joannou having contextualised Rhys’s work in post/modern contexts, and H. Adlai Murdoch, Carine Mardorossian and John J. Su having presented influential postcolonial perspectives. Savory has navigated Rhys’s modernist and postcolonial dimensions in her comprehensive Cambridge Introduction, and the

­4     Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran editors of this volume have written about Rhys in modernist and postcolonial comparative contexts, respectively.13 The strands of modernist and postcolonial interest that run through these works intertwine in this volume, so that essays that further develop more canonical concerns join those with new critical directions such as ecocriticism, posthumanism, archival approaches and affect theory. While the contributors to this volume, along with many others, have aptly demonstrated that Rhys offers important insights into modernist aesthetics and colonial relations alike, she has occupied a persistently marginal canonicity in these fields – a position that we understand as haunting. In this introduction, we therefore explore the extent to which the figure of the ghost and the notion of haunting are central to understanding Rhys’s work and its critical reception. Her wandering, homeless protagonists are often characterised as outsiders, as marginalised, or what Ford Madox Ford named, in the original critical piece on Rhys, the ‘underdog’.14 Whether this figure is seen as an emblem of modernist alienation or as a colonial remainder, readers tend to focus on Rhys’s outcasts as such.15 However, it would be a mistake to say that Rhys offers proverbial ‘down and out’ stories about the various locales of her own life including Dominica, France and England, for underlying her portraits of marginalised women is a consistent view of their ghostliness, as though they haunt rather than inhabit these places in much the same way that Rhys’s work troubles and haunts critical fields. As Wilson and Johnson put it, ‘Rhys’s position in the canon seems similar to the position of many of her protagonists [. . .] [who] are at the heart of the texts they inhabit and marginal in the societies through which they wander.’16 When Rhys belatedly began to come to the attention of academics, her work was perhaps most visible in postcolonial circles where she has figured as a staple of syllabi and as an ongoing source of debate ever since Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak’s seminal reading of Wide Sargasso Sea in ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’ appeared in Critical Inquiry in 1985.17 Spivak’s analysis of the imbrication of nineteenth-century English colonial attitudes within Rhys’s representation of Jamaica during the same century sparked awareness, first and foremost, of what is at stake in Rhys’s writing for postcolonial critics. Moreover, Spivak’s essay was contemporary with a debate in Caribbean literary circles about Rhys’s status as a Caribbean writer.18 Several critics have contributed to these conversations in their readings of Rhys’s Caribbean aesthetics (Emery 1990 and 2007), her ‘creole imagination’ (Gregg 1995), and the figure of the Creole in her novels (Raiskin 1996).19 While such work demonstrates Rhys’s relevance to postcolonial studies and to Caribbean literature, Savory points out that ‘the narrative of Rhys

Introduction: The Haunting of Jean Rhys      5

criticism is the narrative of cultural and racial history’, and she charts rising and lapsing interest in Rhys as a postcolonial writer depending on the politics contemporary with developments in the field.20 Rhys still hovers on the edges of these fields in part because of her ambiguous colonial biography, with her Dominican childhood and European adulthood; we would also argue that her ghostliness in various fields of study reflects the content of her work and the way in which it draws readers in and bothers, disturbs or even frightens them on a personal level that rarely finds voice in any established academic discourse. Thus, while critics have offered insightful readings of the politics and historical contingencies of Rhys’s work, it is significant that the emotional impact of her writing has found echoes in creative, more than critical, work by other Caribbean writers. Derek Walcott’s famous poem, ‘Jean Rhys’ absorbs Rhys’s eerie affect, as does Lorna Goodson’s ‘Lullaby for Jean Rhys’, Olive Senior’s ‘Meditation on Red’ and several of Michelle Cliff’s works.21 Recent theoretical work by Judith Butler, Ranjana Khanna, Kelly Oliver and the contributors to the edited volume Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties brings psychoanalysis to bear on postcolonial studies, a move that offers exciting new directions for Rhys scholarship. As the editors of the latter volume explain, ‘With its focus on processes of identification, repression, and splitting and projection, psychoanalysis presents a rich account of the formations and deformations of subjectivity under conditions of intimacy, authority, and the play of power and violence.’22 Khanna similarly points to the psychical strife of colonial and postcolonial modernity, while Oliver develops the concept of ‘social melancholy’, which she defines as the ‘inability to mourn the loss of a lovable self because there is no affirmation or acceptance of this lovable self within mainstream culture’.23 Following Franz Fanon, Oliver notes that ‘the negative affects of the oppressors’ are ‘deposited into the bones of the oppressed’, engendering a pervasive sense of shame that for women in particular often develops into depression, which in turn wordlessly speaks to ‘the loss of the self as an active agent and positive force in the world’.24 Rhys’s fiction depicts the very process of this loss and the debilitating state of mind that ensues, and while postcolonial readings of Rhys thus far have tended to focus on the historical and materialist dimensions of her work, this new body of psychoanalytic work points the way to a more holistic approach that brings historical and materialist concerns into dialogue with the states of mind they engender. These directions have yet to be applied to Rhys, though, for her standing in postcolonial studies has fallen off in the twenty-first century

­6     Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran just as her status as a modernist has grown, as though she is on a critical pendulum.25 Again, her long career, with its distinctive periods of productivity in the early and later twentieth century, is often viewed in the context of a single period rather than as one that spanned several. While we would argue that she haunts modernist studies for many of the same reasons that she does postcolonial literature – and most importantly because her emotional impact has seemed inassimilable – Rhys’s marginalisation in modernist studies until very recently is just as strange as her peripheral status in contemporary postcolonial studies. Despite the fact that she published a book of short stories and four novels between 1927 and 1939, and despite her masterful experimental form and contributions to the aesthetic and thematic explorations of her contemporaries, it is only in the last ten years or so that Rhys has been mentioned alongside such writers as T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Joseph Conrad – or even her sister colonial Katherine Mansfield.26 Not only does her writing contribute to a shared conversation among others living under the rubric of the British Empire as it peaked and collapsed during the modernist period, but she is a writer of the Americas as well whose work bears out the scars of the New World in much the same way as that of William Faulkner, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay and others. The dozen or so comparative studies of Rhys that appeared in the 1980s through to the early 2000s examine her work almost exclusively among other twentiethcentury women writers, with the exception that she is often linked to Ford Madox Ford, if only in passing and primarily in light of their brief liaison and working relationship in the 1920s. Rhys’s rising prominence in modernist studies is very much an aspect of twenty-first century criticism, and it is due in large part to the recent trend toward what her work exemplifies, global modernisms, as well as interest in cosmopolitanism – a philosophy that her characters are seen both to embody and reject. In light of these critical complications, we contextualise Rhys within the ‘spectral turn’ in literary and critical studies not only because of the way in which she haunts multiple fields, but also because spectrality is a central theme of her fiction and personal writing alike. 27 There are numerous references to Rhys’s sense of herself as ghostly. ‘I belong to a past age really or a future one,’ she told Peggy Kirkaldy in a letter, ‘Not now.’ This conviction that she was adrift in time and space only gained confirmation from the now-legendary account of Rhys’s literal rediscovery as a writer still alive and not dead as presumed.28 ‘My bitter enemy next door is now telling everybody very loud and clear that I’m an imposter “impersonating a dead writer called Jean Rhys”,’ Rhys wrote Kirkaldy. ‘It’s a weird feeling being told you are impersonating

Introduction: The Haunting of Jean Rhys      7

yourself. Rather nightmarish. You think: perhaps I am!’29 In fact, Rhys depicted this rediscovery as a resurrection from death: Selma Vaz Diaz’s interest ‘meant a lot to me [. . .] I began to wake up and make plans and come alive again,’ she wrote.30 In another letter she explained her disappearance from the public thus: ‘I don’t know why everybody thinks I am dead – but I was feeling a bit that way myself at the end! – I did not mean to disappear, but besides hearing once or twice that I was a ghost – there were such rum stories tacked on by people I’ve never met in my life that I felt it was damaging me.’31 As such passages demonstrate, feeling insubstantial and unreal – both to herself and others – was central to Rhys’s experience and to her writing.32 Rhys is correct, moreover, in thinking that others perceived her as a ghost. According to Alexis Lykiard, who begins his reminiscences about Rhys by noting that the title The Haunted Woman sums up ‘something of lively importance about Jean Rhys’, Paul Nash and his wife, members of Ford Madox Ford’s circle who met Rhys in the 1920s, referred to her as ‘The Ghost’: ‘It struck Nash that although Jean’s had been “a very pathetic and eventful history” [. . .] she’d seemed, even then, to have scarcely “any real existence”. Mrs. Nash too considered Jean “ghost-like”.’33 Lykiard himself repeatedly characterises Rhys – ‘that never immaterial, friendly shade’ – as insubstantial and wraith-like, as ghost and revenant, leading one reviewer to call his memoir ‘a haunted meditation’ on Rhys’s life (Iain Sinclair).34 Most pertinent in this context is Lykiard’s claim that he and Rhys shared a love of ghost stories, and Lykiard cites a number of stories and novels in this genre that they discussed. For Lykiard, the peculiar affective power of Rhys’s fiction develops out of this sense of herself as ‘an unwanted guest’ in the world. Rhys herself denied that her fiction was autobiographical, adding the important disclaimer that ‘the feelings are always mine’. While Lykiard often collapses the fiction with Rhys’s life, his focus on the origins of Rhys’s affective power seems accurate and perceptive. For Rhys repeatedly describes her characters as feeling themselves more ghostly than real: Anna Morgan, Julia Martin and Antoinette all describe themselves as ghosts, while Marya Zelli recognises that ‘the shadow can be more important than the substance’ and Sasha Jansen walks the streets of Paris haunted by memories of her past. In the late story ‘I Used to Live Here Once’, the protagonist discovers she is a ghost. Indeed, Rhys’s original impetus to write the story of Bertha Mason evolved out of her sense of Bertha as spectral: ‘She seemed such a poor ghost, I thought I’d like to write her a life,’ she told an interviewer in 1970. Often the spectral affect Rhys assigns her protagonists derives from an irrevocable split, between past and present, as with Julia and Sasha, or between a past in

­8     Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran the Caribbean and a present in England, as with Anna and Antoinette. Rhys often deploys time to convey such fractured sensibilities: in Voyage in the Dark she tried to show ‘that the past exists – side by side with the present, not behind it; that what was – is’.35 Similarly, in Good Morning, Midnight ‘yesterday today and tomorrow are all mixed up’ in Sasha’s mind and the ending conveys the sense that Sasha has ‘enter[ed] the No time region [. . .] “Everything is on the same plane”’.36 Both thematically and stylistically, then, the representation of a haunted and haunting sensibility is at the core of Rhys’s aesthetic. On an existential level, her protagonists experience the inner, deathly stillness to which Rhys alludes in her earliest journal writing; as Sasha says in Good Morning, Midnight, ‘after all, the agitation is only on the surface. Beneath I’m indifferent. Underneath there is always stagnant water, calm, indifferent – the bitter peace that is very near to death, to hate . . .’37 This threshold existence between life and death undergirds Rhysian subjectivity, and the looping, haunting nature of her work, along with the world view she presents, is intrinsic to its power and lucidity. While readers embrace Rhys’s strangeness – and indeed, she inspires an almost cult-like following – that strangeness challenges critical discourse. As Kristin Czarnecki observes, Rhys’s novels ‘have fascinated and disturbed readers for decades [. . .] these troubled and troubling women draw us into their lives even while at times we can hardly bear to read of them’.38 Uniquely affective, her work evokes powerful feelings, gripping moods, emotions that are difficult to sort out, classify, account for. Analyses of emotion, affect and psychology in Rhys’s writing have been, for the most part, contextualised in psychoanalytic theory. Critics have read her work through the frames of schizophrenia (Abel), depression (Czarnecki), melancholy (Maslen) and trauma (Linnet, Moran), as well as through sustained analyses of the mother–daughter relationship (Humm, Ingman, Kloepfer, Simpson).39 As insightful as this body of work is, it develops out of the understandable impulse to identify and analyse the origins of the malaise Rhys’s characters embody. Why are they so unhappy, so ill-adjusted, so depressed, so masochistic? The ‘affective turn’ in literary theory may provide space for Rhys’s strangeness to resonate within critical writing by offering a broader scope for understanding the strange and unsettling emotional, psychological and affective terrain with which she presents us, in the same way that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick envisions affective queer readings that move away from what she terms the ‘transhistorical, almost automatic conceptual privileging [. . .] offered by a Freudian view’ to less Oedipal, drive-­oriented understandings that ‘leave us in a better position to do justice to a wealth of characteristic, culturally central practices [. . .]

Introduction: The Haunting of Jean Rhys      9

that [. . .] [otherwise] become invisible or illegible’.40 Sedgwick’s distinction between paranoid and reparative reading is particularly germane here. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s concept of ‘hermeneutical suspicion’, Sedgwick cautions that ‘“hermeneutics of suspicion” – widespread critical habits indeed, [are] perhaps by now nearly synonymous with criticism itself’; paranoid readings develop out of a set of ubiquitous critical practices, which Sedgwick categorises as ‘[s]ubversive and demystifying parody, suspicious archaeologies of the present, the detection of hidden patterns of violence and their exposure’ – practices typical, in fact, of Rhys’s own writing, both fictional and personal.41 Reading from a reparative position, by contrast, entails the surrender of ‘the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new’.42 Hence whereas paranoid reading practices exhibit an aversion to surprise, reparative readings are open to it, and surprise can be good as well as bad: ‘Hope, often a fracturing, even traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates.’43 Two pioneering affective readings of Rhys – Judith Kegan Gardiner’s analysis of the politics of empathy in Rhys and Tamar Heller’s reading of shame in Good Morning, Midnight in dialogue with Simone Weil’s philosophical writing – exemplify the ways in which reading Rhys reparatively opens up new critical space. Drawing on Weil’s concept of attente, a radical state of empathy that enables one ‘to see from the vantage point of the Other’, Heller reflects, ‘I think what is threatening about the way Rhys situates us in the consciousness of an afflicted mind is the potential threat this poses to our own sense of self.’44 Heller’s focus is reparative in that she situates Rhys’s portrait of affliction as a site of empathy, thereby opening up both terms to one another. Similarly, essays by Jennifer Mitchell, Andrew Kalaidjian, and Paul Ardoin in the recent collection Rhys Matters complicate what the editors term ‘the reductive picture of the suffering Rhys woman’ by analysing the ‘unsettling intersections of pleasure, power, and happiness in Rhys’s work’.45 And, in The Problem with Pleasure, Laura Frost shows how Rhys ‘do[es] not simply substitute pain for pleasure, but rather alter[s] the value of each’.46 These readings, in their openness to Rhys’s reconfiguration of emotional terminology, attend to the way in which she offers, instead, her own vision of affective dynamics. Rhys herself lays the foundation for these new affective and psychological approaches for, although she began writing during the birth of psychoanalysis, a moment that deeply affected Rhys as well as her contemporaries, she registers criticisms of Freud – the ‘psychoanalytic gent’

­10     Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran as she called him – in both her personal and fictional writing. Resistant to the idea that one could pathologise the workings of thought and feeling – and hostile to the ‘psychoanalytic gent’s’ self-confident diagnosis of his women patients as ‘potty cases’ – she complained in a 1964 letter to Francis Wyndham about the dearth of fiction devoted to what she termed the ‘mind’: ‘I’ve never read a long novel about a mad mind or an unusual mind or anybody’s mind at all. Yet it is the only thing that matters and so difficult to get over without being dull.’47 Rhys’s complaint may seem astonishing, given the publication in her lifetime of works by writers ranging from Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Marcel Proust, to Vladimir Nabokov (whose writing Rhys claimed she found difficult to read). In the same letter Rhys went on to praise Anna Kavan’s short stories as well as her novel Who Are You?: ‘Very short but what a splendid title. If only I’d thought of it,’ she remarked. Rhys’s elision of writers now synonymous with stream-of-consciousness, as well as her citing of the little-known Kavan, suggests that the type of mind Rhys wanted to read about is the type of mind she herself worked to represent: the mind of the isolated and socially marginalised woman whose very existence seems unreal and insubstantial, a woman whose mind is, to more socially integrated subjects, at best illegible and invisible, at worst ‘potty’, neurotic and pathological.48 It would not be overstating matters to say that Rhys’s vision of the mind is that of the ghost’s mind, the haunted and haunting sensibility of the person who is out of place and out of time, someone who asks herself the same question posed by others: who are you? Rhys’s explorations of the postcolonial, modernist, deeply disenfranchised and fractured subject do not make for easy reading. From the outset of her career, when her publishers forced her to change the ending of Voyage in the Dark because her editor found it too ‘sordid and depressing’, readers have found her work dark and dispiriting. (Arguably the popularity of Wide Sargasso Sea as a classroom text lies at least partially in its apparently triumphant resistance to colonial and imperial discourses.) Yet she continues to fascinate readers with her uncompromising vision of spectral existences lived on the margins, borderline subjectivities who occupy liminal spaces both culturally and psychologically. It is poignant that even Rhys’s tombstone bears an inscription of the unbelonging she felt in her life and the uncanniness of the art she created; it reads: ‘Here lie buried the ashes of my beloved mother/ Jean Rhys, C.B.E., Novelist (Ella Gwendolen Hamer)/ Born Dominica August 24th 1890/ Died Exeter May 14th 1979. “Good Morning Midnight”.’ In these final words, the threshold between light and darkness, beginning and ending, life and death, remains ajar.

Introduction: The Haunting of Jean Rhys      11

Chapter Overview The first of the volume’s three sections focuses on Jean Rhys’s modernist aesthetics by extending her relevance to this category in different directions and by demonstrating the ways in which Rhys redefines the category itself. Sue Thomas and Rishona Zimring both contextualise Rhys’s early fiction not only within the modernist period, which most critics place between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, but within the specific aesthetic movements at either end of the period. In keeping with our introductory metaphor, Thomas and Zimring demonstrate the ways in which Rhys hovers around modernism, haunts and renders porous its borders. Thomas examines fin-de-siècle aesthetics of literary decadence in Rhys’s early work, beginning with the point that Rhys alludes to a passage from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in the diaries, early manuscript and novel that she eventually published as Voyage in the Dark. Thomas makes an important link to another colonial modernist writer, Katherine Mansfield, who, startlingly, refers to the same passage in a short story that was only recently unearthed in the King’s College Library. The only critic yet to approach Rhys’s evident affinity with artistic decadence, Thomas thus presents an important and much-needed reading of Rhys and offers as well the first published analysis of the Mansfield manuscript. While Thomas demonstrates Rhys’s engagement with early modernism, Zimring explores her participation in aesthetic movements of the mid-twentieth century. Stretching Rhys’s modernist relevance beyond the period’s common boundaries, Zimring historicises Rhys’s 1962 short story, ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’, among literary and musical movements contemporary with its publication. ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ is singularly important among Rhys’s stories in part because it is the only one she wrote in the first person from an Afro-Caribbean point of view. Rhys draws on jazz to express her protagonist’s consciousness, and in so doing she contributes to a larger British aesthetic movement in which writers of fiction, poetry and cultural criticism were all preoccupied with music. Zimring argues that precursors from the modernist period figure as a ‘parent generation’ for mid-century writers, which makes Rhys a particularly interesting example because she refers not to other, earlier writers but to her own earlier work, in essence performing an act of selfarchiving. Zimring thus presents a rich reading of one of the few pieces Rhys wrote later in her career while at the same time illuminating elements of her fiction from the 1920s and 1930s that find their way into ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’. Mary Lou Emery contributes to the ‘modernist’ section with a segue

­12     Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran to the following section on postcolonial theory in her essay on Rhys’s ‘material modernism’. Emery reads the geopolitics of architecture in Rhys’s short stories and novels and identifies the persistently important, liminal space of the veranda in them. She carefully historicises the creolised architectural form of the veranda and explains how it is haunted, so to speak, by five centuries of imperial conquest and conflict, the slave trade, the Middle Passage, the plantation and the plantations’ legacies in the city space of early twentieth-century Europe. She also offers an innovative reading of the impact of the 1804 Haitian Revolution and the early twentieth-century US occupation of Haiti on representations of liminal Caribbean space. Through her reading of the veranda/ piazza/glacis, Emery shows that the veranda functions as a framing device within which the transcontinental reach of this deep history is embedded, and she uses it to situate the experimental prose of Rhys’s Caribbean modernism. Thus, Emery, Zimring and Thomas show how the intertextuality and intraconnectivity of Rhys’s work expands beyond the period of modernism and renders ‘modernism’ more of an aesthetic than a temporal signifier. The second section of the volume is concerned with the postcolonial issues that very much defined Rhys criticism in the twentieth century and suggests new directions for such readings. Elaine Savory picks up on Emery’s interest in the spatial politics of Rhys’s writing in her postcolonial ecocritical reading of Rhys’s short stories. Working across the untamed flora of the Caribbean and the highly controlled urban gardens of Europe, Savory argues that, while Rhys’s protagonists are at home in neither the wilderness nor the garden, such spaces are critical to her representation of wealth, hierarchy and the mutual exploitation of people and land under the rubric of empire. In ‘Caribbean Formations’, Carine Mardorossian attends to another role played by the landscape in Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and in several of the short stories. Her Foucaultian reading reveals the extent to which neither character nor the environment pre-exist their narrativisation in the diegetic logic of the texts but are actually produced through their mutual imbrication in narrative. Focusing on texts set in the Caribbean, Mardorossian examines the ‘landscape-function’ in Rhys’s texts (to echo Foucault’s ‘author function’) in order to highlight the multiplicity of meanings the Caribbean garners in her writing with regard to the category of ‘human’ in the tripartite colonial society against which these texts are set. Maroula Joannou takes a materialist approach to Rhys’s representation of colonialism in her analysis of fashion in Wide Sargasso Sea. Joannou shows how dress situates characters, and the white creole woman in particular, amongst European racial hierarchies. Whereas

Introduction: The Haunting of Jean Rhys      13

Rhys’s modernist novels feature ‘the little black dress’ and a keen sensitivity to fashion as both self-expression and commodity, the palette of Wide Sargasso Sea moves from black to red. Unlike the black dress in Europe, dresses in the later novel signify connections and feelings of belonging in the Caribbean, from the dresses exchanged by Tia and Antoinette as children to the red dress Antoinette dons at the end of the novel. Joannou thus shows how Rhys depicts fashion in her last novel as a potent and complex signifier of imperial power and resistance. H. Adlai Murdoch continues the postcolonial conversation in his analysis of racial ambivalence and indeterminacy in Rhys’s earliest and last novels. In Voyage in the Dark, a version of which Rhys drafted long before her first published novel, Quartet, she contests the coloniallydriven ideology undergirding the social system of the metropole and its associated categories of racial representation, while in Wide Sargasso Sea she highlights the unspoken ambiguities of race, place and social position at work in Jane Eyre and in British society. Murdoch shows how Rhys preserves these ambiguities around the figure of the Creole in both works, and reads the creole characters of Anna and Antoinette in productive dialogue with one another. In the third section of the volume, critics bring the important intellectual trend of affect theory to bear on Rhys. Not only is this approach timely and important in light of the recent ‘affective turn’ in literary and cultural studies, but Rhys’s deeply affective aesthetic underlies the continuing significance of her work. John J. Su builds on postcolonial theory in his analysis of ‘the empire of affect’ in Rhys’s work. Su’s essay offers an important assessment of the overlap of postcolonial and affect theory while illuminating Rhys’s particularly complex and nuanced portrayal of affect and emotion. He introduces the idea that ‘disorientation’ figures as a prominent affect of postcoloniality and shows how Rhys presents both an affective portrait of colonial enmeshment and prompts in her readers an affective understanding of the disorientations of the colonial Caribbean. Patricia Moran presents a reading of what Rhys, in a letter, called ‘la belle colère’. Working with shame theory, Moran shows not only that shame is a primal affect of Rhys’s characters, but that shame gives rise to feelings of humiliated rage. In particular, the characters of Julia and Sasha, from After Leaving Mr Mackenzie and Good Morning, Midnight, respectively, contract and cringe in scene after scene of rejection and humiliation but then express powerful feelings of rage in response to the script of shame in which they are ensnared. Many have read Rhys’s characters as humiliated or powerless victims, but Moran breaks new ground in her analysis of shame as a structuring affect and,

­14     Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran more i­mportantly, of the ways in which shame blossoms into rage – a key dynamic of Rhys’s texts that no one else has identified to date. Erica L. Johnson contributes to this section of the volume by bringing posthumanist theory to bear on Rhys’s representation of human relations as they are enmeshed in non-human agencies. Rhys presents the human condition as a state of brutality that Rhys’s characters do well to endure, and that prompts feelings of numbness and indifference in them. This scenario gives rise to particular affective affiliations on their parts with non-human entities (mirrors, mannequins, dolls, animals, zombies and so forth), with the effect of radically revising the concept of agency. While critics have long fretted over a demonstrable lack of agency in Rhys’s characters, or attempted to assert their agency through critical intervention, a posthumanist reading reveals the extent to which Rhys reconfigures the conventional definition of agency as it has been predicated on the liberal subject. The characters in Rhys’s novels written during the modernist period present a diffuse, rhizomatic form of subjectivity that is powered by affective flows and that doubles as a postcolonial critique of liberal humanism. Posthumanism, ecocriticism, affect theory, postcolonial theory, archival research, materialist analysis, psychoanalytic theory, comparative study: Rhys’s body of work prompts readings from across the critical spectrum and promises to offer keen insights to her readers for this century and those to come.

Notes   1. Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 105. In the exercise books themselves, which are preserved in the manuscript of the unpublished novel ‘Triple Sec’, Rhys also refers repeatedly to an inner numbness, or nothingness, that defines her existence. At one point she even thinks of herself as crucified: ‘What a funny thought—crucified! Perhaps because a thing may be hanging on a cross and yet be alive’ (‘Triple Sec’, Tulsa McFarlin Library, p. 151).   2. Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (New York: Norton, 1986), p. 29.   3. Ibid., p. 170.   4. Mary Lou Emery, ‘Foreword’, in Mary Wilson and Kerry L. Johnson (eds), Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 3.   5. Thomas Staley, Jean Rhys: A Critical Study (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979); Helen Nebeker, Jean Rhys: Woman in Passage (Gilbert, AZ: Acacia Publishing, 2009); Coral Ann Howell, Jean Rhys (New York: St. Martin, 1991); Nancy R. Harrison, Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

Introduction: The Haunting of Jean Rhys      15  6. Carol Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1990).  7. Mary Lou Emery, Jean Rhys at ‘World’s End’: Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); Sue Thomas, The Worlding of Jean Rhys (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1999); Veronica Marie Gregg, Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), Teresa F. O’Connor, Jean Rhys: The West Indian Novels (New York: New York University Press, 1986).  8. Elaine Savory, The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).   9. Pierette Frickey (ed.), Critical Perspectives on Jean Rhys (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1990). 10. Mary Wilson and Kerry L. Johnson, Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives, p. 4. 11. Mark Wollaeger (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 12. Len Platt, Modernism and Race (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 415. 13. Patricia Moran, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and the Aesthetics of Trauma (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Erica L. Johnson, Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of Location in Works by Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell’Oro (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003). 14. Ford Madox Ford, ‘Preface’ to Jean Rhys, The Left Bank and Other Stories (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1927), pp. 7−27. 15. The notion of the ‘colonial remainder’ is one that Ranjanna Khana presents in Dark Continents. Khanna explains, The remainders are nonidentificatory, and are not driven by a conscious desire for nationhood or for community. They do not build a sense of belonging and are not employed in the service of community building through establishing shared histories or memories. On the contrary, they manifest an inability to remember, an interruption, or a haunting encryption that critiques national-colonial representation [. . .] critical agency [is] represented melancholically and spectrally [. . .] [in] a form of nonrepresentational critique, one that cannot be represented but alerts to a different form of disenfranchised, subaltern justice. (Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism [Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003], p. 21)

16. Wilson and Johnson, Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives, p. 4. 17. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,’ Critical Inquiry, 12.1 (1985): 235–61. 18. For discussions of Rhys as a Caribbean writer that anticipate Spivak’s essay see Kenneth Ramchand, Introduction to the Study of West Indian Literature (Kingston: Nelson Caribbean, 1976); Wilson Harris, ‘Carnival of the Psyche: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea’, Kunapipi, 2.2 (1980): 142–50; Helen Tiffin, ‘Mirror and Mask: Colonial Motifs in the Novels of Jean Rhys’, World Literature Written in English, 17.1 (1978): 328–41;

­16     Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran Elizabeth Nunez-Harrell, ‘Paradoxes of Belonging: The White West Indian Woman in Fiction’, Modern Fiction Studies, 31.2 (1985): 281–93. 19. Mary Lou Emery, Jean Rhys at ‘World’s End’; Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Gregg, Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination; Judith Raiskin, Snow on the Canefield: Women’s Writing and Creole Subjectivity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 20. Savory, The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys, p. 198. 21. Derek Walcott, ‘Jean Rhys’, The New Yorker (28 April 1980); the poems by Senior and Goodison, and Cliff’s prose meditation, are all reprinted in the Rhys issue of the Journal of Caribbean Literatures 3.3 (2003). Cliff also alludes to Wide Sargasso Sea in her novel Abeng and in her short story, ‘Contagious Melancholia’; she mentions Rhys’s work directly in her short story ‘Art History’. Both short stories appear in The Store of A Million Items (New York: Mariner Books, 1998). 22. Warwick Anderson, Deborah Jensen, Richard C. Keller, Unconscious Dominions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 22. 23. Ibid., p. 123. 24. Ibid., pp. xix, 120–1. 25. For example, Rhys Matters excludes discussion of Rhys’s most canonically postcolonial work, Wide Sargasso Sea, altogether, and the essays in the volume rarely touch upon postcolonial analysis. Melanie Otto’s analysis of the zombi does, however, engage such critique. 26. Patricia Moran and Carey James Mickalites both compare Rhys with such writers in the 2007 books Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma and in Modernism and Market Fantasy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), respectively; other such comparative studies have appeared even more recently in Christopher GoGwilt’s The Passage of Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), Laura Frost’s The Problem with Pleasure (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), Juliette Taylor-Batty’s Multilingualism in Modernism (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013) and Anna Snaith’s Modernist Voyages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 27. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock coined the term ‘the spectral turn’, and the editors of the recent The Spectralities Reader bear out his theory in their anthologisation of recent work on ghosts, hauntings and spectres that has followed upon Derrida’s influential Specters of Marx and Archive Fever; see The Spectralities Reader, Maria Del Pilar Blanco and Esther Pereen (eds) (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). See also Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters for a compelling study of the role that ghosts and hauntings play in twentieth-century literature and culture; Ghostly Matters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 28. Selma Vaz Dias sought Rhys out when she was adapting Good Morning, Midnight as a radio play; she had to resort to ‘missing person’ posts in local newspapers before locating Rhys. 29. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly (eds), The Letters of Jean Rhys (New York: Viking, 1982), p. 64. 30. Ibid., p. 76. 31. Ibid., p. 135.

Introduction: The Haunting of Jean Rhys      17 32. Savory, too, notes that ‘Ghosts were important in Rhys’s self-construction as well as in her texts, and so are frequently mentioned’, The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys, p. 250n. 33. Alexis Lykiard, Jean Rhys Revisited (Exeter: Stride Publications, 2000), pp. 11, 79. 34. Ibid., p. 13. 35. Wyndham and Melly, The Letters of Jean Rhys, p. 24. 36. Ibid., pp. 60, 138. 37. Good Morning, Midnight, p. 153. 38. Kristin Czarnecki, ‘“Altered and Cut to an Echo”: Marriage and Modernism in Jean Rhys’s After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie’, CEA Critic, 67.2 (2005): 29–42. 39. Elizabeth Abel, ‘Women and Schizophrenia: The Fiction of Jean Rhys’, Contemporary Literature, 20 (1979): 155–77; Cathleen Maslen, Ferocious Things: Jean Rhys and the Politics of Women’s Melancholia (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009); Maren Tova Linett, ‘“New Words, New Everything”: Fragmentation and Trauma in Jean Rhys’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 51.4 (2005): 437–66; Moran, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma; Maggie Humm, ‘Jean Rhys: Race, Gender and History’, in Gina Wisker (ed.), It’s My Party: Reading Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing (London and Boulder: Pluto Press, 1994), pp. 44–79; Heather Ingman, Women’s Fiction Between the Wars: Mothers, Daughters, and Writing (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998); Deborah Kelly Kloepfer, The Unspeakable Mother: Forbidden Discourse in Jean Rhys and H.D. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Anne B. Simpson, Territories of the Psyche: The Fiction of Jean Rhys (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 40. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 147. 41. Ibid., pp. 124, 143. 42. Ibid., p. 146. 43. Ibid., p. 146. 44. Tamar Heller, ‘Affliction in Jean Rhys and Simone Weil’, in Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran (eds), The Female Face of Shame (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), pp. 170, 171. 45. Wilson and Johnson, Rhys Matters, pp. 14, 15. 46. Frost, The Problem with Pleasure, p. 161. 47. Wyndham and Melly, The Letters of Jean Rhys, pp. 254–5. 48. Victoria Walker compares Rhys and Kavan in ‘Ornithology and Ontology: The Existential Bird in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Anna Kavan’s Who Are You?’, Women: A Cultural Review 23.4 (2012): 490–509.

Chapter 1

Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield Writing the ‘sixth act’ Sue Thomas

Jean Rhys (1890−1979) and Katherine Mansfield (1888−1923) were born within two years of each other in countries that were then British colonies, Dominica and New Zealand respectively. Rhys’s relative longevity and the fact that her first publication, the story ‘Vienne’ appeared in 1924, a year after Mansfield’s death, have obscured their contemporaneousness. Both Rhys, born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, and Mansfield, born Kathleen Beauchamp, finished their formal educations in England and were among those white colonial women excited by ‘new possibilities for physical and social mobility, including new professional and career opportunities’ in England in the first decade of the twentieth century.1 Their defiance of double standards of sexual respectability would complicate their family and personal relationships. Rhys wrote in exercise books she filled in the 1910s about her relationship with Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith between 1910 and 1912 and its impact on her life. Material in the exercise books would be reworked as ‘Triple Sec’, an unpublished 1924 novel, and later revised as Voyage in the Dark (1934). ‘A Little Episode’, dated as 1909 and published for the first time in The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (2012), mediates aspects of Mansfield’s relationships with Garnet Trowell and George Bowden, to which the discovery of ‘A Little Episode’ has drawn renewed attention. The epigraph to ‘A Little Episode’ is taken from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, ‘the so­­-called “bible” of English decadence’:2 ‘The one charm of the past is that it is past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen.’ Sir Henry Wotton is instructing Dorian Gray on the propensity of former female lovers ‘to go in at once for reminiscences. That awful memory of woman! [. . .] One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar’ (131). 3 Dorian reiterates to Basil Hallward the next day, ‘What is past is past’ (138). Rhys, I realised after reading ‘A Little Episode’, alludes to the same passage in The

­22     Sue Thomas Picture of Dorian Gray in the opening sentence of Voyage in the Dark. ‘It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known’ (7), thinks Anna Morgan, the first­-person narrator, a Dominican expatriate in England.4 Rhys explains to Evelyn Scott in 1934 that her original title for the novel, ‘Two Tunes’, has ‘[s]omething to do with time being an illusion I think. I mean that the past exists − side by side with the present, not behind it; that what was − is.’5 In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has valorised the ‘positionality of beside’ as an ‘agnosticism’ about the ‘linear logics that enforce dualistic thinking’ underpinning ‘[b]eneath and behind’.6 In engaging with the implications of Lord Henry’s lesson and The Picture of Dorian Gray more generally, both Mansfield and Rhys weigh the psychic ‘relations between memory, time, desire, and subjectivity’.7 Lord Henry’s conversation takes place after he has told Dorian the news of the death of Sibyl Vane, apparently by suicide. Dorian had proposed marriage to the seventeen­-year­-old actress, but spurned her after watching her give a poor performance in the role of Juliet in ‘an absurd little theatre’ (73) in a ‘labyrinth of grimy streets and black, grassless squares’ (86) in east London. Having come to know real ‘love’ and ‘passion’ in her relationship with Dorian, her ‘Prince Charming’, Sibyl could no longer ‘mimic’ it on stage (130). Dorian is initially anxious about his lack of affect at the news of his fiancée’s death, and Lord Henry expatiates on the theme of former female lovers ‘insist[ing] on living on’ and going over the whole thing again, and digging up the past, and raking up the future. ­. . . The one charm of the past is that it is past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over they propose to continue it. If they were allowed to have their way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art. (131)

He opines that ‘there is really no end to the consolations that women find in modern life’ (132) after love affairs end. In context reminiscence is implicitly positioned as one of the potential consolations. The romance between Sibyl and Dorian had been about to conform to a Cinderella pattern Rhys refers to in her fiction and autobiography: stage girl marries wealthy man, in Voyage in the Dark ‘Chorus Girl Marries Peer’s Son’ and thus ‘get[s] on’ in life (64). For Lord Henry the proper place of the past is beneath the present. His choice of language links the past with death, decay and depth and marks it as abject. When Dorian rejects Sibyl his portrait begins to mirror his ‘touch of cruelty’, the

Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield Writing the ‘sixth act’     23

‘burden of his passions and his sins’ (119). Dorian’s echo of Lord Henry, ‘What is past is past’, becomes both a passion and a sin, a wilful spurning of conscience that becomes integral to the performance of the dandy. ‘A Little Episode’ was one of a number of typescripts acquired by Miron Grindea, the editor of ADAM International Review, from Mansfield’s school friend and later companion Ida Baker, also known as L.M., in probably ‘late 1964 or early 1965’. Chris Mourant, who discovered the typescripts in 2012 in the archive of the journal held at King’s College, London, speculates that they may have been ‘produced as part of the work Baker did for John Middleton Murry in the years after Mansfield’s death, typing up her work for posthumous publication’. One of the other typescripts ‘Bites of the Apple’ (1911) is a ‘collection of fifty aphorisms’ on the subject of ‘carnal knowledge’ modelled on Wilde’s writing in the genre.8 ‘A Little Episode’ has to date been read as a mediation of Mansfield’s relationships with musician Garnet Trowell, by whom she became pregnant in December 1908, and George Bowden, a singer teacher whom she married in early March 1909 ‘seeking legitimacy for her unborn child’. Mansfield left Bowden on their marriage night, the marriage remaining unconsummated. At the time she became pregnant Mansfield was boarding in the Trowell household in London. Garnet’s father Thomas had been her cello teacher in New Zealand. Maorant suggests that the Trowells ‘represented an alternative to the commercial values and middle­-class priorities of the Beauchamp family’.9 In his autobiographical reading of the story he equates Yvonne Mandeville’s sexual repugnance at her husband with Mansfield’s refusal of marital sex with Bowden, and her desire for Jacques Saint Pierre with Mansfield’s subsequent failed attempt to rekindle her relationship with Garnet Trowell. In the ‘Notes’ on the published text of the story Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan endorse an autobiographical reading, writing that ‘[t]he narrative conveys KM’s bitterness and disillusion following the musician Garnet Trowell’s abandoning her when pregnant, and her brief relationship with George Bowden, her husband of convenience’.10 The young Mansfield’s fascination with Wilde is well known. He was, notes Sydney Janet Kaplan, ‘Mansfield’s principal stylistic influence in 1906−8, the years of her most active lesbian experiences’.11 Mark Williams offers a usefully succinct account of Mansfield’s adolescent fixation on Wilde: Wilde, as a Decadent, offered a potent and captivating antithesis to bourgeois colonial life and the restraints it imposed upon the young Mansfield. His elaborately dandified stance as a man of exquisite taste cultivating a ­theatrical

­24     Sue Thomas personality and pursuing art for its own sake offered a radical alternative to the world of upper­-middle­-class Wellington and her father, the ‘Pa man.’ He stood opposed to Victorian values and offered a call to Mansfield to explore her own complex and ambiguous nature. .­  . . Wilde spoke to her own ambivalences and desires in a period of considerable sexual confusion and excitation. Sexuality was to provide a means of distancing herself from her background and constructing an alternative persona − or, perhaps, presenting herself behind a variety of personae.12

As Williams also notes, ‘Wilde, who favoured opium­-tinged cigarettes as a sign of taste, made cigarette smoking a sign of aestheticism’.13 In Mansfield’s love letters to Garnet Trowell the prospect of their smoking Abdullah cigarettes together has an aphrodisiac quality. Letters from the Beauchamp family in New Zealand, by contrast, ‘strangely depress’ her and she experiences ‘that frightful sensation of grief that used to overcome me in Wellington. You alone could take it from me. It is like suddenly finding myself face to face with this ghost that terrifies me’.14 Part of what terrifies her is her memory of same­-sex desire, Wilde’s ‘exact decadence’, ‘exactly the same fits of madness as those which caused his ruin and mental decay’, a confession made in a letter to probably Ida Baker which Mansfield left behind ‘at George Bowden’s flat’ ‘wrapped’ in ‘paper’ marked ‘Never to be read, on your honour as a friend, while I am still alive’.15 On route to Bavaria to give birth to a child after her final break with Garnet, she writes to him in a draft letter, My body is so self conscious − Je pense of all the frightful things possible­– ­‘all this filthiness’ − Sick at heart till I am physically sick − with no home − no place in which I can hang up my hat − & say here I belong − for there is no such place in the wide world for me.16

In the Pension Müller she writes in a second surviving draft letter, remembering sites of their sexual relationship, both real and fantasised about in love letters: this coldness − physical, mental − heart coldness − hand coldness − soul coldness. Beloved − I am not so sad tonight − it is only that I feel desperately the need of speech − the conviction that you are present ­. . . that is all. Sunday morning. Yet another Sunday. What has this day not brought us both. For me it is a sweetness and anguish. Glasgow − Liverpool − Carlton Hill − Our Home.17

‘A Little Episode’ shows Mansfield reaching a creative impasse. The language of Wilde’s dichotomy between the Philistine and the aesthetic is inadequate to the representation of the protagonist Yvonne Mandeville’s experience. The backstory of Yvonne is first archly sketched by Mrs Amelia

Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield Writing the ‘sixth act’     25

Mason, a society woman described by the third­-person narrative voice as ‘a stout, moustached woman in an aggressively décolleté dress’, and by Yvonne as one of the ‘fat, stolid Philistines’, and then later partly evoked by Yvonne’s ‘exquisite bitter sweet memories’ of growing up. In Mrs. Mason’s narrative Yvonne is the daughter of Oswald Parratt, ‘a complete failure’ in England, who moved to Paris to become an artist, and ‘some little obscure weed’ he wed in Paris, who died in childbirth. After Oswald died the seventeen­-year­-old Yvonne was taken in by her uncle and aunt, ‘nice, quiet, thoughtful Church of England people in Bellevue Avenue’ (538).18 The signs of her bohemian decadence at the time were that she had been brought up in ‘helter skelter’ manner, ‘didn’t even know the Catechism − had no clothes and smoked cigarettes’ (541). The word ‘weed’ denies humanity to a class and ethnic other. Seemingly reformed by her aunt and uncle, ‘changed .­ . . absolutely’ (540), Yvonne marries Lord Geoffrey Mandeville, ‘good and earnest and very thorough’(539), and Mrs Wood, an acquaintance of Mrs Mason, anticipates a reproductively fruitful union. The narrator characterises the married Yvonne as a ‘fascinating Society butterfly’; to Mrs Mason she looks ‘the very embodiment of elegant languor’, having ‘a strangely listless expression’, her hair fashionably styled, and wearing ‘a long black velvet kimono coat’ (541). To Mrs Wood, to whom Mrs Mason speaks about Yvonne, she is ‘a distinguished looking woman .­ . . such grace, Amelia − she looks like a Du Maurier picture, doesn’t she?’ (549). It is perhaps a mark of her Philistinism that the remark does not take cognisance of the satirical dimension of Du Maurier’s oeuvre. For Mrs Wood and Mrs Mason, as for Lord Henry, ‘appearances, where one displays taste and class, tell more about a person than any imagined interiority’.19 Yvonne has come to a concert at which pianist Jacques Saint Pierre, who frequented her family’s ‘rooms’ in Paris, is to perform. As Jacques starts playing she remembers a scene of closeness to her father, warm and protective: ‘Jacques at the piano − Emil, half lying across the table − Jean by the fire − sketching them all .­ . . She, sitting huddled up by her Father − his arm round her, cheek to cheek, heart to heart’. The scene is the more ‘exquisite’ by contrast to her marriage in which she feels ‘caged’ by a ‘great heavy brute’, ‘hideous and dreadful’, the prospect of sex with whom fills her with ‘[a] feeling of intolerable disgust’ (541). Meeting with Jacques during and after the concert, smoking a ‘cigarette’ he has given her, blurting out to him aspects of the story of her failed marriage make her feel ‘alive and loving, and tremendously excited’, relishing ‘adorable irresponsibility’ (542). Mansfield makes explicit that Yvonne’s desire is for what Jacques represents: aestheticism, her ‘happy life − her Paris days’, an affective

­26     Sue Thomas return to a time before the trauma of her father’s death and being reprogrammed to think of him as ‘the Arch Fiend’ and Paris as ‘Hell’. After the concert she and Jacques have rough sex in a ‘little gardener’s cottage’ she has converted into a personal space for herself in the grounds of her marital home in Manchester, and furnished with what Jacques recognises as ‘all her Paris treasures − her Father’s pictures − little odd familiar pieces of drapery − a charcoal sketch of himself at the piano’. Cathy Caruth has observed that ‘[t]o be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or an event’.20 Yvonne’s mementos of Paris possess her as images of traumatic loss. While she, ‘alive again’, anticipates that the tryst marks the beginning of ‘something beautiful and stupendous’ (541; a sixth act in Lord Henry’s terms), back at his hotel Jacques writes to a ‘chérie’, othering Yvonne as ‘no longer one of us’ (542), implicitly tainted by the wealth of her husband and his being ‘a “howling bore”’ (543), and commenting that ‘she has the inevitable feminine passion for trying to relight fires that have long since been ashes’ (544). The comment recalls the epigraph from The Picture of Dorian Gray. The allusion positions the marriage as the Philistine farce following the tragedy of the rescue of Yvonne by the Parratts, whose family name suggests mimicry of conventional social standards, lack of originality. The language of interiority and depth in ‘A Little Episode’ is recollection, feeling, and ‘scruples’ (543). Feeling encompasses ‘primitive impulses − primitive needs’ (540). It becomes visible on Yvonne’s body as ‘[A] sudden wave of colour’ that ‘flooded her face’ at the concert, a look of being ‘dishevelled’, ‘flushed’ (543) after sex with Jacques. Recollection of the bohemian life produces the ‘sudden wave of colour’, suggesting a revivification from ‘elegant languor’ (539), a pose of aestheticism. She is, to use Lord Henry’s terms, remembering the details of the ‘colour of life’. The word ‘Recollections’ suggests a recongregation of affect­-laden fragments, recomposure. The cottage is a place of consolation, lit by candlelight, which suggests its consecration to sustaining memories, in ‘a desolate place’ on the property that symbolises her marriage, ‘down an overgrown path − and into a little tree fringed space’ (542). ‘[C]onventions’ and conscience are represented as ‘scruples ­. . . thrown to the four winds’ (543). ‘Episode’ is a musical term for a ‘portion of a movement lying between two statements of the same material, with which it is contrasted in key and­/or style’, ‘A fresh subject’.21 The epigraph to ‘A Little Episode’ and Jacques’s comment are statements of the same sentiment, posturings of fictional dandies that offensively patronise and belittle women, cagings in of Yvonne’s experience of adultery. The intervening narrative contrasts in both key and style. The adjective ‘little’ suggests

Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield Writing the ‘sixth act’     27

the insignificance of the sex to Jacques, highlighting the affective gap between its meanings for Yvonne and for him and the psychological ramifications of the betrayal of her expectations that will ensue beyond the temporal ending of the story. In narrative terms there is also a gap between the language of ‘exquisite bitter sweet memories’ to convey the affective reach of Yvonne’s ties to her past and the complexities and nuances of these suggested by the story. Exquisite is a favourite Wildean descriptor of fine taste; ‘bitter sweet’ is a hackneyed oxymoron, rather than a pointed allusion to the ‘new Hedonism’ ‘prophesied’ by Lord Henry which would not ‘involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be’ (162). In narrating the ‘episode’ Mansfield juxtaposes points of view: Mrs Mason’s, Mrs Wood’s, Yvonne’s, Jacques’s and the third­-person narrative voice. By doing so she subjects the linear logics of Mrs Mason’s and Jacques’s views of Yvonne (before and after) to mordant irony. For Yvonne the past is not past. Psychologically it needs to exist in the present, in a beside conveyed symbolically in the furnished cottage and her presentation of herself beside Jacques ‘passive[ly]’ ‘[l]ike a child’ (543, 542). This beside structures Yvonne’s desiring subjectivity. In the posthumously published Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (1979) Rhys writes of her experience of depression after the breakdown of her relationship with Smith, a ‘sadness’ that ‘became a part of’ her and that she ‘would have missed ­. . . if it had gone’ (120).22 Living in a flat in Fulham, reached on a bus route to World’s End, she bought exercise books, and headed one ‘This is my Diary. But it wasn’t a diary. I remembered everything that had happened to me in the last year and a half. I remembered what he’d said, what I’d felt. ­. . . I filled three exercise books and half another, then I wrote: “Oh, God, I’m only twenty and I’ll have to go on living and living and living”’ (129–30). Her ‘fingers’ and ‘palms’ ‘tingled’ as she wrote, the word ‘tingled’ suggesting a ‘stinging or smarting sensation’, ‘thrill’, ‘excite[ment]’, and, by transference from the ‘cheeks’, ‘under the influence of shame, indignation, or the like’.23 In the early 1920s these exercise books would be reworked with the assistance of journalist H. Pearl Adam as ‘Triple Sec’, the text that would serve as Rhys’s introduction to Ford Madox Ford, then the editor of the transatlantic review. Rhys chose Gray as her stage surname while working as a chorus girl between 1909 and 1911;24 Suzy Gray is the protagonist and first­-person narrator of ‘Triple Sec’. Dorian Gray sees his degeneration reflected in the portrait painted by Basil Hallward. Suzy’s experiences in the part of her life in the 1910s that is reworked in Voyage in the Dark culminate in a mirror­-image of ill­-health she

­28     Sue Thomas r­ ecognises as a ‘melancholy skeleton’: ‘All the bones of my neck show − my cheeks are hollow − there are circles under my eyes and lines from my nose to my mouth − my hair is darker’.25 Suzy contemplates the image about half way through the novel. She seldom remembers her childhood in the Caribbean. It is to assuage the homesickness that she experiences when she is pregnant and ill that she wills herself to remember growing up there, and corporeal memories, including the scent of ‘stephanotis’, ‘the flower for the dead’, well up in her mind.26 The memories encompass half a page of a 230­-page typescript. Rhys returned to the exercise books (now lost) rather than ‘Triple Sec’ to develop Voyage in the Dark. She would only revise one other seven­-page section of ‘Triple Sec’ for publication, in a process that took decades, with ‘Till September Petronella’ first appearing in 1960.27 After the break­-up of her sexual relationship with Walter Jeffries, Anna thinks, ‘I’m nineteen and I’ve got to go on living and living and living’ (94). ‘Like many modernist writers, Rhys had used her life, in all its painful rawness, as the material from which she formed her fiction’, writes Helen Carr. ‘The process of transmutation was always for her a long and arduous struggle, because, she said, “a novel has to have a shape and life doesn’t have any” ­. . . the autobiographical content of her writing was more often read as scarcely mediated confession rather than a problematic starting­-point’.28 In the first chapter of Part One of Voyage in the Dark Laurie, a sister chorus girl, chaffs Anna, calling her ‘Virgin’ (15) and joking that Walter Jeffries, who had picked Anna up in Southsea, would have to ‘borrow the club tin­-opener’ (17) in dating her. By novel’s end Anna has been supporting herself by amateur prostitution, taken to drinking, become pregnant by one of her casual partners and had an abortion. As I have noted in The Worlding of Jean Rhys, ‘[b]etween the amateur and her partner the sexual contract is implicitly negotiated, based on mutual understandings that sex may be available freely or in exchange for gifts (of money, clothes, jewelry, and the like), nights out, motor rides and the like’. The amateur was the subject of moral panics in the 1910s and the 1920s, in both of which she was represented as ‘threatening a racial degeneration’.29 In tracing Anna’s path Rhys redeploys and engages with aspects of the discourses circulating around the amateur and familiar narrative arcs of seduction plots. The novel is also haunted by earlier and other contemporary English and European moral panics around decadence and degeneration: around Emile Zola’s naturalism, 1890s decadence epitomised by Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, and ragtime. This allusive and aesthetic literary memory inscribed in the novel is, as with modernist interest in memory in the work of Virginia Woolf and

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T. S. Eliot, ‘always already invested and intertwined with writing sexuality, the body, and desire’.30 The scope of Rhys’s references to English and French decadence in Voyage in the Dark has gone largely unnoted. Rhys was certainly familiar with Wilde’s oeuvre. When she was studying at the Academy of Dramatic Art in 1909 students would have to act a ‘well­-known scene’ for one of their teachers. Rhys remembers that they ‘usually played a scene from Lady Windermere’s Fan or Paula and Francesca by Stephen Philips’.31 In a study of intertextuality in Good Morning, Midnight (1939) Judith Kegan Gardiner observes that the protagonist and first­-person narrator Sasha Jansen ‘seems to associate the ­. . . Decadents with a tradition of woman­-hating’.32 A young Russian man whom the pregnant Sasha instructs in English has had her read with him ‘a collected edition of Oscar Wilde’s works’, as he, ignoring Wilde’s Irishness, ironically admires him as ‘the greatest of English writers’ (110). A story he tells her about the torture of a Russian female ‘revolutionary’, ‘eaten’ alive ‘by rats’ in ‘prison’, is clearly ‘misogynist[ic]’ (115).33 The most overt allusions to artistic decadence in Voyage in the Dark are in Part Three, Chapter Six, in which Anna recalls visiting the flat of d’Adhémar with her friend Laurie, after d’Adhémar, whom Laurie thinks is ‘slightly potty, but an awfully sweet old thing’, had promised to show Laurie ‘a marvellous book of dirty pictures’ (145). ‘[S]cent’­-wearing d’Adhemar recites French decadent poet Jean Richepin’s ‘Les Philistins’, a poem which vaunts cross­-generational rebellion against paternal bourgeois values, with children becoming not ‘Clean shaven, stoutly built­/Lawyers’ but ‘most hairy­/Poets’.34 Laurie, who at this point in the narrative is supporting herself on the gifts of casual sexual partners rather than as a chorus girl, is ‘[v]ery disappointed’ by the Aubrey Beardsley drawings, commenting, ‘I don’t call that hot stuff. Is that book really worth a lot of money? All I can say is, some people don’t know what to do with their money’ (145). The Beardsley book, the recitation and the scent mark d’Adhemar’s self­-fashioning and posturing as inspired by English and French decadent art and literature. Andrew Thacker urges that in Rhys’s fiction ‘what lies beyond the boundaries of the self is the material nexus of rooms, streets and cafés in the city, rather than her relations with other people’.35 Structurally Rhys positions Laurie in Parts Two, Three and Four as a monitory image for Anna and her life as a metonym of the material underpinnings of the circulation of amateur prostitutes around London. Laurie’s dismissal of the value of Beardsley’s work draws attention to the fact that ‘for all their obsession with being “new” and their supposedly “immoral” approach to art and culture, the Victorian Decadents were in fact a “deeply

­30     Sue Thomas ­conservative avant­-garde” ­. . . Although often outrageously iconoclastic and ostentatiously eccentric, they were also surprisingly bourgeois in their own personal tastes and habits’.36 For d’Adhémar Laurie is a metonym of his sexual frustration that he self­-absorbedly projects on to the ‘dead streets’ around his ‘flat’. ‘[F]rustration’, he tells Laurie and Anna, ‘can become something homely, desirable and warm’; Laurie responds, ‘Go on, Daddy ­. . . don’t drivel’ (145). Daddy is a diminutive of d’Adhémar which draws out their age difference, but also a term for a lover in the African­-American musical cultures from which ragtime, a music associated with Anna spending time with Laurie, Carl Redman and Joe Adler, emerged.37 The opening of Voyage in the Dark seems to offer an implicit counterpoint to the opening of The Picture of the Dorian Gray. Wilde’s novel opens in a ‘studio .­ . . filled with the rich odour of roses’, flowers Rhys always associates with Englishness. Lord Henry is smoking a ‘heavy opium­-tainted’ cigarette, taking in ‘the heavy scent of the lilac’, ‘the more delicate perfume of the pink­-flowering thorn’, and the spectacle and sounds of the ‘garden’ outside. ‘The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ’ (23). He is immersed in the corporeal sensations of a present moment in which the ‘heightened sensitivity to motion, colour, sound and scent’ produced by the drug ‘segues into exotic images of the Orient’. Lord Henry’s ‘point of view’ here ‘embodies’ his credo of ‘living for and in the moment’.38 Anna’s corporeal memories of Dominica in the first paragraph of Voyage in the Dark are constitutive of being ‘different’ in England, unable to ‘fit’ ‘back there’ or ‘out there’ and England ‘together’. The lack of fit makes her feel ‘as if a curtain had fallen’ and challenges her epistemological certainties. Her memories warm and nurture her in the relative existential and physical ‘cold’ of expatriation (31). Rhys alludes to the scene in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in which the company doctor tells Marlow as he is about to depart for the Congo that ‘out there’ ‘the changes take place inside, you know’, ‘In the tropics one must before everything keep calm’.39 For Anna’s sister chorus girls the tropics are a site of ‘shame’, of the ‘Hottentot’ (12). The garden of the boarding house in which she and Maudie are staying is ‘walled­-in’. What Anna can see from the sofa on which she is reading Zola’s Nana is less picturesque than Lord Henry’s view of the garden from Basil Hallward’s studio. Her vista is redolent of her lower class position: a ‘tree by the back wall .­ . . lopped so that it looked like a man with stumps instead of arms and legs. The washing hung limp, without moving, in the grey­-yellow light’ (9). The tree is an image of amputation rather than growth. The image of the walled­-in garden resonates with leitmotifs of England

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as a place of enclosure and as distinguished by a culture of repetition and homogenising sameness. Anna’s subjective sense of her diasporic place and time shapes her retrospective impressions of arrival: a small tidy look it had everywhere fenced off from everywhere else ­. . . I had read about England ever since I could read − smaller meaner everything is never mind − this is London − hundreds thousands of white people white people rushing along and the dark houses all alike frowning down one after the other all alike all stuck together − the streets like smooth shut­-in ravines and the dark houses frowning down. (15­-16)

Alikeness becomes a metonym of English xenophobia and ‘grey’ blandness, and suggests that, contra Wilde, England is not a site for women of Anna’s class of ‘sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance’ (163), sensations that sustain Dorian’s embrace of hedonism. Anna’s persistent sense of the greyness of England is shown in starkest form in her memory that on tour as a chorus girl, You were perpetually moving to another place which was perpetually the same. There was always a little grey street leading to the stage­-door of the theatre and another little grey street where your lodgings were, and rows of little houses with chimneys like the funnels of dummy steamers and smoke the same colour as the sky; and a grey stone promenade running hard, naked and straight by the side of the grey­-brown or grey­-green sea. (8)

The passage illustrates the point Erica L. Johnson makes about Rhys’s oeuvre ‘that affect structures modernist temporality such that memory ­. . . shifts into an affective mode whereby the present is “saturated by the past”’.40 Walls feature in Rhys’s representation of Anna’s depression. Anna remembers feeling in Newcastle that the walls of her boarding­-house room were closing in on her, and while living in Ethel’s flat after her break­-up with Walter, ‘when you try to think it’s as if you’re face to face with a high, dark wall’ (26). Walls figure in Anna’s sense of the English sneering at women of her class and in her desperate situation: ‘their damned voices, like high, smooth, unclimbable walls all round you, closing in on you’ (120). While Walter’s cousin Vincent talks to her about an abortion she observes that ‘the look in his eyes was like a high, smooth, unclimbable wall. No communication possible’ (126). When she tries to broach the question of her ambivalence about the pregnancy and fear that the child could ‘have something the matter with it’, he patronisingly dismisses her fears: ‘My dear girl, nonsense, nonsense’ (147). Anna’s memories of the Caribbean become her transcendental anchor in modernity.

­32     Sue Thomas Dorian Gray famously becomes ‘absorbed’ in, ‘fascinated’ by a ‘poisonous’ ‘yellow book’ given to him by Lord Henry, a book often identified as modelled largely on Joris­-Karl Huysmans’s A rebours (1884), and Rhys invokes the ‘tradition of the “fatal book”’, a French novel, in the opening section of Voyage in the Dark. 41 Charles Bernheimer argues of Zola’s Rougon­-Macquart series, of which Nana is part, that ‘if its method is naturalist, its subject is decadence, the corruption and degeneration of France under Louis Napoleon’. He also points to the ‘naturalist subtext’ of A rebours.42 Touring chorus girl Maudie, with whom Anna is sharing the room in a boarding house, calls Nana ‘a dirty book ­. . . it’s about a tart’, and comments, ‘I bet you a man writing a book about a tart tells a lot of lies one way and another. Besides, all books are like that − just somebody stuffing you up’ (9). This is a variant of a scene in which Nana reads a novel that had made a ‘great sensation’, ‘the history of a courtesan; and she was disgusted. She said that it was all false, showing, besides, an indignant repugnance for such filthy literature, which had the pretension of being true to nature, as though one could describe everything’.43 Anna, pointedly on Rhys’s part, is not a close or attentive reader of Nana, as Dorian is of the ‘yellow book’. She finds ‘[t]he print ­. . . very small, and the endless procession of words’ gives her ‘a curious feeling − sad, excited and frightened. It wasn’t what I was reading, it was the look of the dark, blurred words going on endlessly that gave me that feeling’ (9). Wilde, of course, famously could not in the published text of The Picture of Dorian Gray ‘describe everything’ of Dorian’s reputed behaviour under the influence of the ‘yellow book’, notably his homosexual experiences. In the first version of Part Four of Voyage in the Dark, an ending Rhys revised at the insistence of her publisher, some of Anna’s memories of sex hint at her having been raped: I like it now I used not to but I like it now I said weights on your arms weights on your legs only your heart beating and not being able to breathe [. . .] Stop stop stop I thought you’d say that he said.44

The British Library holds a far more graphic version of the abortion scene than that in the published text, a version in which Anna imagines the foetus during the abortion. She withdraws consent to the procedure, but Mrs Robinson, the abortionist, does not heed the imperative.45 Rhys’s interest in the idea of two tunes playing side by side in Voyage in the Dark is also apparent in historical references to the phenomenally popular arrival of ragtime in England c. 1912. Ragtime and dancing to it were sensationalised by some as American decadence, in large part

Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield Writing the ‘sixth act’     33

because of its emergence from African­-American musical culture. The Times reported that Arnold Bennett had written that Mr Louis Hirsch (a well­ -known composer of such music) has recently declared that ‘the essence of “rag­-time” is the mixture of two rhythms.’ ­. . . ‘Rag­-time,’ then, may be said to be a strongly syncopated melody superimposed on a strictly regular accompaniment, and it is the combination of these two rhythms that gives ‘rag­-time’ its character.46

In Voyage in the Dark Rhys refers explicitly to a well­-known white ragtime composer and performer Melville Gideon, who played at Oddenino’s Restaurant. Laurie and Anna meet Americans Carl Redman and Joe Adler there for dinner. The historical Gideon had approached the owner of Oddenino’s about revitalising the business by performing ragtime; the incentive payment was ‘25 cents for every new customer who came in to eat, over the average number then calling daily’.47 Such was his success that he reportedly made £7,000 ‘as a pianist in his first year in England’. He was also conducting an affair after his evening performances at Oddenino’s with a former chorus girl, Lilian Enid Borrows, who had in 1908 married David Wellesley Bell, an heir to an estate worth £100,000. The divorce proceedings in 1913 were reported around the world.48 In ‘Songs My Mother Didn’t Teach Me’, which includes material that would be reworked in the vignette ‘Leaving England’ in Smile Please, Rhys writes of the way in which her sense of historical time was shaped by the music of particular catchy tunes she habitually recalled in her conscious mind. Today the recurring tunes would be termed earworms. In Musicophilia Oliver Sacks writes of the ‘seemingly indelible quality of musical memory’ such as earworms.49 ‘Waiting for the Robert E. Lee’, a ragtime version of which was part of the historical Gideon’s repertoire, later haunts Anna.50 She remembers ‘the tune of Camptown Racecourse’ (103) in this way as well while she and Carl dine at Kettner’s and in the preliminaries to sex with Carl afterwards (132). Oscar Wilde had been one of the restaurant’s most noted diners; it was in the early 1890s an establishment in which he conducted ‘casual affairs’ with men Richard Ellmann describes as ‘Rough Trade’.51 Kettner’s figured prominently in Edward VII and his mistress Lillie Langtry’s relationship. Bennett, invoking racial and ethnic stereotype, observes: There are sincere and sensitive musicians who hold that ‘rag­-time’ is decadent and deplore its popularity as an evil sign of the times. They see in it all the worst characteristics of the modern American (many of them perhaps, caught from the despised negro race). ‘Rag­-time’ in fact leaves, they feel, an unpleasant taste in the mouths of healthy­-minded people. ­. . . ‘Rag­-time’ music has

­34     Sue Thomas been popular in the United States for about 25 years, and started probably as a debased imitation of the genuine negro song ­. . . if it has lost something in the course of its transformations it has gained also. It now represents not the lazy, sensuous, pleasure­-loving ‘nigger’ element, but the modern American at his most characteristic, full of energy − purposeless energy, perhaps, and without result − but never­-tiring and always alert.52

John Shepherd and David Horn observe that ‘controversies about ragtime and its purported affront to morality as a kind of pathological social disease threatening white American culture appeared in the popular press, both musical and otherwise, well into the 1920s’.53 Bennett’s use of the word ‘caught’ suggests that in England, too, the music’s detractors saw its spread as contagious across colour lines. As in the United States ragtime was in vogue in Britain at a crucial moment in the ferment of modernism. 54 Ford Madox Ford and Osbert Sitwell, for instance, remembered ragtime and the dancing of the tango to ragtime at the Cave of the Golden Calf in the Cabaret Club in 1912−13. This was an important meeting place of modernist artists and writers, including Mansfield.55 Anna is a white Creole, Creole meaning born in the West Indies, but in English racial typologies she is often blackened in the novel. Her nickname among the chorus girls is ‘Hottentot’. A landlady complains of her ‘drawly’ West Indian accent and ‘lip’ and denounces her as sexually promiscuous. Anna’s xenophobic English stepmother Hester, rails against Anna’s West Indian accent, attributing it to her attachment to the black servant Francine, and against her Uncle Ramsay’s illegitimate non­-white children, and in referring to the ‘unfortunate propensities’ of her mother’s family casts her mother as having been ‘coloured’. She attributes Anna ‘turn[ing] out badly’ (25) in England to her own failure to ‘teach’ her ‘to talk like a lady and behave like a lady and not like a nigger’ (46). In her delirium in the original version of Part Four Anna’s sexual fall in England is refracted through metaphors of dancing and horseriding, as she crosses racialised boundaries of sexual propriety. In acquiescing in Walter Jefferies’ assumption of her sexual availability she takes on in fantasy the name of an enslaved woman Maillotte Boyd she had seen in an old slave list on her mother’s family’s estate. Wilde racialises Dorian’s opium addiction; by the end of Voyage in the Dark Anna is an alcoholic, and Rhys shows how her drinking is racialised. Dorian uses opium to achieve ‘a new Hedonism’ (162), ‘experience itself, and not the fruits of experience’ (163), ‘sensations that would be at once new and delightful’, ‘oblivion .­  . . where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new’ (220). The addiction, observes Curtis Marez, takes Dorian into

Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield Writing the ‘sixth act’     35 opium dens on the quays of East London. The craving for opium impels a movement from the fastness of Dorian’s home to the edge of the city − and by extension, the island nation − where England opens out onto scenes of threatening racial otherness. .­ . . Opium critics represented addiction to the drug as a form of racial contagion akin to miscegenation; English reformers deemed the drug especially pernicious because it suggested the possibility of a quasi­-racial transformation or degeneration.56

In the opium dens Dorian mixes with Chinese and Malay people. Critics have noted the stereotyped and hackneyed quality of Wilde’s descriptions of Dorian’s ventures into London’s underworlds. Edouard Roditi, for instance, writes, ‘From the brilliantly lit society with which the author seems so well acquainted, we step straight into a dim slum­-land of which he seems ignorant, scared or ashamed, whose denizens are all stock characters from almost “gothic” melodrama’.57 In Chapter Five of Part One of Voyage in the Dark Anna and Walter have a conversation about ‘drink[ing]’ being in Anna’s ‘blood’, and he calls her a ‘rum little devil’. Anna has told Walter that she is of ‘the fifth generation born out there, on my mother’s side’ (44­-5). Triple sec and rum are ingredients of the cocktail called Little Devil. The name triple sec (used for the first reworking of Rhys’s diaries about her life in the 1910s, an ingredient of Voyage in the Dark) references Caribbean origin. The first recorded instance of the name triple sec for an ‘orange­-flavoured liqueur’ is in the Daily Gleaner (Kingston, Jamaica) of 19 November 1892.58 The history of rum, a spirit distilled from sugar­-cane, is deeply imbricated with the sugar plantation cultures of the Caribbean.59 As an adjective rum means ‘Odd, strange. Also: bad, spurious, suspect’.60 Walter represents what is in Anna’s blood as ‘too lush’, ‘hot places’ when he ‘prefer[s] cold places’, yet in inviting her to his bedroom says, ‘You sound a bit tight ­. . . you rum child, you rum little devil’ (46). She may be ‘a bit tight’, but offering women alcohol, usually spirits, is a routine ingredient in the scenarios of seduction and sexual pick up dramatised in the novel, used to loosen moral inhibitions around extramarital sex. The dust jacket of the copy of Nana that Anna reads has ‘a coloured picture of a stout, dark woman brandishing a wine­-glass. She was sitting on the knee of a bald­-headed man in evening dress’ (48). The wine glass here is a sign of her consumption of sex; ‘dark’ is a reference to brunette features. Walter has plied Anna with wine on their first date at the Hoffner Hotel and Restaurant, Hanover Square; the private dining room has an adjoining bedroom concealed by a curtain. Carl asks her whether she ‘take[s] ether’, as she ‘look[s] a bit as if’ she ‘took something’ (20). ‘Cold − cold as truth, cold as life. No, nothing can be as cold as life’ (131), Anna thinks about her condition as Carl tries to warm her hands. ‘Effects of drinking’ ether ‘are

­36     Sue Thomas similar to those produced by alcohol but appear faster and last briefly’, notes Richard Lawrence Miller.61 Jane Nardin points out that the standard ‘modernist drunk narrative’ is ‘the story of a sensitive, artistic male who heroically and freely chooses alcohol for its power both to affirm his cosmic despair and to render it bearable’. She argues that Rhys ‘avoids representing alcoholism as a disease of the will. The novel does, however, represent it as a disease of modernity’.62 For Rhys and Mansfield the past is not past. The presents of both Anna Morgan and Yvonne Mandeville are haunted by affective memory and the past as consolation, corporeal plenitude, difference, origin, sexual identity formation, trauma and shaming. There is no evidence that Mansfield thought ‘A Little Episode’ to be polished enough to offer for publication in her lifetime. The subtlety and density of the allusive layering of Voyage in the Dark demonstrate that Rhys was not only concerned to counter the linear logics of moral panics around decadence − health and degeneration, before and after − but also to engage her readers in complex contrapuntal work of literary and cultural memory in making meaning of the novel.

Notes   1. Angela Woollacott, ‘The Colonial Flaneuse’, Signs 25:3 (2000), p. 762.   2. Sally Ledger, ‘The New Woman and the Crisis of Victorianism’, in Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (eds), Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 28.  3. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Peter Ackroyd (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).   4. Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (1934; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000).   5. Jean Rhys, letter to Evelyn Scott, 18 February 1934, in Jean Rhys, Letters 1931−66, ed. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly (1984; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 24.   6. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 8.  7. Gabrielle McIntire, Modernism, Memory and Desire: T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 5.   8. Chris Mourant, ‘“A Little Episode”: The Forgotten Typescripts of Katherine Mansfield, 1908−11’, Katherine Mansfield Studies, 5 (2013), pp. 164, 155, 159.   9. Ibid., pp. 155, 154. 10. Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan (ed.), The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1898−1915 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), p. 544. 11. Sydney Janet Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 21.

Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield Writing the ‘sixth act’     37 12. Mark Williams, ‘The Development of Katherine Mansfield’s Prose Style’, in Jacqueline Bardolph (ed.), Telling Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction in English (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), p. 358. 13. Ibid., p. 370. 14. Katherine Mansfield, letters to Garnett Trowell, 2 October 1908, 3 October 1908, 5 October 1908, in Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott (ed.), The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield. Volume One: 1903−1917 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 63−5. 15. Mansfield, letter to Ida Baker, before April 1909, The Collected Letters, pp. 89−90. 16. Mansfield, draft letter to Garnet Trowell, 28−30 April 1909, The Collected Letters, p. 91. 17. Ibid., p. 92. 18. Katherine Mansfield, ‘A Little Episode’, in Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan (eds), The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1898−1915 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 19. Jonathan Goldman, Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), p. 25. 20. Cathy Caruth, Introduction, in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 4−5. 21. William Lovelock, A Student’s Dictionary of Music (London: Bell & Hyman, 1964), p. 31; ‘episode’, definition 4, Oxford English Dictionary, online edn (Oxford University Press, 2014), hereafter abbreviated in notes as OED. 22. Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (1979; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), pp. 120, 129−30. 23. ‘tingle’, OED. 24. Carole Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, rev. edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 57. Rhys performed variously as Vivian, Emma, Ella and Olga Gray. 25. Quoted in Sue Thomas, ‘“[T]earing me in two so slowly so slowly”: Jean Rhys’s Representations of Abortion’, Jean Rhys Review, 12:1 (2002), p. 17. 26. Quoted in Thomas ‘“Tearing me”’, p. 13. 27. On this process see Sue Thomas, ‘Thinking through “[t]he grey disease of sex hatred’: Jean Rhys’s “Till September Petronella”’, Journal of Caribbean Literatures, 3:3 (2003), pp. 77­-90. 28. Helen Carr, Jean Rhys, 2nd edn (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2012), p. 3. 29. Sue Thomas, The Worlding of Jean Rhys (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), pp. 67−8. 30. McIntire, Modernism, Memory and Desire, p. 2. 31. Jean Rhys, Smile Please, p. 103. 32. Judith Kegan Gardiner, ‘Good Morning, Midnight; Good Night, Modernism’, Boundary 2, 11 (1982−3), p. 246. 33. Gardiner, ‘Good Morning, Midnight’, 246. 34. ‘Philistines’, http:­/­/wulfshead.blogspot.com.au­/2013­/04­/philistines.html, accessed 19 August 2014. 35. Andrew Thacker, Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 205.

­38     Sue Thomas 36. Chris Snodgrass, Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 5. 37. ‘daddy’, definition 3, OED. 38. Phyllis Weliver, ‘Oscar Wilde, Music, and the “Opium­-tainted Cigarette”: Disinterested Dandies and Critical Play’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 13:3 (2010), p. 325. 39. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong, Norton Critical Edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), pp. 11−12. 40. Erica L. Johnson, ‘Haunted: Affective Memory in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight’, Affirmations: Of the Modern, 1:2 (2014), p. 16. 41. Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 65. 42. Charles Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture in Fin de Siècle Europe, ed. T. Jefferson Kline and Naomi Schor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), pp. 59, 72. 43. Emile Zola, Nana, introduced by Burton Rascoe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925), pp. 287−8. 44. Jean Rhys, ‘Voyage in the Dark. Part IV (Original Version)’, ed. Coral Ann Howells, in Bonnie Kime Scott (ed.), The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 384, 387. 45. Thomas, ‘“Tearing me’”, pp. 20−1. 46. ‘Music. Rag­-time’, Times (London), 8 February 1913, p. 11. 47. ‘Overdoing Ragtime in England May Be Its Death, Says Butt’, Variety, 10 January 1913, p. 1. 48. ‘Gaiety Girl’s Confession’, New Zealand Herald, 4 July 1914, p. 2; ‘An Actress’s Divorce’, Times (London), 20 May 1914, p. 4. 49. Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Kindle Edition, location 3856. 50. Ross Laird, Tantalizing Tingles: A Discography of Early Ragtime, Jazz, and Novelty Syncopated Piano Recordings, 1889−1934 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995), p. 71. 51. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), p. 366. 52. ‘Music. Rag­-time’, Times (London), 8 February 1913, p. 11. 53. John Shepherd and David Horn, Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. Volume 8: Genres: North America (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 378. 54. Jed Rasula, ‘Jazz and American Modernism’, in Walter Kalaidjian (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 160. 55. Peter Brooker, Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 84. 56. Curtis Marez, ‘The Other Addict: Reflections on Colonialism and Oscar Wilde’s Opium Smoke Screen’, English Literary History, 64:1 (1997), pp. 257, 275. 57. Edouard Roditi, ‘From “Fiction as Allegory”’, in Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Donald L. Lawler, Norton Critical Edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), pp. 369−70. 58. ‘triple sec’, OED.

Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield Writing the ‘sixth act’     39 59. Hugh Barty­-King and Anton Messel, Rum: Yesterday and Today (London: Heinemann, 1983). 60. ‘rum’, adj.2, OED. 61. Richard Lawrence Miller, The Encyclopedia of Addictive Drugs (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), p. 153. 62. Jane Nardin, ‘“As Soon As I Sober Up I Start Again”: Alcohol and the Will in Jean Rhys’s Pre­-War Novels’, Papers on Language and Literature, 42:1 (2006), pp. 46, 57.

Chapter 2

Making a Scene: Rhys and the Aesthete at Mid-Century Rishona Zimring Jazz is the new art of the unconscious. Philip Larkin, ‘The Art of Jazz’ (1940)1 It’s a smoky kind of voice [. . .]

Jean Rhys, ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ (1962)2

It’s not a hopeless dream that one day soon there might exist a small troupe of readers as aesthetically literate as the people who listen to music at concerts and on the radio. Brigid Brophy, Prancing Novelist (1973)3

Rhys’s ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ (originally published in 1962) implies that in spite of its distortion, appropriation and commodification by the forces of mass entertainment and leisure, jazz music retains the power to create intensely meaningful private acoustic spaces.4 Private acoustic space also describes a defining characteristic of modernist subjectivism, or, in spatial terms, interiority. Rhys shares with other post-World War II English writers a preoccupation with music scenes as inspirations for modernist interiority. Put rather starkly, music’s power to inspire introspection and withdrawal, rather than connection and/or movement, encouraged some writers, including Rhys, to experiment with a character – the listener – who was also a modernist and aesthete. Rhys joins Philip Larkin and Brigid Brophy in this essay so as to encourage an exploration of their shared, if varied, fascination with the effects of midtwentieth-century music scenes on a listener’s selfhood and sociability. This essay proposes that Philip Larkin, Jean Rhys and Brigid Brophy wrote representations of modern listeners that contribute to new understandings of modernist aesthetics and cultural politics in the second half of the twentieth century. To place Rhys in the company of Larkin and Brophy is to nudge her postwar reputation away from the Caribbean orientation of Wide Sargasso Sea into a new frame of reference that positions her on the map of postwar (that is, post-World War II) English

Rhys and the Aesthete     41

culture, a ‘shrinking island’, to be sure, but also a remarkably musical one.5 Rhys’s twenty-first-century importance includes her postwar short fiction’s explorations of the music scene. Along with Larkin and Brophy, Rhys used modernism’s aestheticism and experiments with interiority (such as depth psychology, inner monologue, stream of consciousness, free indirect discourse and fascination with symbolism and the unconscious) to investigate the modern listener’s complex subjective experience of music. Private acoustic space within the music scene suggests a somewhat controversial (especially in Larkin’s case) identity: the music connoisseur. I use ‘connoisseur’ to connote a listener’s enthusiasm and enjoyment, along with informal, para-institutional, but cultivated expertise. Imagine the listener’s affinities with the reader of modernist texts: one might say that both cultivate an ear and a taste for experiences of privacy, depth and multifaceted layering beneath poses of deflective detachment. According to Alan Sinfield’s influential chapter ‘Making a Scene’ in Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain, music connoisseurship emerged as a cultural practice that transformed jazz from a popular form to an elite one in the second half of the twentieth century.6 Jazz music and its cultural hybridity had galvanised audiences during the interwar period in venues including hotels, night clubs and dance halls, signalling a transformation of British culture through foreign musical influences and foreign musicians themselves. Crowds including interracial couples danced and clubs erupted with fistfights while Mass Observation ethnographers (for example) observed with a mixture of anxiety (expressed in the careful tallying of racial difference) and wonder (expressed in euphoric descriptions of couples swaying to melodious trumpets). The influx of new, foreign music and musicians (including those from the United States, the Caribbean and Africa) looked back to turn-of-the-century popular foreign dance-musical influences (such as tango) and ahead, to the transformations of postwar English culture through the literature and popular music of a new wave of immigrants, beginning with the Windrush Generation.7 The potent, protean and complex implications of musical expression, appropriation and individual reception received careful attention by a range of literary figures in the 1950s and 1960s, among whom were not only Larkin and other male writers labelled ‘Movement’ and ‘Angry’, but female writers – and listeners – as well. This essay pairs two of Rhys’s stories about jazz music’s listeners in England: the well-known, anthologised and critically celebrated ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’, and the relatively neglected title story of the collection in which it was published, ‘Tigers Are Better Looking’.8 I mean

­42     Rishona Zimring to expand and indeed remake the scene of music connoisseurship and English modernism by considering these stories’ cultural politics, aesthetics and place in literary history. I situate Rhys in a surprising constellation of postwar English writers, between the iconic poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin and the now obscure experimental novelist, cultural critic, Freudian and political activist, Brigid Brophy. These three writers never share space in cultural or literary histories of postwar England, modernism, or postmodernism. To bring these writers together is to argue that alternative groupings prove productive in the ongoing project of defining and redefining Rhys’s modernism and her work’s legacies for the twenty-first century (as well as in projects reconfiguring modernism more generally).9 Rhys and her fellow connoisseurs appear here in a new light. Larkin figures prominently as a famed figure of postwar England and its vexed attitudes towards modernism and popular culture, who is often considered the exemplary anti-modernist; however, his modernist sensibilities, especially in poems set in music scenes, resonate with Rhys’s. The stories in Tigers Are Better Looking remind us of Rhys’s English and especially London co-ordinates; the London stories in particular elaborate various music scenes. Brophy’s literary reputation derives from her most aggressively experimental fiction, In Transit, but the apparently more realist The King of a Rainy Country deserves consideration as a fable of modernist inheritance with an alternative music scene (opera in Venice) and another version of private acoustic space (the shared, exclusive space of female intimacy). All three writers give the listener and his or her private acoustic space special emphasis, using musical reception to explore a postwar relevance for modernist interiority in ways that other constellations and cultural histories have ignored, obscured, or repudiated. Brophy praises the ‘aesthetic literacy’ encouraged by concerts and radio; Rhys’s narrator discerns a voice’s smokiness. Aesthetic literacy and eloquent discernment are made prominent in all three writers’ fascination with an idea of the modern listener’s private, but not necessarily rarified or elite, experience. Music connoisseurship mingles expertise and cultural authority with the celebration of accessible popular enjoyments, promising (without necessarily delivering) a potent source of agency and selfpossession to many (not only a few) listeners. This is one of the great tensions within consumer culture which Rhys’s fiction, in particular, so ingeniously maps: commodification of accessible leisure and art forms can mean democratised individual self-expression but also escape – and escapism – into perilous fantasy (a private acoustic space that is problematically anti-social). Rhys’s postwar short fiction should be cel-

Rhys and the Aesthete     43

ebrated for exploring this territory with stunning experimental artistry and imaginative insight. Still given considerably less attention than her novels, Rhys’s stories deserve greater prominence in twenty-first-century cultural histories of postwar authorship and twenty-first-century canons of literary form.

Larkin: Jazz Enthusiasm and Anti(?)-Modernism Alan Sinfield’s groundbreaking Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain remains an influential cultural history of the 1950s1980s, and its account of postwar musical subcultures and the shaping of literary taste bears consideration here.10 Sinfield clarifies how the rise of a rock-’n’-roll youth subculture was accompanied by anxiety about degenerate behaviour, Americanisation and working-class, male insurgency. The hostility of postwar literary intellectuals to rock-’n’-roll led to a new form of oppositional connoisseurship: jazz enthusiasm. Male friendships, such as that of Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis at Oxford, were founded on this shared enthusiasm, and the literary celebration of the jazz enthusiast then appears in Movement fiction and in the ‘typical Amis protagonist [. . .] a jazz fan’.11 Jazz enthusiasm transcended boundaries of class and education, exciting listeners from the lower classes for whom it represented intellectualism and independence, while at the same time attracting elites in rebellion against upper-class norms. Although jazz enthusiasm involved the rejection of class and educational hierarchies, jazz had the aura of art and exclusivity: ‘[j]azz fans were continually defining jazz, identifying purer forms of it, providing it with a canon, a tradition and elite interpreters’ (160). The elite jazz enthusiast was also anti-modernist. Significantly, in Sinfield’s cultural history of a postwar intelligentsia, for Movement and Angry writers, jazz was not prized for any association with modernism or modernism’s interwar context. Indeed, anti-modernism is for Sinfield a defining characteristic of postwar English writing, invigorated variously by a newfound preoccupation with Englishness, anti-effeminacy, the rejection of perceived pretentiousness, and associations of modernism with upper-class remoteness. Thus, modernism’s British relevance ends, to be ‘reinvigorated and recentred’ in the United States (185).12 On one side of the Atlantic, modernist experimental writing becomes attenuated, marginal and irrelevant, while on the other it gets a new life; in English writing, realism takes prominence, while experimental writing is redefined as metafiction and postmodern. On this account, jazz enthusiasm rejects literary modernism’s cachet as difficult and potentially subversive.

­44     Rishona Zimring The quintessential jazz enthusiast was also the quintessential antimodernist who embodied a form of postwar populism. Philip Larkin explicitly and infamously declared his anti-modernism through his allegiance to popular interwar jazz music and his rejection of everything highbrow and esoteric in his ubiquitously quoted introduction to All What Jazz: I dislike such things not because they are new, but because they are irresponsible exploitations of technique in contradiction of life as we know it. This is my essential criticism of modernism, whether perpetuated by Parker or Pound or Picasso: it helps neither to enjoy nor endure.13

Larkin’s particularly nostalgic jazz enthusiasm and his anti-modernism – the cultural politics of his poetry, his jazz criticism as reviewer for the Daily Telegraph starting in 1961, his letters and his life – have been the subject of tremendous debate.14 Despite Larkin’s well-known jazz writings, the omnipresence of Larkin’s alliterative Parker, Pound, Picasso triad has led one twenty-first-century assessment of Larkin to decry ‘the scandalous neglect of Larkin’s love of jazz’.15 Conventional wisdom regards Larkin’s populist jazz enthusiasm as a weapon against high modernism. For Sinfield, Larkin (along with Kingsley Amis) epitomised an Oxford-educated disdain for mass culture and innovation that expressed itself in nostalgia for popular jazz safely contained in the past and in private listening experiences through recordings rather than live performances and the collective pleasures of social dancing. Larkin’s anti-modernism meant both his disdain for popular, collective practices and his rejection of difficulty, aggressive innovation, and the cultural oppositionality and subversion so often ascribed to them. Myriad critics, however, have entered the debate and undertaken a rehabilitation of Larkin as a literary modernist whose jazz enthusiasm is entirely in keeping with his attraction to and promotion of modernist aesthetic values. The new modernist Larkin is an adherent of French symbolism, in ongoing dialogue with Yeats and Flaubert, a Baudelairean explorer of transgressive lesbianism. He is Lawrentian, Joycean, Woolfian, Imagist, a Wildean aesthete in pursuit of beauty and, perhaps above all, literary soul mate of the first ‘jazz poet’, T. S. Eliot.16 Larkin extends modernism’s audiences into postwar England: we can reject his modernism, like Rhys’s and Brophy’s, as merely attenuated and irrelevant, but to do so is to ignore the enchantment of private acoustic space and modernist interiority for audiences seeking experiences of introspection, withdrawal and detachment in a postwar context. Two of Larkin’s poems about music scenes foreground the protective consolations of private acoustic space and of the listener’s introspective

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detachment from the crowd: ‘Reasons for Attendance’ and ‘The Dance’.17 ‘Reasons for Attendance’ is well-known, and I will simply recall here its classic positioning of the speaker outside the music scene on one side of ‘lighted glass’ (l. 2) observing it in detached solitude but listening all the while to ‘The trumpet’s voice, loud and authoritative’ (l. 1). To listen to the trumpet is to hear its voice while deliberately refusing to participate in the ‘to and fro’ of young dancers who ‘maul’ each other (l. 17). The crux of ‘Reasons for Attendance’ arrives in the fourth and fifth stanzas: What calls me is that lifted, rough-tongued bell (Art, if you like) whose individual sound Insists I too am individual. It speaks, I hear; others may hear as well, But not for me, nor I for them; (ll. 12–16)

Here, the poem declares a clear allegiance to the modernist interiority of private acoustic space, even as it delivers an ironic sideswipe at aestheticism in parentheses. ‘(Art, if you like)’ is precisely the modernist message of the poem: the speaker prefers art to life (in debate with the famous anti-modernist Larkin who prefers life to art), and celebrates the individual’s separation from the couple or the crowd. A listener’s withdrawal is further elaborated and becomes significantly more complex in the unfinished poem ‘The Dance’. We encounter the poet clearly tracing the footsteps of Eliot, in an opening stanza that evokes the derelict city of The Waste Land but most of all reads as an updated Prufrockian love song: ‘Drink, sex and jazz – all sweet things, brother: far Too sweet to be diluted to “a dance”, That muddled middle-class pretence at each No one who really . . .’ But contemptuous speech Fades at my equally-contemptuous glance, That in the darkening mirror sees The shame of evening trousers, evening tie. White candles stir within the chestnut trees. The sun is low. The pavements are half-dry. Cigarettes, matches, keys – All this, simply to be where you are. (ll. 1–11)

The poem’s music scene – a dance – becomes a drama of the speaker’s nervousness in public, approaching the ‘you’ of line 11 with Prufrockian hesitation and timidity. Jazz music’s function as dance music occasions the speaker’s need for ‘protection’: ‘everything / I look to for p ­ rotection – the mock jazz [. . .] grows less real’ (ll. 47–51). In his timidity, the speaker thinks of where else he could be: ‘in bed, / Or listening to

­46     Rishona Zimring records’ (ll. 36–7). ‘The Dance’ seems most assured when the speaker articulates his detachment: I lean forward, lest I go on seeing you, and souse my throat’s Imminent block with gin. How right I should have been able to keep away, and let You have your innocent-guilty-innocent night Of switching partners in your own sad set: How useless to invite The sickened breathlessness of being young (ll. 93–9)

Here we encounter the familiar preoccupation with aging in both Eliot and Larkin, the idea of a male protagonist who cultivates his melancholic withdrawal from women and from social relations. Eloquence depends on distance, the listener’s retreat from music’s crowd into private, ginsoaked solitariness. It is fascinating to see the poem trail off just as it imagines the speaker participating in rather than refusing the dance, in lines that recall Prufrock’s mermaids. As ‘we take the floor’, the speaker’s words become more euphoric, a mode the unfinished poem cannot sustain. By dancing to the music, the speaker seems to lose his way in the sounds, and his eloquence falters as the poem simply breaks off: How the flash palaces fill up like caves With tidal hush of dresses, and the sharp And secretive excitement running through Their open ritual, that can alter to Anguish so easily against the carp Of an explicit music; then (ll. 124–38)

Then what? The poem’s incompletion speaks to an incapacity to provide words for the ‘anguish’ felt in the presence of an ‘explicit music’. It is as though the speaker (drowning amidst the ‘tidal hush’ of dresses like Prufrock drowning amidst human voices) cannot bear that which is ‘explicit’, for the kind of individual listening he has cultivated in ‘Reasons for Attendance’ is an implicit art: the mode of modernist interiority and detachment. The jazz enthusiast equates private acoustic space with individuality, and it is in withdrawal, hearing the trumpet’s authoritative voice, alone, where he most confidently declares his position.

Rhys: Jazz Pessimism and Modernist Urban Space Like Larkin’s, Rhys’s postwar writing examined the music scene’s encouragement of detachment and introspection. Overshadowed by the

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canonical reputation of Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys’s London stories are important postwar explorations of popular music’s seductive appeal and its liberating promises (and disappointments). This section revisits Rhys’s metropolitan short fiction, beginning with The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927). The playful style and sophisticated artifice of her earlier urban sketches shifts dramatically in the pessimistic London stories of Tigers Are Better Looking (1968) which explore interior states and experiences of withdrawal with far greater attention and elaboration. Indeed, the London stories read like a sequel not to The Left Bank so much as to the ending of Good Morning, Midnight (1938), with its remarkable hallucinatory music scene featuring a surreal jazz performer (an instance of Larkin’s notion of jazz as the new art of the unconscious). Literary history has situated Rhys primarily as a Caribbean, postcolonial, or European interwar modernist writer.18 She is also a writer of postwar England and especially of wartime and postwar London. Published as a collection in 1968, Tigers Are Better Looking is comprised of stories written during or after World War II. Five of the eight stories in the collection take place in London: ‘Till September Petronella’, ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’, ‘Tigers Are Better Looking’, ‘The Lotus’ and ‘A Solid House’. The specificity of these stories gives them a documentary particularity, with their details of the urban time and place (Portobello Road, Bloomsbury, Coptic Street, Edgeware Road and air raids, for example). At the same time, the stories register a symbolic rather than documentary sense of place, with their ominous repetition of enclosures (isolated rooms, prisons, taxis, police vans, a sanitorium, claustral flats and even a deathbed). The claustral dimension of the collection’s primarily urban locations accentuates a threatening spatial interiority. London’s urban space is dominantly atomising, but music introduces an element of theatricality, the sociable, intersubjective opportunities of which, though sparse, are of great interest and attraction. As theatricalising influence, music transforms urban space (and its emotional emptiness) into urban scene (a stage of heightened emotions and social complexity). Rhys’s stories about London music scenes build on her earlier 1920s sketches of the tourist’s Paris in The Left Bank and Other Stories.19 In that collection, Rhys displayed her talent for crafting wry depictions of Parisian scenes at once delightful and artificial, in stories that parody the longing for authentic Paris. In ‘Tea with an Artist’, for example, she satirically inhabits the traveller’s imagination of ‘the real Latin Quarter which lies to the north of the Montparnasse district and is shabbier and not cosmopolitan yet’ (30). In ‘Tout Montparnasse and a Lady’, an American tourist looks for a stereotypical ‘Dope Fiend’ in the more

­48     Rishona Zimring outré corners of the ‘real’ Paris, and, disappointed at not finding one, begins ‘to yearn for the free life of the Apache and to wish that some of the original clients of the Bal Musette had stayed’ (17–18). Referring to romanticised working-class outlaws dubbed ‘Apaches’, Rhys’s caricature is not of the Apaches themselves, but of the exoticist desires of the American tourist who seeks these already-commodified characters in a ‘real’ Paris of tourists’ fervent fantasies. The irony of the outlaws’ name is presumably lost on the American lady, but not on Rhys or her reader. Rhys and her reader recognise Parisian artifice and theatricality, the staginess and constructed character of its pretence of authenticity. The city’s touristic allure is driven home repeatedly by Rhys’s insistent use of titles that designate Paris locales as though listed in a guide book: ‘In a Café’, ‘Tout Montparnasse’, ‘In the Luxembourg Garden’, ‘In the Rue de l’Arrivée’, ‘At the Villa d’Or’, and, for the particularly intrepid traveller, ‘From a French Prison’. Other titles announce the collection’s interest in theatricality, artifice and display: ‘Illusion’, ‘A Spiritualist’, ‘Mannequin’ and (as if to emphasise a jazz age cliché) ‘Mixing Cocktails’. Visual vignettes and sketches underscore both the city’s theatricality and the visitor’s acceptance of its visual demands. In ‘In a Café’, for example, we find that ‘[s]tout business men drank beer and were accompanied by neat women in neat hats; temperamental gentlemen in shabby hats drank fines à l’eau beside temperamental ladies who wore turbans and drank menthes of striking emerald’ (13). Or, again, in ‘Tout Montparnasse’, we find an arch air of sophistication in the narrator’s voice as he (?) observes a scene, and the voice itself is satirised as much as or more than the scene it describes: Most of the women are not so young, with that tendency to be thick around the ankles and incongruous about the shoes, which is nearly always to be found in the really intelligent woman. For they are intelligent, all these people. They paint, they write, they express themselves in innumerable ways. (16)

Rhys creates ironic detachment from the Parisian scene without rejecting its pleasures. Recognising its artifice and clichés only adds to the appreciation of its theatricality, its play of masks, costumes, props – its masquerades.20 The Paris stories remind us that Rhys was an artist (and indeed a connoisseur) of artifice. She was an expert at crafting narrative voices of observation and commentary on fakeness and poses, and at encouraging the style of ironic detachment. Most flamboyantly in Good Morning, Midnight, her heroines self-consciously manipulated the poses and masks made so accessible in the seductive spectacles of consumer

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culture. Such manipulations, ironic detachment and self-awareness can seem threatening, and thus it is that Ford Madox Ford’s original introduction to The Left Bank defused the threat by celebrating Rhys’s authenticity rather than her appreciation of artifice. Perhaps in order to market the stories successfully to unsuspecting American tourists who also sought the ‘real’ Paris, Ford wrote in ‘Preface: Rive Gauche’ of the author’s ‘profound knowledge of the Left Bank [. . .] and a ­terrific – almost lurid! – passion for stating the case of the underdog’.21 By constructing Rhys’s ‘profound knowledge’ of the Left Bank and the ‘terrifying insight’ she brought from the Antilles, Ford constructed a writer of experience rather than analysis. Yet it is the analyst, the ironist and the expert (rather than the terrific, terrifying, or lurid writer of experience), as well as the connoisseur of artifice and ‘scenes’ whom we encounter in the London stories of Tigers Are Better Looking. Neither ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ nor ‘Tigers Are Better Looking’ features an entirely autobiographical protagonist: Selina Davis is a black West Indian immigrant and Mr Severn is male.22 Across barriers of race and sex, Rhys brilliantly imagined radically other subjectivities (just as she did in Paris). While the visual faculty dominates in The Left Bank, however (hence its insistent visual descriptions of clothing and colours, for example), acoustic sensitivity becomes more pronounced in Tigers. To write about London by thinking into the listening lives of others is precisely the mature, much-revised accomplishment of these late career stories, their powerful imaginative leap beyond what Rhys had written previously in the context of interwar, European modernism. These stories do not simply revel in the delights of artifice, though they do take in London’s surfaces and poses. In Rhys’s London stories, we encounter profoundly intersubjective writing that presupposes others’ interior states. This presupposition is at the very core of modernist literary experiments with inner monologue, free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness. In the London stories, listening acquires newfound relevance in its successes and failures at fostering intersubjectivity and meaningful sociability within spaces theatricalised by music into ‘scenes’. Rhys’s London stories should be periodised as writing of postwar England in part because they remark on popular music’s presence as both encouragement and hindrance to intersubjectivity and its modernist literary forms. ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ and ‘Tigers Are Better Looking’ in particular recognise the importance in twentieth-century English society of the music scene. Listening (hidden behind appearances of detachment and aloofness) connotes depth, interiority and intersubjectivity. Through listening, Rhys explores the horizons of agency and

­50     Rishona Zimring s­elf-possession promised by the exchanges between singers and audiences. The failure to listen overturns this celebration, and conveys Rhys’s pessimism about the ‘unpleasant facts’ of English society’s repressive characteristics.23 To the extent that listening works, so do interiority and intersubjectivity, as well as the pose of detachment which keeps them hidden and implies depth beneath surface. To the extent that it fails, surface triumphs over depth, and the visual reasserts its domination over the aural. ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ is Rhys’s story about the triumph of private acoustic space behind the façade of the visual; ‘Tigers Are Better Looking’ is its pessimistic double, a story about the victory of sight over sound. ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ uses London’s Holloway Prison and then a party to stage its transformative music scenes. In Holloway Prison, the narrator Selina’s depression abruptly ends when she hears a woman singing ‘The Holloway Song’ (173); from this point on, Selina possesses newfound agency and hope. Released from prison, she is ‘not frightened’ (174) of Londoners any more. She knows ‘what to say and everything goes like a clock works’ (175). The story’s ending is provocatively ambiguous. When Selina herself whistles the Holloway song at a party, a man hears it and plays it on the piano, ‘jazzing it up’, then selling it and sending her five pounds (175). Selina’s realisation that the music has been stolen from her first plunges her into despair: ‘Now I’ve let them play it wrong, and it will go from me like all the other songs – like everything. Nothing left for me at all’ (175). This despair is then countered by Selina’s final reflections, which begin with, ‘But then I tell myself all this is foolishness.’ Her final realisation repeats her first response to the Holloway song: she achieves a sense of self-possession that propels her forward. Her ‘So let them call it jazz’ is not so much a capitulation to her exploitation as an assertion of her private response. If they ‘play it wrong’, ‘[t]hat won’t make no difference to the song I heard’ (175). The story’s final line – ‘I buy myself a dusty pink dress with the money’ (175) – announces Selina’s triumphant compromise. On the one hand, by turning to a dress, she adopts a visually-oriented consumer’s mask, an orientation towards exteriority. On the other hand, she has already established that the song’s private meaning makes a difference to her: her orientation is interior. The purchase of the dress and the song’s defiant private significance both state ownership. The dress itself symbolises the mingled indifference and difference of Selina’s racialised public/private persona: dusty and pink, it is both dark and light. She both wears and protects her identity, her double self. The music’s original power for its listener is her memory of ‘the song I heard’: ‘It’s a smoky kind of voice, a bit rough sometimes, as if those

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old dark walls themselves are complaining, because they see too much misery – too much. But it don’t fall down and die in the courtyard; seems to me it could jump the gates of the jail easy and travel far, and nobody could stop it’ (173). The voice’s smokiness can be detected in a final visual trace, the ‘dusty’ dress, and is protected by Selina’s memory. She now possesses, and protects, private acoustic space. ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ suggests that behind the façade of jazz linger memories of hostility, imprisonment, yearning, endurance and survival. Rhys’s story further suggests that the pose of consumption and its superficial indifference is a mask that protects private acoustic space, a shelter for memory and knowledge unassailed by music’s commodification and its use as entertainment. The listener’s detachment protects the melody’s original meaning and allows the song’s social power to survive within private experience. Rhys’s story about the private significance of jazz offers a surprising affinity with Larkin’s poems. Both foster the reader’s pleasurable knowledge that music ‘connoisseurship’ means the comfort and confidence of private acoustic space. While jazz may entertain – and it should be allowed to, from Selina’s point of view – its emotional significance exceeds its mass appeal. Larkin and Rhys make music work to detach listeners from collective to individualistic, public to private, response. The literary work fosters the very same interiority in the reader, who is in a sense privatised by the text’s music. Rhys’s story further suggests that a doubleness dwells within the individualistic response. The secret sharing between singer and listener implies an intersubjective dimension to Selina’s acoustic space, an important variant on Larkin’s more austere separations. Separation reaches extremes in ‘Tigers Are Better Looking’. Here, Rhys offers a disturbing examination of hostility and the music scene. In this story, the listener is a writer (a journalist employed by an Australian newspaper). Hostile listening inspires writing that in its privileging of the visual over the acoustic silences otherness and obstructs intersubjectivity. The name of the listener, Mr Severn, announces that a Dickensian caricature is at work. Mr Severn is severed and severe, a case of destructive isolation and detachment whose interiority corrodes social relations. ‘Tigers’ is a savagely satirical portrait of the artist as solipsist in an oeuvre that revisits time and again the yearning for constructive sociability amidst its fragility and failure. Selina, after all, is a seamstress, and her work entails mending, alteration and, of course, connecting pieces. The dress purchase that masks her inner allegiance to private experience also symbolises her connection with others, her acceptance of appearing and functioning ‘properly’ in public. Mr Severn succeeds at writing at the cost of sociability; indeed, his writing thrives on hostility, and the

­52     Rishona Zimring story masterfully reveals how the interiority inspired by a music scene can result in cruel indifference. One of a number of stories Rhys herself called ‘dated’ (and ‘purposely’ so), ‘Tigers Are Better Looking’, takes place in 1934; it thus offered its 1960s readers an opportunity to visit the interwar period and modernism’s milieu.24 Mr Severn’s urban katabasis, or journey through the underworld, brings him into the London equivalent of Parisian cafés and cabarets, an exotic and decadent territory that promises to fertilise the imagination. After barking at his recalcitrant typewriter and rushing down the stairs, Mr Severn takes two double whiskies at Time, his usual pub (178), picks up two young women on the street, and seeks out with them a nightspot with a name out of P. G. Wodehouse – the ‘Jim-Jam’ (178). Once inside, they become audience members to a ‘mulatto who was playing the saxophone’ (178). Severn becomes increasingly belligerent, eventually getting kicked out and taken to the local police station where he is locked into a cell, then released by a magistrate after paying a fine. On his return to his flat, Mr Severn finds that his ‘swing’ is back; he can now type out his weekly article for his Australian audience, his writing reanimated by his vaguely ethnographic tour of a London pub, streets, club, prison, court and police van. Ford’s ‘almost lurid!’ comes to mind as a suitable label for the story’s tour of metropolitan space, and readers of ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ may be struck by the parallels with the story of Selina Davis: like Mr Severn, she returns to work after an episode of belligerent behaviour lands her in court, prison and police van. In each story, the protagonist emerges from the urban underworld, a scene theatricalised by music, and is transformed into a detached observer who has withdrawn into private space (Selina’s self-conscious interior monologue; Severn’s compositional process in his room). However, the crucial difference between Selina and Mr Severn is that she listens, while he flees from listening. Selina never sees the singer of the Holloway song; she only listens. What matters to Mr Severn is the experience of racial difference in the encounters of the music scene: he sees it all around him. ‘Tigers Are Better Looking’ is about the repression of sound with sight, the return to writing as a violent repudiation of music’s call to intersubjectivity. Mr Severn visits a night club in the company of women in order to try to get his writing ‘swing’ back: ‘[t]he swing’s the thing, as everybody knows – otherwise the cadence of the sentence’ (177). He wants to contact the source of the ‘swing’, so seeks out ‘the jubilee laughter [. . .] Jubilant – Joy – [. . .] Words whirled round in his head, but he could not make them take shape’ (178). The confusion Severn experiences at the prospect of jubilation continues in his experience of the music scene, where a ‘mulatto playing

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the saxophone leaned forward and whooped’ (179). One of his female companions at the club comments that ‘“They play so rotten”’ while the other retorts ‘“why should they play well. What’s the difference?”’ and Severn agrees: ‘“Quite right. All an illusion”’ (179–180). Dismissive of the music itself and whether it ‘makes a difference’, Severn becomes preoccupied with what he sees, rather than what he hears. A woman looks to him like she has ‘a touch of the tarbrush’ and the threat of racial difference made acute by the club’s music scene inspires an episode of modernist interiority through experimentation with fragmented stream of consciousness. Severn’s visual obsession returns him to the original threat to his ego, his rejection by Hans, his erstwhile lover: ‘Pictures, pictures, pictures . . . Faces, faces, faces . . . Like hyaenas, like swine, like goats, like apes, like parrots. But not like tigers, because tigers are better looking, aren’t they? as Hans says’ (181). If Hans has derided his looks, Severn will mollify his wounded ego by turning his own derision against others: thus Rhys’s story uses the racial hybridity of the music scene to reveal racist hostility as a form of revenge. Rhys’s story portrays Severn’s writing as repressive appropriation and distortion of the music scene that violently repudiates the interiority it inspired. Severn’s hostility towards the ‘mixed’ (181) character of the music audience escalates into violence when he is expelled from the club for his ‘[o]bscene drawings on the tablecloth’ (182); when he and his Irish companion Maidie are eventually released by the police, he rejects her extended hand with ‘a black look’ (187). Upon his return to his flat, he finds that his ‘swing’ has returned: ‘the incongruous colours and shapes became a whole’ (187) and his writing swings into gear when he represses all the ‘tormenting phrases’ and ‘[o]ther phrases, suave and slick, took their place (188). The story’s final lines are richly ironic: The swing’s the thing, the cadence of the sentence. He had got it. He looked at his eye in the mirror, then sat down at the typewriter and with great assurance tapped out ‘JUBILEE . . .’ (188)

The story’s ending reveals that ‘tormenting phrases’ must be conquered by the ‘eye’. Whereas Selina’s final turn to the visual (her purchase of a dusty pink dress) is preceded by her act of reclaiming the song she has heard, Severn’s turn to the visual is a violent repression of the music scene, a repression constitutive of his ‘assurance’ as a writer. While Severn is expelled from the London club for obscene drawings, the story’s ending suggests that his textual drawings – his urban sketches – are marketable to an Australian audience. The sketches will be comprised of ‘slick and suave’ phrases based on the repudiation of listening.

­54     Rishona Zimring His writing is founded on the visual conquest of the aural, which the story makes quite clear is a racist victory. Severn is the opposite of Selina: a threatened, unlistening, violent figure, as opposed to a sympathetic listener whose pose of detachment masks a vocal depth. Rhys exposes Severn’s writerly suaveness and slickness as a form of repressive silencing, while she reveals Selina’s consumerist pose to protect the private acoustic space of internal communion.

Brophy: Modernist Inheritance and the Space of Female Intimacy Jazz enthusiasm as recounted in Sinfield’s cultural history was exclusively male and a fertile ground for male friendship. What about a space for female intimacy in postwar English music scenes? Hinted at in Selina’s bond with the woman who sang the Holloway Song, such space is realised more fully and explicitly in the work of Brigid Brophy, an experimental novelist and critic who championed fin-de-siècle and modernist aesthetes (Aubrey Beardsley, Ronald Firbank) as well as Mozart. In her work, opera enthusiasm encourages female intimacy, and suggests an alternative acoustic space. Published in 1956, The King of a Rainy Country follows two initially aimless, educated twenty-somethings, Susan, the narrator, and Neale, her Bloomsbury flatmate and asexual love interest, as they emerge from melancholic passivity into a quest story that takes them from London to a climactic dénouement in Venice.25 Towards the beginning of the novel, during the initial phase of their ‘allusive and entangled’ verbal relationship (17), Neale quotes Baudelaire’s ‘Spleen’, giving Brophy’s novel its title: ‘“Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux, Riche mais impuissant [. . .]”’ (24). In their shared melancholia, Susan bemoans that ‘“I can bear anything except a status quo”’ and the two muse on whether there might be a ‘third’ alternative rather than simply two unbearable ones (24). Described by Baudelairean Neale as two ‘“incurable romantics”’ they share a quest for this ‘third’ alternative to the status quo. They search for Cynthia, a girlhood crush of Susan’s whom the two of them see in a pornographic photo in the bookseller’s collection; they find her in Venice, where she is trying out for roles during a film festival. In Venice, both Susan and Neale are captivated by Cynthia’s friend, a famous American opera star, Helena Buchan. In the novel’s third and final section, The King of a Rainy Country becomes the story of Susan’s aesthetic reeducation. Susan becomes Helena’s intimate, and their exclusive female friendship sequesters them from the more obvious plots (one lesbian,

Rhys and the Aesthete     55

one heterosexual) that could have resolved Susan’s ambiguous state. Brophy plays up Helena’s maternal desires, having her wistfully wanting to show ‘“the world to someone else. Maybe that’s why it’s nice to have children [. . .] Maybe I really got acquainted with Cynthia so as to have someone to shew (sic) Venice to. You sort of renew your own impressions that way”’ (240). But Helena’s maternal longings mingle with her praise of friendship, ‘“an experience you shouldn’t underestimate. It’s not unpoetical, though there’s not much poetry written about it”’ (239). She takes Susan with her to Padua, where the two enjoy the friendship of a ‘“ladies only trip, like going to the hairdresser”’ (241). They play with the theatrical props in Helena’s portrait photographer’s studio, and amidst the accoutrements of illusion, Susan confesses her search for an immortal moment, while Helena expresses her sense of impending mortality. They discover ‘sympathy’ in each other, and their friendship takes on a newfound aura of intimacy. Helena departs for Austria, where she dies en route to Vienna, and, back in London, in a new secretarial job and living apart from Neale, Susan receives from Helena a mailed box containing the muddied dress in which she had been married during a rainy London June, an episode she’d shared with Susan over cigarettes on their Padua excursion. The ‘rainy country’ of Neale’s Baudelaire shifts into the background. It is replaced by a female authority: the opera singer who bestows her souvenir of a rainy country to her symbolic daughter, sympathetic friend and quasi-romantic partner.26 The King of a Rainy Country celebrates the exclusivity of a female sympathy founded in women’s embrace of high culture and European tradition, suggesting a shared modernist interiority of female intimacy. Susan finds a ‘third’ alternative to the status quo through the sequestered, ladies-only intimacy of a female friendship with an older American opera star who sings Mozart and Puccini. Brophy celebrates the new possibilities of the allegiance between an older woman whose artistic career belongs to a previous era, and who is dying, and a younger woman, who inherits the older woman’s past through the wedding dress that is both relic of marriage and, muddied, a symbol and omen of its failure. The muddied dress provides a material connection and lasting bond between the dead Helena and Susan, liberated from her entanglement with Neale and the presumed heiress of Helena’s embrace of adventure and art – her commitment to finding beauty. Brophy offers the ‘constrained stateliness’ of the ‘athletic’ (205) female singer who evocatively mingles maternal and homoerotic power. A glamorous and talented celebrity, Helena is one with the watery powers and ‘piercingly mortal beauty’ (206) of Venice itself. Her musical gift mesmerises her audience, who listen ‘solemnly’ (226) when she sings in a public square.

­56     Rishona Zimring Helena replaces Cynthia, the porn starlet and failed film ingénue, in Susan’s imagination and affections: opera and female sophistication replace not only the pretentious male poet, but the naïve female poser. In their stead, Susan’s sympathy with Helena creates an intimate private space for female homosocial art-worship, and through her connection to Helena, Susan returns to the London working world with the double consciousness we saw in Selina: secretaries and seamstresses cultivate inner lives, the clues to which lie in their acoustic private space of jazz and opera.27 Rhys and Brophy wrote about female listeners who achieved intersubjective interiority and intimacy in urban spaces (London, Venice) theatricalised by music. Such listeners expand the horizon of our understanding of postwar English writing and its relationship to other forms and standard periodisations of artistic expression. Between Larkin’s cultivation of solitude and Brophy’s celebration of the female dyad (a twist on Woolf’s Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe), the postwar modernism of Rhys’s stories resonates anew.

Notes   1. Quoted in Richard Palmer, Such Deliberate Disguises: The Art of Philip Larkin (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 7.   2. Jean Rhys, ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’, in The Collected Short Stories (New York: Norton, 1987), p. 173. All subsequent citations will be from this edition.   3. Brigid Brophy, Prancing Novelist: A Defence of Fiction in the Form of a Critical Biography of Ronald Firbank (London: Macmillan, 1973).   4. ‘[T]he construction of acoustic space as private space is in fact a precondition for the commodification of sound’: Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 155.   5. Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). On Rhys as a Caribbean writer, see Elaine Savory, Jean Rhys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).   6. Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Peter Kalliney builds on Sinfield’s analysis of postwar jazz enthusiasm among Movement and Angry writers as a means to both reject ‘effete’ highbrow modernism and to ‘retain a sense of cultural accomplishment that distinguished them from the working class’: Peter Kalliney, Cities of Affluence and Anger: A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), p.118.   7. I develop this cultural history at greater length in a book-length argument

Rhys and the Aesthete     57 about social dance. Rishona Zimring, Social Dance and the Modernist Imagination in Interwar Britain (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013).   8. Rhys, ‘Tigers Are Better Looking’, The Collected Short Stories. All subsequent citations will be from this edition.  9. A vast and galvanising body of work constitutes the ‘new modernist studies’, and I will single out here two texts for their persuasive interest in developing a new vocabulary for late or postwar modernist literary works, providing future criticism with ‘intermodernism’ and ‘metamodernism’. See Kristin Bluemel (ed.), Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-TwentiethCentury Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009) and David James and Urmila Seshagiri, ‘Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution’, PMLA, 129.1 (January 2014): 87–100. 10. Sinfield, Literature, Politics, and Culture. See especially the chapter ‘Making a Scene’, pp. 152–81. 11. Ibid., p. 158. All subsequent citations will be from this edition. 12. Kalliney develops Sinfield’s account of Movement anti-modernism and jazz enthusiasm, sharpening focus on their protest against London’s dominance in the literary imagination and emphasising the mapping of realism onto provincial locations in a newfound regionalist anti-urbanism. Englishness is also emphasised in the anti-modernist rejection of French literary influence, seen to have dominated the prewar generation. Kalliney, Cities of Affluence and Anger, pp. 116, 118, 143ff. 13. Philip Larkin, ‘Introduction to All What Jazz’, in Philip Larkin, Required Writings: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983), pp. 285–98, p. 297. 14. These debates are tartly summarised and dissected in Martin Amis’s essay ‘Don Juan in Hull’, The New Yorker, 12 July 1993, pp. 74–82. 15. Richard Palmer, Such Deliberate Disguises, p. xxi. 16. On Larkin’s Baudelairean inheritance, debts to French symbolism and ongoing engagement with Yeats, see Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin (London: Methuen, 1982); on his affinities with Joyce and Woolf, see Stephen Cooper, Philip Larkin: Subversive Writer (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2004); on his affinities with Lawrence and Imagism, see Terry Whalen, Philip Larkin and English Poetry (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986); on the aestheticist influence of Flaubert, Mallarmé and Wilde, see M. W. Rowe, Philip Larkin: Art and Self (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); many writers comment on Larkin’s Eliotesque qualities, especially Palmer in Such Deliberate Disguises, the title of which quotes ‘The Hollow Men’. 17. ‘Reasons for Attendance’ was originally published in The Less Deceived in 1955. ‘The Dance’ is an unfinished poem from the early 1960s. Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems, ed. Archie Burnett (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), pp. 30, 306, 360, 637. 18. Recently literary histories have begun to rework and complicate these categorisations. Peter Kalliney has defined Rhys’s place in the arena of global modernisms as that of a ‘postcolonial intellectual’, foregrounding her ‘dissatisfaction with bourgeois metropolitan culture’ and the consequent ‘blend of aesthetic, political, and social nonconformity’ that linked her to other modernist writers during the interwar period and, in the postwar period,

­58     Rishona Zimring to colonial and postcolonial writers of the Windrush Generation to whom she stood, as a white woman, in uneasy relation. Peter Kalliney, ‘Jean Rhys: Left Bank Modernist as Postcolonial Intellectual’, in Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 413–32. See also Mary Lou Emery’s outline of Rhys’s reception history in ‘Foreword’ to the collection Rhys Matters. Mary Lou Emery, ‘Foreword’, in Mary Wilson and Kerry L. Johnson (eds), Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives (London: Palgrave, 2013), pp. xi-xiv. 19. The stories originally published in The Left Bank are listed in Cheryl Alexander Malcolm and David Malcolm, Jean Rhys: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne, 1996), p. 133. All subsequent citations will be from this edition. 20. For a discussion of Rhys’s deconstruction of Parisian charms, see David Armstrong, ‘Reclaiming the Left Bank: Jean Rhys’s “Topography” in Left Bank and Quartet, in Kerry and Johnston, Rhys Matters, pp. 169–88. 21. Malcolm, Short Fiction, p. 120. 22. The autobiographical sources in ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ are interpreted astutely by Sue Thomas. I emphasise the otherness of the story’s protagonist in order to draw out Rhys’s experimentation with acoustic space and interiority as a means to explore and even inspire intersubjectivity. Sue Thomas, ‘Modernity, Voice, and Window-Breaking: Jean Rhys’s ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’, in Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (eds), De-scribing Empire: Postcolonialism and Textuality (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 185–200. 23. ‘The English clamp down on unpleasant facts and some of the facts they clamp down on are very unpleasant indeed, believe me.’ Quoted in Malcolm, Short Fiction, p. 107. 24. Ibid., p. 107. 25. Brigid Brophy, The King of a Rainy Country (London: Virago, 1990). All subsequent citations will be from this edition. 26. Patricia Juliana Smith reads Brophy’s novel as a text of lesbian postmodernity and a metafiction that experiments with conventional generic plots, one of which is the homoerotic girls’ school novel, as explored by Terry Castle. Patricia Juliana Smith, ‘Desperately Seeking Susan[na]: Closeted Quests and Mozartean Gender Bending in Brigid Brophy’s The King of a Rainy Country’, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 15.3 (Fall 1995): 23–31. See also Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 27. Smith emphasises the modernist affiliation in Brophy by connecting King’s Mozartian elements (the protagonist’s resemblance to Mozart’s Susanna, for example) to Brophy’s comparison in Mozart the Dramatist of the Countess and Susanna to Woolf’s Chloe and Olivia in A Room of One’s Own. Smith, ‘Desperately Seeking’, p. 31, n. 11. See Brigid Brophy, Mozart the Dramatist: The Value of His Operas to Him, to His Age and to Us, revd edn (London: Libris, 1988).

Chapter 3

On the Veranda: Jean Rhys’s Material Modernism Mary Lou Emery

they have drifted to the edge of verandahs in Whistlerian white, their jungle turned tea-brown [. . .] Derek Walcott, ‘Jean Rhys’ (1980)1

Derek Walcott’s homage to Jean Rhys pictures her a child in a deteriorating sepia photograph having ‘drifted’ with her aunts to the ‘edge / of verandahs’. One aunt ‘canoes through lilies of clouds’ from a ‘Carib hammock’, while the child, sighing, stares at a candle flame, ‘her right hand married to Jane Eyre’. In the concluding lines, the child foresees ‘that her own white wedding dress/ will be white paper’ (427–9). The ekphrastic poem gestures to multiple stories untold in its main narrative and offers glimpses of these stories through the material objects it names – beginning with the photograph itself and simultaneous reference to James MacNeill Whistler’s portraits of girls in white; including the picture album, the hammock, the candle with its flame, the novel; and ending with the prophetic white paper, signalling the future of the Euro-creole woman writer. We might read Walcott’s poem as a guide to reading Rhys, in particular the materiality of her modernism interleaved with a dreamy liminality of time and representational space.2 One place it suggests we tour in this reading is the veranda. This chapter focuses on the veranda in Rhys’s writing as an architectural space that opens onto multiple stories, its material history embedded within five centuries of inter-imperial conflict and expansion, colonial settlement, the Middle Passage, the plantation and the plantation’s legacies in twentieth-century England and Europe. Defined by the OED as ‘an open portico or light roofed gallery extending along the front (and occas[ionally] other sides) of a dwelling or other building’, the word itself has Spanish or Portuguese origins with versions in Hindi, Bengali and modern Sanskrit.3 As a creolised architectural form, the veranda speaks to global circuits stretching from its origins in West

­60     Mary Lou Emery Africa and India through Europe and the Americas, with the Caribbean as a central point of transit. In Rhys’s writing – several short stories including ‘Mixing Cocktails’, the novels Voyage in the Dark, Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea – the veranda changes its form and goes by different names. These shifting shapes of the veranda open to view obscured areas of the Caribbean past and connect distant, conflicting worlds. In Wide Sargasso Sea, changes in the veranda’s name raise questions that lead us to architectural sites of nineteenthcentury Dominica and to those of post-revolutionary Haiti. Following these connections, we can read some of the novel’s key scenes alongside those from literary and dramatic productions portraying the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath. In this deep mapping of the veranda, an architectural feature designed to display the leisure and power of the planter class and, as liminal space, to inspire a dreamy state of mind, translates into a battleground on which disparate registers of history, literature and language collide. This charged space becomes a point of departure in Rhys’s fiction for further transformations in cultural power and vision, generating a unique style of Caribbean and, more broadly, global or planetary modernism.4

The Art of Mixing In the short story ‘Mixing Cocktails’, we find the word ‘veranda’ appearing repeatedly as a refrain – ‘the veranda’, ‘on the veranda’ and ‘from the veranda’ – contributing to the hypnotic effects of a story about dreaming.5 Told from the point of view of a young girl, the story takes place on a veranda ‘that ran the whole length’ of a house in the hills of Dominica (36). In a ‘languid’ state, the girl occupies a state of mind between waking and sleeping, a liminality suited to the in-between location of the veranda (37). Like the porch, the veranda marks an architectural threshold, a space between inside and outside that some architectural historians describe as joining different worlds.6 In this story it seems to join different states of consciousness into a dreamy reverie. However, the girl also describes in concrete detail the typical furnishings of a plantation veranda: the creaking hammock on which she swings, the ‘enormous brass telescope’ on the stout wooden table, and an ‘unloaded shotgun’ leaning in a corner. Each of these objects has its plantation history and purpose. As Walcott’s poem specifes, the hammock is of Carib origin; appropriated by the planter class, it not only signifies the leisure its members enjoy, it displays that leisure from the veranda, for all to see. In fact, seeing is central to the design and

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position of the plantation veranda. While the girl in ‘Mixing Cocktails’ describes gazing through the telescope at the ocean where the steamers pass or, at night, into the sky at the stars, the telescope also afforded the planters surveillance of their fields and of the labourers working there.7 The shotgun, though unloaded in this story, speaks to the potential for violence from the veranda directed outwards towards intruders or into the surrounding fields. From this in-between space, the girl casts herself as an outsider to her world, wanting to be left alone by ‘oddly cruel Other People’ but also wishing she were more like them. When they are present on the veranda, she too is subject to surveillance and control. No longer allowed her solitary dreams she is told to listen, pay attention, come inside, avoid the sun or she will get freckles, and try ‘not to look vague’ (37). One of these intruders is an English aunt who makes a show of admiring the sea and the garden before falling asleep. What finally sends the girl into the house is not fear of the sun but of the moon when the family cook, an obeah woman, warns against sleeping in the moonlight and of the ‘bad things’ the moon can do (38). Once inside, the girl performs her nightly duty of mixing cocktails, describing her skill and ‘uncanny intuition’. We might read this ending in a number of ways: as an ironic comment on the socialisation of a child into adult drinking habits in the West Indies (it is her ‘nightly duty’) or, more metaphorically, as a reflection on the ‘mixing’ of cultures she experiences on the veranda – from the transatlantic crossings of the French, Canadian and British steamers, to the voices of Other People and the English aunt, to the warnings of an Afro-Caribbean obeah woman.8 In her dreamy state, she has absorbed them to an ‘uncanny’ intuitive degree. We might go further and read it as the author’s trope for an art of writing (‘Here, then, is something I can do’) generated from this mixing of cultures, an assertion of a global yet specifically Caribbean modernism. The many ellipses that punctuate the story indicate elements forgotten or missing even as new combinations are created. This verbal performance of creolisation takes place ‘on the veranda’ in a context of leisure but also of material objects that speak to centuries of imperial conquest, colonisation and forced labour. The conflicting voices that invade the girl’s dreams of the day time and frighten her at night prompt rebellious self-reflection: ‘I should like to laugh at her, but I am a well-behaved little girl . . . Too well-behaved . . .’ (38). We find many of these associations with the veranda in other stories and in the novels Voyage in the Dark, Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea. In some cases, the veranda remains a liminal space of leisure and languid dreaming. It remains also, as in ‘Temps Perdi’, a vantage point from which to see across the ocean to other islands

­62     Mary Lou Emery and to the horizon as the sun sets. However, as a space without walls, between inside and outside, it brings together different worlds that violently collide. Sounds carry through the veranda; objects hurtle across its threshold. In ‘Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers’, Mr Ramage stands with a shotgun on the veranda of his ‘Spanish Castle’, confronting an angry crowd intent on throwing stones and setting fire to his house. Rumours fly that he has shot a woman or a boy or simply threatened to do so, but the next day, he is the one found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Similarly, in ‘Again the Antilles’ the newspaper editor Papa Dom appears ‘on his veranda, frightened to death’ by a crowd ‘throwing stones and howling for his blood’ (39). Verandas appear even in Rhys’s fiction set in England and Europe, as in ‘Till September Petronella’, when the narrator hears voices on a cottage veranda wondering whether she is ‘the sort to kill herself’ (142). In Voyage in the Dark Anna recalls numerous scenes ‘on the veranda’ from her childhood in Dominica. Remembered in the context of England, however, swinging in a hammock does not relax her; instead, it makes her ‘very sick’ (69), and soon afterwards her stepmother tells her she is going to have ‘a very unhappy life’ (71).9 The veranda dream Anna recalls is a nightmare featuring her Uncle Bo with treacherous false teeth, ‘like fangs’ (92). ‘Long and ghostly’, it is where she sits with her family in the evening ‘with the night coming in, huge’ (83). None of the veranda scenes in ‘Till September Petronella’ or Voyage in the Dark portray rest, comfort, or leisure; in fact, just the opposite. These threshold spaces open on to the troubling past and also to dark visions of the characters’ futures. In the complex narrative of Voyage in the Dark, they become more than naïve memories of Anna’s Caribbean childhood. Rather, they embed the veranda and all of its colonial associations within the town and city spaces of England. As Anna’s ‘fall’ accelerates, it becomes impossible to separate one location of the colonial system from another. It is as if she has drifted, in Walcott’s words, ‘to the edge / of verandahs’ where connections between colony and metropole become dangerously visible. We might even read the terrace in Good Morning, Midnight where Sasha first meets René as a Parisian form of the veranda. On the ‘cold and dark’ terrace where ‘there is not another soul’, they test one another, argue about money, and each say their ‘piece’, performing various roles in a mix of languages (‘wealthy dame’, ‘mauvais garçon’) (72, 73, 74). On this threshold space, the liminality of their identities (‘no papers’, ‘no passport’) becomes increasingly evident within a larger context of imperialist nationalism and rising fascism (76). The potential violence of the veranda, signified in the shotgun leaning in a corner in ‘Mixing

Rhys’s Material Modernism     63

Cocktails’, now permeates Europe on the edge of a second world war. Reading the veranda across these stories and novels, we can discern a connection, in architectural and material terms, between two worlds – that of the Caribbean colonies with their plantation past and of Europe with its recurring violence among imperial nation states. We can also discern the practice, made possible by these threshold sites, of an art of mixing in Rhys’s Caribbean modernist narratives. Sometimes the narrative calls attention to this practice, as in ‘Mixing Cocktails’; sometimes it performs the mixing in a chaotic montage of voices, as in the concluding scenes of Voyage in the Dark; or it stages a meeting between strangers of uncertain origins, improvising with a mix of languages and parts to play, as in Good Morning, Midnight. When Rhys returns to the Caribbean in her last published novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, she calls attention to the veranda in her own experiment with linguistic improvisation, one that raises a number of questions. Though several of the most emotionally and physically charged scenes take place on a veranda, the word itself never appears until Part Two of the novel. Instead, throughout Part One, Rhys renames the veranda the glacis. What does glacis signify, and why does it replace ‘veranda’ in this particular novel? To address the questions raised by Rhys’s use of glacis in Wide Sargasso Sea, it will be helpful first to explore the history of the veranda as setting for the creolised art of ‘mixing’.

From Veranda to Glacis That history unfolds as multiple interrelated stories, of the word and of the material structure. Veranda came into the English language from its Portuguese origins via India in 1711 in a description of an Indian building with ‘a paved court, and two large verandas or piazzas’.10 As in this description, terms such as piazza (of Italian origin), portico, colonnade, or arcade helped to explain the newer term veranda in the Indian and English contexts, while piazza and also gallerie (of French origin) frequently designated the veranda in North America and the West Indies.11 As a material structure, the veranda’s history also comes in different versions. Perhaps most prevalent is one identifying European Neoclassicism and the Classical Revival as primary influences on plantation houses of North America and their iconic columned verandas. However, such forms, according to architectural historian Jay Edwards, appeared even earlier, before the rise of Neoclassical architecture. Tracing these earlier appearances of the veranda involves other stories

­64     Mary Lou Emery that begin also in Europe, with galleries derived from ancient folk architecture of the Iberian Peninsula; or in Brazil with the full galleries or open loggias featured on early farm houses. Still others cite early influences of Italio-Hispanic villas in, for example, the house built in 1510 in Santo Domingo for Diego Colon, Christopher Columbus’s son. However, in Edwards’s comprehensive survey of numerous possible histories of the veranda and its origins, he identifies two as primary. Following the veranda to these two primary sources reveals an ongoing mix of cultural influences beginning not in Europe, South America, or the Caribbean, but in West Africa and Bengal.12 The West African part of this account begins in the mid-sixteenth century with reports from European traders of small houses along the West African coast built with roofs of leaves and open sides or fronts. When early planters in Brazil ordered enslaved Africans to build their own houses, these West African forms began to influence house design in Latin America and the Caribbean. They mixed with Amerindian structures to shape the design of Maroon houses and, as early as the midseventeenth century, they appeared in farm cottages as well as large estate houses with full-length or encircling verandas. As the Portuguese in Brazil became more powerful, Dutch settlers as well as Sephardic Jews fled for the Caribbean islands, bringing Brazilian plantation designs with them. Both Edwards and John Vlach stress the centrality of the Caribbean to further creolisation and circulation of the veranda, a point clearly relevant to our reading of its presence in Rhys’s writing. Beginning in 1655 with the capture of the Spanish outpost in Jamaica by Cromwell’s army, the English appropriated the ‘Spanish Antillean Creole house’ with its porch or piazza.13 They subsequently mixed its features with English architectural elements and created ‘a new form of raised English West Indian Creole house’ which was adopted by other British planters in the Caribbean and then along the North American coast.14 This already creolised design, with its West African source, then mixed further with styles brought by European and French Canadian émigrés. The importance of the Spanish creole house in the Anglophone Caribbean recalls Rhys’s portrayal of Mr Ramage’s ‘Spanish Castle’ in ‘Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers’, while the additionally creolised ‘raised West Indian Creole house’ resonates with houses built in turn-of-the-century Roseau, Dominica where Rhys grew up. Alongside the routes taken by the veranda from West Africa to the Caribbean and on to North America, Edwards also identifies as primary those from India, more specifically from Bengal. Drawing on the work of Anthony B. King and accounts of British residents in India such as J. Lockwood Kipling, he points to the military adaptation of Bengali

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vernacular architecture during the early colonial period. The bungalow (bangla or banggolo in Hindi) was designed by Bengali peasants with a raised floor, overhanging thatched roof and full-length veranda.15 Adapted by the British for the army and subsequently for administrative buildings and colonial residences, the bungalow was exported to the Caribbean where it mingled with the Spanish Antillean creole houses already present. In this account of the West African and Bengali origins of the veranda, we see inter-imperial encounters, indigenous design and colonial adaptations all shaping the veranda while migrations of people – both forced and voluntary – carried it across continents and archipelagos until it became a familiar feature of nineteenth- and twentieth-century North American domestic architecture. In the period between 1830 and 1920, plantation house verandas with Neoclassical colonnades became iconic. Ironically, however, the Big House veranda, which planters imagined as a European Renaissance architectural form, owed its features to the designs of enslaved Africans whose descendants worked in the planters’ fields.16 In a similar turn, indentured labourers from India, who arrived in the Caribbean following the abolition of slavery in 1838, worked under surveillance from verandas additionally influenced by the designs of Bengali peasants. When Rhys sets fictional scenes ‘on the veranda’, she taps into an art of mixing that has circuited the globe over the course of at least five centuries. Its sources precede Western modernity and extend beyond Western Europe, confirming suggestions by recent theorists of modernism that the innovative, often multilingual, and fractured aesthetics of modernist texts derive in part from cultural spaces and times long considered incapable of modernity.17 Moreover, it is an art intensified through imperial conquest and expansion, infused with the violence of the slave trade and indentured servitude, the displacements and migrations of colonialism, and also with the silencing of parts of its own past. No wonder these threshold spaces often stage scenes of conflict and violence; no wonder they portray contradictory and swiftly changing relationships among displaced characters of uncertain origins. In Wide Sargasso Sea, the veranda appears as setting for some of the novel’s most anxious and violent scenes. However, in Part One of that novel its name changes from veranda, terrace, gallery, or piazza – all words that would make sense for the Caribbean – to glacis. At the same time, the narrative makes clear with an explicit definition that this is, nevertheless, the same architectural feature. Set in Jamaica, Dominica and England in the 1840s, just following the Emancipation of slaves, the novel famously reads as a ‘prequel’ to Jane Eyre. It begins in the voice of Antoinette, a child who observes her family’s estate falling into ruin

­66     Mary Lou Emery and her widowed mother into despair. Early in Part One, she describes the place where Annette, her mother, walks: ‘My mother usually walked up and down the glacis, a paved roofed-in terrace which ran the length of the house and sloped upwards to a clump of bamboos. Standing by the bamboos, she had a clear view to the sea [. . .]’.18 From this point on, the word glacis appears throughout Part One, prompting readers to ask why. The position of the veranda as threshold space connecting different worlds, along with its interrelated histories as word and as creolised structure of plantation architecture, account for much of the veranda’s significance in Rhys’s fiction. However, these histories do not include the word glacis among the veranda’s many synonyms. Turning to the OED, we find two apparently unrelated definitions of glacis, both seemingly distant from the veranda: ‘a gentle sloping bank’ and a ‘fortification’.19 The word derives from the Old French glacier, meaning to slip or slide, and as glacis in French, a place made slippery by freezing water or ice. As a sloping bank in the context of landscape gardening, glacis appeared in English in 1712 and now refers, not to an actual terrace as in Wide Sargasso Sea, but a ‘steep slope of ground falling from one level to another in a landscaped garden’.20 As a fortification, its usage in English dates from 1688 and, in one example, dated 1757, is described also as a ‘covered way’. Sloping upwards to a fortress, a glacis keeps an invading army under fire while obscuring its view and giving defenders a powerful visual advantage.21 It seems apparent that in the colonial period of the late seventeenth–eighteenth centuries, glacis in English meant both a garden slope and military defence, depending on the context, and in at least one instance, was described as covered. With the garden, the slope and the cover, we come closer to Antoinette’s description of the ‘roofed-in’ terrace on which her mother walks. Nevertheless, none of these definitions involves actual verandas or terraces. When Rhys explains glacis in terms of a terrace, yet abandons both terrace and veranda in favour of a word that refers to a garden slope in one context but in another has military significance, she collapses the distinction, explicitly bringing the violence of colonial conflicts, in particular the architecture of military defence, directly into the garden. At the same time, she reserves a place of strangeness for the word, in between French and English, in between possible meanings.

From Garden to Battleground The coupling of a plantation home and military fortification would have been familiar to Rhys. Her parents’ courtship, honeymoon and

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early marriage took place on the grounds of such a plantation/fortress, suggesting associations that weave their way through Wide Sargasso Sea in its language and in the shifting forms of the veranda. Lennox Honeychurch describes the estate on the southern coast of Dominica where Rhys’s father met her mother and where they made their first home as a married couple. Taken over from the French, it was called Stowe after an English country house. In the 1770s it became a sugar plantation and, due to its location, served also as a military defence of the island with a battery of cannons curving in front of the estate house. In its architecture and landscaping, Stowe offered Rhys an example of the militarisation of a garden ‘paradise’ overlooking the sea. She kept a drawing of the estate cottage where her parents lived, indicating the association of marriage with this historic conjunction of plantation grounds, inter-imperial hostilities and armed defence.22 The militarisation of paradise appears in different versions throughout Wide Sargasso Sea, beginning with the very first sentence: ‘They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did’ (9). That Antoinette and her mother are not protected by these defensive moves becomes clear when she then states, ‘But we were not in their ranks’ (9). This social exclusion explains perhaps why the material structure of the glacis cannot adequately defend a widowed planter’s wife from Martinique living on a Jamaican estate following Emancipation. That difference of creole identity along with her complicity in plantation slavery leaves Annette without allies and surrounded by potential enemies on all sides. However, the visual advantage offered by a glacis built as military fortification is denied her. Though Annette has a ‘clear view to the sea’, while walking on the glacis, ‘anyone passing could stare at her’. Antoinette stresses the effects of this reversal of visual command: ‘They stared, sometimes they laughed. Long after the sound was far away and faint she kept her eyes shut . . .’ (11). The garden that should be a paradise has ‘gone to bush’, while threatening stares and mocking voices have breached its lines of defence. What we might think of as the suppressed past or underside of the plantation veranda – its origins in the cultures of the formerly enslaved people who now threaten and, in some cases, try to protect Antoinette and her mother – is exposed and turned about. The threshold space on which planters have displayed their leisure and power now makes them a target. It opens to view the possibility of battle, defeat and capture – all events of the island’s past that transpire also in the lives of Antoinette and her mother. We find key events of Part One taking place on the glacis, including a celebration of Annette’s marriage to an Englishman, Mr Mason. But

­68     Mary Lou Emery even this occasion is marred by undercurrents of hostility from gossiping visitors, and soon sounds of mysterious drumming come to the glacis. What Mr Mason describes as ‘drunken negroes’ in a ‘nasty mood’ assault the house and, when he walks on to the glacis to ask what they want, throw stones, forcing him inside. Like the verandas in ‘Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers’ and ‘Again the Antilles’, the glacis becomes a zone of violent confrontation. Racist stereotypes come into play in Mr Mason’s initial view of the drummers as children, in his later description of the attackers as drunk, and in Antoinette’s perception of the ‘horrible noise’ they make ‘like animals howling’ (23). Attempting to defend their position as planters from the glacis, these are the terms in which they interpret the assault and the fire that soon drives them from the house. Away from the house, however, they enter another world of interpretation when Coco, the parrot, catches fire and falls screeching from the glacis railings. Attackers and defenders become suddenly quiet and remember the bad luck brought by killing a parrot or even seeing one die (25). Such alternate worlds open throughout Wide Sargasso Sea, and often from the glacis, or what becomes in Part Two the veranda and ajoupa. Part Two begins with another marriage, that of Antoinette to the unnamed man readers recognise as Edward Rochester from Jane Eyre. Narrated in the first person from his point of view, it immediately describes his courtship and wedding in military terms as ‘the advance and retreat’ (38). What might have been for him a paradise – marriage to a beautiful creole heiress – has become instead a battleground in which he feels himself an outsider, always on the defensive. An Englishman, he does not use the word glacis. Instead he refers to the ‘veranda’ at Granbois where they spend their honeymoon, and he describes its typical plantation furnishings of ‘canvas chairs, two hammocks, and a wooden table on which stood a tripod telescope’ (48). The difference between the words Antoinette and her new husband use for veranda becomes even more pointed in his description of another structure with ‘four wooden posts and a thatched roof’: ‘Every evening we saw the sun go down from the thatched shelter she called the ajoupa, I the summer house’ (53). By using a creolised French word that designates what Edwards identifies as an ‘Afro-Arawak folk cottage’, Antoinette preserves the structure’s history and its origins in West African and indigenous architecture while her husband assumes an English origin.23 However, as he makes clear in another passage, Englishness in the West Indies cannot be authentic: it is only an ‘imitation English summer house’ (42). In these conflicts over naming, the creolisation of the veranda emerges as a matter of words, actual structure and of a complex history involving shifting alliances of anti-colonial resistance. The West African/

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Amerindian ajoupa appeared also, in Edwards’s account, in the designs of Maroon houses with galleries. Sheltering escaped slaves, encamped in the treacherous ‘cockpit country’ of Jamaica’s interior, Maroon houses represent freedom and revolt. In 1739 the Maroons waged successful war against the British, culminating in a treaty that granted them land and self-governance; however, the treaty also stipulated that they must return to the British any further escaped slaves, a clause that obligated them to betray others in exchange for their own freedom. The themes of escape and betrayal run throughout Wide Sargasso Sea, but most significant in these passages is the multiplicity of words referring to the veranda and the openings of those words to a multiplicity of stories, all shifting tensely between one and another or in direct conflict, and all in the context of a plantation system under siege. Battles of words escalate in Part Two, often in stories about verandas told on the veranda – a narrative framing of the architectural feature so much in dispute. Early in their marriage, Antoinette invites her husband to walk on the veranda as she tells him of being frightened as a child and running to a veranda where she lay in a hammock watching the full moon. Like the obeah woman in ‘Mixing Cocktails’, Antoinette’s nurse Christophine warns her against sleeping ‘in the moonlight when the moon was full’ (49). Antoinette asks her husband whether he too thinks she has slept too long in the moonlight, as if offering another explanation for his increasing doubts concerning her sanity as well as her sexual and racial ‘purity’. As their relationship worsens she tries again to explain ‘the other side’ of the damaging stories he has been hearing about her. Again on the ‘long dark veranda’, Antoinette attempts to defend herself. Central to her account are other verandas including the glacis at Coulibri with its ‘curved flight of shallow steps’, which she remembers as ‘one of the best things’ on the estate (79). The worst of these memories, however, is of seeing from a veranda the abuse of her mother who was forcibly confined following the fire at Coulibri. As Antoinette concludes this story of a veranda, told on the dark veranda of Granbois, her husband responds by calling her Bertha, a name she resists but which he insists upon in yet another battle of words that, in effect, denies all she has just told him of her past and identity.24 In these scenes, the veranda stages stories of other verandas told by a creole wife in acts of self-defence against a husband who will, as Annette’s husband has done already, judge his wife as mad, seize and imprison her. Even at this point in the narrative, her architecturally framed stories are additionally framed within his narrative voice. It is a battleground of conflicting realities shaped doubly: by the history of colonialism in the West Indies and also by nineteenth-century laws g­overning

­70     Mary Lou Emery marriage that give a husband the right to his wife’s property and person. An alternative possibility appears, however, when Antoinette and her husband prepare to leave Granbois and sail for England. In this scene ‘Rochester’ refers to ‘the ajoupa’ where he joins Antoinette, giving the structure he had previously insisted was an ‘imitation English summer house’ its creolised name (101). He recalls things Antoinette has told him about the island and her names for things such as mountains (‘Morne, she’d say’) and the green flash of the sunset (‘The Emerald Drop’) (101). As her world of perception and naming overwhelms him, he feels a sadness that surprises him and, suddenly, is ‘certain that everything [he] had imagined to be truth was false’ (101). He even imagines asking her forgiveness and giving Granbois back to her. But instead, he recalls all his previous suspicions and casts himself again as an embattled victim who hates not only his wife but the place, and both for a secret he believes they hold but that is lost to him. In this scene the very epistemology of British colonialism falters as the plot of Wide Sargasso Sea and, through it, that of the canonical Jane Eyre opens to an alternative, one in which the world view and humanity of the Euro-creole woman captured in Brontë’s novel as the bestial madwoman in the attic might have prevailed. Set in an early version of the veranda that in the ‘madwoman’s’ lexicon retains its creolised name, the scene opens onto a wider history of conquest and colonisation and offers a brief glimpse of the creative impact of indigenous and African material cultures in the Caribbean. That view, however, is closed again with Rochester’s assertion of his rights of possession. The law on his side, he has won the battle. Yet, ironically, his own militarisation of paradise confirms Antoinette’s use of glacis in Part One to describe the terrace on which her mother walks. Questions persist, however, as to the choice of this particular word, the detailed definition so early in the novel, and its condensation of terms from landscape gardening and military history. I suggest that from the glacis another historical context opens to view, a context responsible for what Kenneth Ramchand, borrowing from Frantz Fanon, referred to in an early essay as the ‘terrified consciousness’ of the white West Indian. By this he meant the ‘shock and disorientation as a massive and smoldering Black population is released into an awareness of its power’.25 Such awareness certainly arose in the years following Emancipation, when Wide Sargasso Sea takes place, and also later with the success of black power and independence movements in the 1960s when the novel was published. I would extend Ramchand’s argument to another, foundational, period of black power, that of the Haitian Revolution. The successful revolt and subsequent declaration of Haiti as an independent

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republic in 1804, just thirty-six years before Wide Sargasso Sea begins, generated a terror felt by slave owners across the Americas. It also became an obsessive theme in cultural productions including novels, travel writings, ethnographies, works of history and plays from the 1930s, when Rhys began drafting the novel that became Wide Sargasso Sea, through to the ’60s when she completed it.26 As I discuss in the next and final section, one of the more well-known and popular of these productions, Orson Welles’s staging of Macbeth set in post-revolutionary Haiti, takes place on a set that closely resembles a glacis. In remaining footage of the performance, battles take place on a walkway reached by a glacis that is definitely a military fortification, but one built to defend what is also the home or castle of Henri Christophe, the ruler of Haiti. Transformed into glacis, the veranda alludes to a material history of revolution and reactionary fear in plantation America; it also becomes a material point of connection among diverse geographical, historical and literary worlds. In this context, the significance of glacis in Part One of Wide Sargasso Sea becomes clearer especially in relation to yet another related word in Part Three of the novel – the ‘battlements’ of Thornfield Hall.

Land of Many Battles During the US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, reports from soldiers and visitors brought Haiti to the attention of the public, typically casting it as a primitive and exotic island. When the occupation ended, in a context also of labour movements and anti-colonial politics throughout the Caribbean, Haiti appeared repeatedly in literary, non-fiction and dramatic writings and performances. This is the period in which Zora Neale Hurston published her ethnographic studies of Haiti and vodun, Faulkner centred the complex narrative of Absalom, Absalom! on scenes of revolt in Haiti, C. L. R. James produced his compelling history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, and Alejo Carpentier inaugurated ‘magical realism’ in The Kingdom of this World, a novel set in the years leading up to, during and following the Revolution. The 1930s, especially, saw the production of plays about the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath. In addition to Welles’s production of ‘Voodoo’ Macbeth with the Negro Theatre Unit of the WPA Federal Theatre Project, these include C. L. R. James’s Toussaint L’Ouverture and Langston Hughes’s Emperor of Haiti (reworked as an opera titled Troubled Island). Haiti inspired music of the 1930s, including the jazz of Sidney Bechet’s Haitian Orchestra, and visual art, including Jacob

­72     Mary Lou Emery Lawrence’s series of paintings depicting Toussaint L’Ouverture.27 The presence of Haiti throughout the culture of the 1930s and extending to later decades suggests a fascination, of widely varying ideological orientations, with a country whose successful revolution, fought by former slaves, had defeated the armies of three European nations on behalf of what many historians and critics have called a ‘radically universal freedom’.28 This obsessive cultural return to Haiti occurs alongside its marginalisation in mainstream history, the silencing of what to most Europeans could only be, in Michel-Rolphe Trouillot’s words, an ‘unthinkable’ event.29 In the midst of the charged cultural atmosphere surrounding Haiti, Rhys made in 1936 her only return visit to the Caribbean, where she became highly aware of the labour strikes and emerging movements for independence. On her way back to England that summer, she visited New York City where she spent time with the writer Evelyn Scott in Greenwich Village, attending parties with Scott’s bohemian intellectual and artist friends. I cannot offer evidence as to the direct effects on Rhys of the fascination with Haiti in the Caribbean and New York at this time, nor do I know whether she saw the Federal Theatre Project’s overwhelmingly popular production of ‘Voodoo’ Macbeth. However, she was very likely present just after the sold-out performances in Harlem and during its subsequent Broadway run. Even if she did not actually attend a performance, she could hardly have missed seeing reviews and hearing it discussed.30 In that milieu, a number of themes central to the writing of Wide Sargasso Sea emerged: the implications of a revolutionary history largely silenced and then brought forward, the power of Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions and their role in anticolonial rebellion, and the actual agency of people who were, at best, considered mere victims incapable of historical action. Further, as most histories of the Haitian Revolution make clear, its amazing achievements, including the abolition of slavery, end to colonial rule, and governance by former slaves from Africa or of African descent, involved constantly shifting alliances among groups based on colour, class and nationality. As Trouillot has emphasised, even those histories repeatedly silence additional shifts of power, internal oppositions and reconfigured alliances.31 Rhys’s purpose in writing Wide Sargasso Sea – to give the silenced madwoman in the attic of Jane Eyre a voice, to reimagine its characters and restage their past lives in a Caribbean fraught with contradictory shifts in power – is fully in keeping with the cultural fervour surrounding Haiti from the 1930s to the 1960s. In this context, the fact of a successful revolution led by enslaved Africans and Afro-Creoles was repeatedly portrayed. However, as in Welles’s production of Macbeth,

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sensationalist and primitivist images of the revolutionaries and their cultural practices, especially ‘voodoo’, competed with more informed efforts at representing the radical freedom sought by the revolutionaries. The post-revolutionary reign of Henri Christophe, known for building his palace Sans Souci and neighbouring Citadel with the cruelly forced labour of black Haitians, further complicated portrayals of Haiti.32 This assertion of black power through the virtual re-enslavement of black people (and following the massacre of remaining whites on the island ordered by Jean-Jacques Dessalines) has made Christophe an ambiguous figure in Haitian history and source of a deeply ‘terrified consciousness’ on the part of white Creoles and planters throughout plantation America. I suggest that this cultural environment with its reminders of the revolutionary past of the Caribbean – its betrayals and shifts in power and the resurgence of Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices – along with the revelations of history’s silences and all the ambivalence and anxiety these revelations tapped into, shaped Rhys’s writing of Wide Sargasso Sea. Further, it helps to explain her staging of key fictional scenes on the veranda – renamed glacis – as battles over words, over the past, and ultimately over literary history. Glacis, italicised and carefully defined by the young Antoinette, becomes a portal word, opening to this deeper, complex and largely unrecorded past. The Federal Theatre Project produced Macbeth under Welles’s direction at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem. Starring an all-black cast, the play ran from 14 April to 20 June 1936, winning rave reviews and sold-out performances. It was then performed at the Adelphi Theater on Broadway from 6 July to 17 July before taking off for a national tour and returning for another New York run, ending 17 October.33 Apparently Welles set Macbeth in Haiti, with the reign of Henri Christophe in mind, because he felt it would create a more realistic setting for the African American actors. For Welles, a Haitian setting meant ‘jungle’ and a Birnam Wood made of palm trees, three witches transformed into ‘voodoo women’, Hecate recast as a male voodoo priest wielding a bullwhip, and actual African drummers from Sierra Leone supposedly familiar with voodoo practices.34 Though sensationalised, the play did bring black actors to the stage in a serious Shakespearean tragedy, one that replaces the Scottish king with allusions to a black Haitian ruler, formerly a slave and heroic revolutionary, turned tyrant.35 The set design alluded to Christophe as well, featuring sloping steps that led to a broad terrace or walkway at the top of a wall and then to a palace and tower that very much resemble the architecture of Christophe’s Sans Souci (Figures 3.1 and 3.2). In the final scene, Macbeth stands on

­74     Mary Lou Emery

Figure 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

Figure 3.2  The front of the Sans-Souci Palace in Milot, Haiti. Photograph by Rémi Kaupp, Wikimedia Commons

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the walkway, looking out on the sloping fortification or glacis, ‘frozen with horror’ as Macduff starts ‘up the battlements’. Their sword fight takes place on the walkway, and Macbeth falls from it into the ‘jungle’ below where Macduff beheads him. At the end, Hecate and the ‘voodoo women’ hold the head of Macbeth high as Hecate pronounces the final words, transferred from Act I, ‘The charm’s wound up!’36 In Welles’s production, the fulfilment of the ‘art’ of voodoo37 triumphs not just over Macbeth/Christophe but over the king’s reliance on what seems a more logical reasoning. In the end, he has failed to see, failed to imagine, the possibilities of his world. Similarly, in Wide Sargasso Sea, the prophecy of an obeah woman is fulfilled when Christophine tells ‘Rochester’ that his willingness to ‘give [his] eyes never to have seen this abominable place’ is ‘the first damn word of truth [he] speaks’, and she seals his fate (or winds the charm) with ‘muttered words’ in a language he does not recognise (96–7). Readers familiar with Jane Eyre know that Rochester does literally lose his sight and recognise that it is due to his own inability to see or imagine the possibilities of the world of which he has become part. This is a triumph for an Afro-Caribbean spiritual worldview, but ironically, its victory stands only because of the previous literary ‘truth’ portrayed in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë in which Antoinette becomes Bertha Mason, the ‘madwoman in the attic’, who sets Thornfield Hall ablaze. The fire she sets sends Antoinette to the battlements of the Hall, a word that acknowledges its history as not only residence for the Rochester family but fortress to be defended. Indeed, in Brontë’s novel, Mrs Fairfax tells Jane that the Rochesters ‘have been rather a violent than a quiet race’ (162).38 These battlements are the Hall’s defining feature by which Rochester identifies the house to Jane. While leaning over the battlements, Jane first surveys the estate; reaching them again, she walks along a corridor, looks out over the fields and longs for ‘a power of vision’.39 ‘Out on the battlements’ in Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette gains what certainly qualifies as a power of vision, understands why she was brought there and what she must do (112). Enacting her part in Jane Eyre, but differently, requesting and receiving Christophine’s obeah help as the fire rages, she jumps. It is not my intention to draw close lines of correspondence between ‘Voodoo’ Macbeth and Wide Sargasso Sea, rather to suggest that in the context of its performance and the fervour surrounding Haiti during the years when Rhys began working on Wide Sargasso Sea, its influence is quite possible. This influence may well extend to other portrayals of the Haitian Revolution, including Christophe and the battlements of his palace/fortress Sans Souci. The battlements on the

­76     Mary Lou Emery set of ‘Voodoo’ Macbeth replicate those of Sans Souci as portrayed in images available at the time;40 Sans Souci and the Citadel also became the focus of Carpentier’s novel, The Kingdom of this World, published in English in 1957, the year Rhys signed a contract with Deutsch for Wide Sargasso Sea. Though I have no direct evidence that Rhys read Carpentier’s work, the final scenes on the battlements in Wide Sargasso Sea echo important passages in The Kingdom of this World. When Ti Noël, the former Haitian slave and protagonist of Carpentier’s novel, achieves at the end a great philosophical realisation, he climbs onto a table, where he views the sky and feels ‘a great green wind’. He sees before him emblems of Sans Souci, the Citadel and a nearby plantation on which he has laboured. These include furnishings, volumes of the Encyclopédie, a music box and a doll. He also hears the bellows of bulls that had been sacrificed in the building of the Citadel. All of these ‘[rise] into the air, as the last ruins of the plantation [come] tumbling down’ (180).41 Ti Noël, who has already learned how to shape-shift into animals and birds, vanishes and is never seen again. In the concluding scenes of Wide Sargasso Sea, when Antoinette views ‘all [her] life’ in the sky, she too sees emblems of plantation life and of Thornfield, including furnishings, a painting by Millet and the garden at Coulibri. She also hears the call of the parrot Coco who fell in flames from the glacis, hears the voice of her husband calling her Bertha, and sees ‘over the edge’ of the battlements her childhood friend Tia, daughter of a black Martinican woman, from whom she was separated by acts of betrayal and violence. All these appear before her in a dream of flying or floating in which her hair ‘stream[s] out like wings’ in the wind (112) as the great house flames behind her. Again, close lines of correspondence are impossible. However, as with Ti Noël, Antoinette’s awakening and power of vision bring her death, and though not in the same way as Carpentier’s, Rhys’s prose moves into the realm of a magical realism he associated with the Caribbean. It is an art of mixing that recognises the presence of more than one world and brings them together. We can read Antoinette as, in a sense, shifting shapes, from a vicious madwoman in Jane Eyre to a dispossessed Creole heiress caught in the legacies of plantation slavery, and she now vanishes at the end of Wide Sargasso Sea into an uncanny literary space between the worlds of two novels. The veranda, as threshold space and creolised architectural form, also brings together different worlds, and we might read its presence in Rhys’s fiction as shifting into various shapes. Each shift – from terrace to glacis, imitation summer house to ajoupa, glacis to veranda and then to battlements – opens the narrative to a conflicted past of violent

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­ ispossession and appropriation. As a material structure, it offers a d fictional setting on which battles take place, and in its transformations from one word to another, we glimpse a material history of creolisation from a centuries-long past, partially obscured. This material history accompanies dynamics of linguistic creolisation and modernist multilingualism through which we can also read Rhys’s shift to glacis. Ania Spyra has recently analysed the Welsh hiraeth in Voyage in the Dark as a ‘mistranslated untranslatable’ – that is, a moment in which the narrative plays out the double-sided opacity of linguistic difference.42 Perhaps Antoinette’s definition of glacis deliberately mistranslates its meaning in the original French, shifting it to a space between its English meanings of garden slope and military defence, yet retaining its Frenchness through the italics. Like Antoinette and her mother, the word has been dispossessed of a fixed national identity or home; yet its assertion through Antoinette’s voice also resists such ownership and insists on its dynamic in-betweenness, a significance generated through slides from one language to another, one meaning to another. Paradoxically, attention to the slides, rather than fixed translations, returns us to the Old French glacier, to slide or slip. If we read the final shape taken by the veranda in Rhys’s writing as that of the battlements of Thornfield Hall, its apparent finality also loosens and slips through a linguistic allusion to Dominica, named by the indigenous Caribs ‘Waitukubuli’ or ‘Land of Many Battles’.43 In its demystification of the Caribbean, exposing the supposed garden paradise as one of coercion, conflict, betrayal and resistance, Wide Sargasso Sea follows the Caribs in recognising its battlegrounds and defences as defining features. Through the shifting shapes of the veranda, Rhys links those Caribbean fortifications to the battlements of England, charting discrepant connections between conflicting worlds of history, literature and language. In those connections, we glimpse lost fragments of the past and alternatives to outcomes already written. Often it seems that these glimpses come through a dreamy consciousness experienced by many of Rhys’s characters. Wide Sargasso Sea, like Voyage in the Dark, Good Morning, Midnight and ‘Mixing Cocktails’ seems in fact to privilege dreams. Antoinette dreams three times in the novel, and the dreams all come fictionally true; Anna in Voyage wanders about England as if in a dream and experiences a montage of hallucinated images and voices in the final scene; Sasha in Good Morning, Midnight, seems to dream the man who enters her room at the novel’s conclusion; and the narrator in ‘Mixing Cocktails’ indulges in daydreams until forced to stop. In all of these, however, the materiality of the plantation system is very much present, at the join of history, the literary ‘real’ and the imagined. In

­78     Mary Lou Emery my example of the veranda, as prompted by Walcott’s poem, we find Rhys’s modernist art of mixing taking off from ‘the edge’ of a creolised architectural form, originating in West African, Bengali and indigenous cultures before European contact, then circulating in its many successive shapes throughout the Atlantic world.

Notes   1. Derek Walcott, ‘Jean Rhys’, The New Yorker (28 April, 1980), p. 48.   2. In my analysis of a ‘material modernism’ in Rhys’s writing, I am building on recent work on the ‘new materialisms’ and on the relationship between architecture and literature. Especially influential have been the collection The New Materialisms with its substantive introduction by the editors Coole and Frost (The New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010) and Laura Doyle’s recent work on inter-imperiality, phenomenology and modernism (‘Notes Toward a Dialectical Method: Modernities, Modernisms, and the Crossings of Empire’, Literature Compass, 7.3 (2010): 195–213). I have been guided by Spurr’s Architecture and Modern Literature in which he articulates the significance of the intersection of discourses of architecture and literature as symptoms of and responses to ‘modernity as a crisis of meaning’ (David Spurr, Architecture and Modern Literature [Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2012], p. 6). Gleason’s Sites Unseen with its chapter on the ‘piazza tales’ in Charles Chestnutt’s conjure stories has been particularly helpful (William A. Gleason, Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature [New York and London: New York University Press, 2011]). Given the context of the colonial system in general, the collection Colonial Modernities edited by Scrivner and Prakash has also guided my thinking. Scrivner and Prakash offer a compelling discussion of the literary representation of architecture as representation by one art of another, but also of representations of actual material conditions, structures and spaces (Peter Scrivner and Vikramaditya Prakash (eds), Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon [London: Taylor and Francis, 2007]). This doubling and intertwining of the material and the representational make portrayals of the veranda as an emblem of the plantation and a creolised architectural form, an especially rich point of entry to Rhys’s fiction.  3. OED on-line: http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/view/Entry/2223 48?redirectedFrom=veranda& and quoted in King, (‘Appendix’, p. 265). King has identified its first recorded use in Portuguese in a 1498 account of Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India (Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture, 2nd edn [New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995], p. 266).   4. I would like to thank Ania Spyra for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. For a discussion of Caribbean modernism as ‘planetary’, see Mary Lou Emery, ‘Caribbean Modernism: Plantation to Planetary’, in Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough (eds), The Oxford Handbook

Rhys’s Material Modernism     79 of Global Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) pp. 48–77.  5. Jean Rhys, The Collected Short Stories (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1987), p. 36. All short story citations are taken from this volume.   6. Robert Mugerauer, ‘Toward an Architectural Vocabulary: The Porch as a Between’, in Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei (eds), The Domestic Space Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012) p. 266.  7. Gleason points out that the piazza in the southern US displayed white leisure in a segregated space and provided an ‘elevated platform of surveillance’ (Sites Unseen, p. 74).  8. Jordan Stouck reads the story in light of Glissant’s theory of creolisation and Kristeva’s theories of feminine subjectivity (Stouck, ‘Distilling Identities: Jean Rhys’s “Mixing Cocktails” and Feminine Creole Process’, Journal of Caribbean Literatures, special issue on Jean Rhys ed. Mary Lou Emery, 3.3 [Summer 2003]: 27–36.)   9. Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (New York: Norton, 1982). 10. Quoted in Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture, 2nd edn (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995 [1984]), p. 266. 11. Ibid. 12. In the previous paragraph and following summary discussion, I rely on Edwards, ‘Complex Origins of the American Domestic Piazza-VerandaGallery’, Material Culture, 21.2 (1989): 2–58, and on John Vlach, AfroAmerican Tradition in Decorative Arts (Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978), pp. 136–8. 13. Edwards, ‘Complex Origins’, p. 39. 14. Ibid., p. 40. 15. King indicates the influence of Muslim architecture on Bengali designs in the development of the bungalow and its veranda. For variations on spelling, see King, Bungalow, p. 18. 16. Gleason points out a related irony concerning the apparently ‘white space’ of the plantation veranda and its ‘complexly multicultural origins’ (Sites Unseen, p. 86). 17. See, especially, Doyle, ‘Dialectical Method’ and Doyle, ‘Inter-Imperiality: Dialectics in Postcolonial World History’, Interventions, 16.2 (2014): 159–96. 18. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, ed. Judith Raiskin (New York and London: Norton, 1999), p. 11. All subsequent citations are from this volume. 19. http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/view/Entry/78617 20. James Curl, the Oxford Dictionary of Architecture (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 318. One definition for glacis – glacis de séchange – describes an ‘open-air terrace’ in Haiti or Cuba, used for drying coffee and vegetables. Nicolas Verton and Jay Edwards, A Creole Lexicon: Architecture, Landscape, People (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2004), p. 109. This, too, however, seems a feature quite different from the glacis as described in Wide Sargasso Sea. 21. See http://militaryhistory.about.com/od/glossaryofmilitaryterms/g/Glacis. htm and Curl, Dictionary of Architecture. 22. http://www.lennoxhonychurch.com/heritage.cfm?Id=229 and http://www.

­80     Mary Lou Emery open.uwi.edu/sites/default/files/bnccde/dominica/centre/jrbio.html Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, Ed. Judith L. Rankin (New York and London: Norton, 1999), no pg. 23. Edwards, ‘Complex Origins’, p. 47. See also the OED http://www.oed. com.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/view/Entry/4445?redirectedFrom=ajoupa& 24. Gleason discusses a similar framed narrative in Chestnutt’s ‘Conjure Tales’ (pp. 67−104) but with different implications. 25. Kenneth Ramchand, ‘Terrified Consciousness’, in Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and its Background (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), p. 225. 26. Angier describes an early version of Wide Sargasso Sea titled Le Revenant written before 1940 (Carole Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work [Boston, Toronto, London: Little, Brown and Company, 1990] pp. 223, 371). Rhys continued to work on the novel throughout the 1940s and ’50s, mentioning it in her letters at various points. 27. For discussions of cultural productions related to Haiti during this period, see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 2011); Simon Callow, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995); and Philip James Kaisary, The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997). 28. See especially Michael J. Dash, ‘The Theater of the Haitian Revolution/ The Haitian Revolution as Theater’, Small Axe, 9.2 (Sept. 2005): 16–23; also Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995); Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Hegel and Haiti’, Critical Inquiry, 26.4 (Summer, 2000): 821–65; and, most recently, Kaisary, The Haitian Revolution. 29. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, pp. 70–107. 30. Rhys spent three weeks in New York and wrote to Scott on 10 August, sometime after her return to England. Though exact dates of her stay are not available, she was quite possibly present during the July performances. Angier, Jean Rhys, pp. 282 and 354–9 and Rhys, The Letters, pp. 30–2. 31. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, pp. 31–69. 32. Christophe built both Sans Souci and the Citadel LaFerrière as palaces for his residence and as fortresses, but the Citadel was high in the mountains and even less accessible than Sans Souci. 33. Scott Newstok and Ayanna Thompson (eds), Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 242. 34. I quote in this paragraph from the playscript available on the website for the Federal Theatre Project: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fedtp/ftmb1. html 35. See Rippy, ‘Black Cast Conjures White Genius’ in Newstok and Thompson (pp. 83–90), for a full discussion of the controversies surrounding the racial politics of the play. 36. III, iv, 6 Playscript, Federal Writers’ Theater, Library of Congress. See also remaining footage on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=QZLrqJka-EU 37. Playscript, I, i, 4.

Rhys’s Material Modernism     81 38. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre www.planetebook.com/ebooks/Jane-Eyre.pdf 39. Ibid., p. 166. 40. For example, the inside cover and frontispiece of a very popular travelogue, Black Haiti by Blair Niles (1926, 1927 and currently in facsimile), are composed solely of a photograph of Sans Souci, clearly showing the glacis that leads to a high wall, walkways, battlements and a tower. 41. Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of this World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957). 42. Spyra, Ania, ‘Language and Belonging in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark’, in Mary Wilson and Kerry L. Johnson (eds), Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 83. 43. Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, p. 57, n. 2.

Chapter 4

Jean Rhys’s Environmental Language: Oppositions, Dialogues and Silences Elaine Savory I was finally aware of the existence of death, of misfortune, poverty, disease. I finally arrived at the certainty that the Devil was quite as powerful as God, perhaps more so. An unconscious Manichee. I didn’t believe, as I read, that it was two faces of the same thing. It was a fight between the two and the Devil was responsible for everything that had gone wrong. I was passionately on the side of God, but it was difficult to see what I could do about it [. . .] Wondering what my life would be like now that God and the Devil were far away. Jean Rhys, Smile Please (1979)1

Of course this was a memory in old age of a time of being really young, but the elderly Rhys could at least name the feeling she remembered from childhood about Dominica. This personal definition of Manichean ethical opposition is one strand of her apprehension of the environment, but she also understood complex interactions of the powerless, the powerful and place. Rhys reminds us not to romanticise, homogenise or become defeatist about human life or the environments on which that depends. Her sense of the oppositional was shaped by her experience as a child in Dominica where she learned Protestant versus Catholic, French versus English and the tensions between white and black, poor and welloff, local and foreign. She fought these in adult life, wanting to reject her race, bucking the conventions of her class and gender, and giving up religion, but nothing seemed to defeat those entrenched identities.2 Oppositions also informed her later experience in Europe. She had an acute sense of being an outsider from the West Indies, poor and powerless in a world run by the rich and influential, and female in a maledominated world. Unlike Hegel’s idea of the dialectic, Rhys’s youthfully intense idea of the Manichean offers no hope of ultimate resolution of conflict. In her fictional world, both non-human and human are mostly controlled by the powerful, though sometimes nature exhibits vast

­86     Elaine Savory power (most exemplified in Rhys’s brief memoir on the volcanic eruption in Martinique in ‘Heat’).3 Though her connection between suffering people and suffering nature can seem highly anthropomorphic, something more interesting is going on. Rhys resisted pastoral and other evasive or quiescent ways of relating to nature and the environment. Her apprehension of the environment was complex and varied. In her childhood Dominica, nature clearly seemed in charge not just of itself but at times of people as well. She gives this idea to her narrator in the story ‘Temps Perdi’: There are places which are supposed to be hostile to human beings and to know how to defend themselves. When I was a child it used to be said this island was one of them. You are getting along fine and then a hurricane comes, or a disease of the crops that nobody can cure, and there you are – more West Indian ruins and labour lost – yes it’s more than three hundred years ago that somebody carved ‘Temps Perdi’ on a tree near by, they say.4

After leaving Dominica, Rhys became mostly an urban person who spent many years in cities (London and Paris and a brief moment in Vienna), though she also lived as an impoverished stranger in holiday home territory in the far south-west of Britain, where the environment is supposed to co-operate with vacation business. Everywhere Rhys lived, environmental consciousness was rudimentary in her lifetime, so that her representation of power dynamics and the environment (human and non-human) has to have come from her own intuitive sense of what might lie beyond the obvious.5 Wilson Harris, the most environmentally aware of all Caribbean writers, points out an important perception of place and history in Rhys’s figure of the ‘tree of life’ in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966).6 Harris reads Rhys as expressing ‘an obvious correspondence with “the garden in the Bible”’, and a likely entirely unconscious awareness of a ‘pre-Columbian figuration’, especially because ‘ancient Arawaks and Macusis’ thought of a particular foodbearing tree as the ‘tree of life’.7 This is the tree which is in flames at the end of the novel (and remembered by Antoinette far earlier). For Harris, it signifies Antoinette’s imminent escape into death and flying home as a spirit to her beloved Coulibri. In Smile Please, Rhys remembers the land in Dominica seemed to her ‘alive’ when she was young, though painfully indifferent to her, ‘it turned its head away [. . .] and that broke my heart’ (66). The originality in this is the entire lack of desire to control Dominica’s land, or even to imagine it hers: Rhys acknowledges the earth can have its own scepticism about humans. Harris himself provides a gloss on the reliability of Rhys’s childhood

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memories of the Caribbean. Harris’s own sense of the environment was not only forged in Guyana, where he came to know the rainforest as a government surveyor, but as a night-shift factory worker in Britain for a few months. As he left the factory one morning, part of a ‘stream’ of workers (the metaphor takes on irony in an ecocritical context), he presciently thought that ‘the rain forests in Brazil and Guyana were under threat, erosion of soils was occurring in the United States and around the globe, weather patterns were changing’: he is able to link the factory work to larger global impacts upon the environment.8 Harris has lived in Britain since 1955, which has not inhibited his deeply thoughtful fictive representations of environment in Guyana, and so he can imagine that Rhys’s sense of the environment remains alert to apprehensions of place and the relation of place, people and hierarchy she acquired as a child.9 Rhys’s urban environments, as we shall see, are illuminated by tiny but significant details of the fate of fauna and flora, often associated with the fate of her embattled protagonists. This essay argues that reading Rhys through this lens of ecocriticism, especially as it relates to the postcolonial, is immensely productive. Elizabeth Deloughrey and George B. Handley say, in their introduction to Postcolonial Ecologies, ‘biotic and political ecologies are materially and imaginatively intertwined [. . .] one vital aspect of postcolonial ecology is to reimagine this displacement between people and place through poetics’.10 Rhys’s fiction expresses a pained connection, often as displacement, between people and place with her characteristic originality and awareness. It is by exploring ‘buried’ clues, small linked references in the fiction, that we can appreciate her awareness of environment. Ileana Rodriguez’s argument in her book House, Garden, Nation is relevant here. She knows that Europe and Latin America have different constructions of nature, but argues that gender also provides a crucial perspective. She notes the distinction between different cultural and national conceptions of the garden, quoting Angel Rama: ‘the critical panorama of European literatures involves a well-charted and better cultivated garden, whereas the American seems a jungle where roads are plotted with difficulty, and often with the swing of a machete’; Rodriguez adds that gardens in women’s literature may be compared with wildernesses in literature by men, itself connected to notions of the nation constructed in ‘nativist fictions’ by men in the Americas as ‘a notion of the State tied to the exploration of nature’.11 Such large generalisations are suspect, but provide a useful point of departure, especially as they are employed in discussions of the difference between North American ecocriticism (a lot to do with the male journey into

­88     Elaine Savory the w ­ ilderness) and postcolonial criticism (including the Caribbean). In the case of Rhys’s sense of the environment, there is a complex weaving of apprehension of the ‘well-charted’ European environment and the ‘wilderness’, most definitely seen through the lens of gender. Complex: because whereas Rhys’s women are often represented as nature erupting out of control when sufficiently provoked, in her creative non-fiction piece, ‘The Imperial Road’, in which she and her husband look for remains of a failed colonial attempt to tame the Dominica forest for European development, she is not at one with the wild environment.12 In Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Timothy Morton offers an insight into the connection between Freud and ecopoetics which is highly relevant to thinking about Rhys’s work. Morton points out that in his study of the uncanny, Freud oscillates between talking about it as the experience of a self and the experience of a place.13 ‘What is “in here” and “out there” fold and redouble and entangle and cross over themselves’: a good way of thinking about Rhys’s sense of the relation between place and person in her fiction.14 An ecological consciousness, as Morton suggests, requires a certain discomfort, the prime indicator of the difference between pastoral or simple pleasure in a nice view of countryside and an anxiety about what drives the relation between human and non-human in rural and urban settings.15 Rhys’s representations of major fictional characters in particular locations employ ecological details easily missed by a fast reading, but often denoting an anxiety which links the human and non-human. It is not possible to claim for her a developed environmental consciousness, but to return to Harris’s argument there is most definitely an alertness to environmental contexts and a subtle consciousness which links people and place in the frame of violation of both. Her description of the garden at Coulibri is of an Eden lost because of slavery and the human corruption that entailed. But whereas separation from a loved landscape has inspired pastoral from Theocritus on, Rhys avoids nostalgia and is ruthlessly acute about all sorts of contradictions in the apprehension of the relation of people and place in her work. In her work, nature is not a benevolent being or attractive ornament. It often aids and abets amoral power, but also when given the chance to escape the particularly British desire to turn wilderness into dependent, subservient garden, it can become a kind of parallel to Rhys’s anarchistic (if often outgunned and outlawed) protagonists. Also relevant here is Timothy Clark’s gloss on the relevance of Heidegger to environmental consciousness. In adopting the term physis, (the Greek origin of the term nature), Clark argues, Heidegger wants us to think about ‘the realm of that which arises of and from itself’, some-

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thing close to Rhys’s apprehension of the way Dominican landscape seems to ‘be alive’ and makes its own choices.16 Finally, Judith Raiskin (Snow on the Cane Fields, 1996) presents an interesting argument about Jean-Paul Sartre’s representation of ‘cultural manichaeism’, on which German fascist notions of Jew and Aryan were based, and ways in which this idea was refracted through the work of Mannoni and Frantz Fanon, the latter emphasising that the stark difference between coloniser and colonised was a result of economic and cultural exploitation during colonialism. Raiskin argues that Rhys contributes to debates in the 1960s and on about colonial identity by representing, for example, Antoinette as constantly moving between identities. In a similar way, Rhys’s sense of the environment as we read it in her work is multifaceted, a kind of dialogue that speaks to fractures in the characters’ identities.

The Botanical Gardens in Roseau and Other Lost Edens Botanical gardens, established in colonies of the empire, demonstrate British colonial domination over horticulture (the moving of plants across the world during empire), explored brilliantly by Richard Drayton in Nature’s Government.17 Drayton points out these were intended for public pleasure but also for ‘the protected propagation of European plants, animals and ideas of landscape’ as well as hoped for ‘symbols of wise government’ and ‘theatres in which exotic nature was, literally, put in its place’.18 British elites encouraged Britons at home to think of nature as planned estates or gardens, in which control is key, the very opposite of the post-Emancipation Coulibri garden in Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. The economically powerful in Britain or the colonies directed their gardeners to develop and maintain their estates, whilst subordinate gardeners lavished nurture on their plant charges. Kew, the spectacular British experiment in transplanting flora from originary sources and domesticating them enough to be kept in London or moved on, gave rise to imperial locations for other plant nurseries. Drayton speaks of those in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay.19 Dominica’s, in Roseau, was just one more, like the one in Antigua which Jamaica Kincaid knew growing up. She comments perceptively about the nature of English control of landscape and gardens in her home country of Antigua (she herself admits to a passion for gardening): When the English were a presence in Antigua, the places they lived in were surrounded by severely trimmed hedges of plumbago, topiaries of willow

­90     Elaine Savory (casuarina), frangipani, hibiscus; their grass was green (strange, because water was scarce) and freshly cut; there were arches covered with roses, and there were beds of marigolds and cannas and chrysanthemums.20

Antiguans, she goes on, learned this practice and replicated it, as Kincaid argues, once ‘they could live in a house with more than one room, had gardens in which only flowers were grown, and this would make even more clear that they had some money’.21 Helen Tiffin discusses the idea of a lost Eden in the work of Rhys and Phyllis Shand Allfrey: both employ tropes of the ruined or ‘parodic’ garden to express the impossibility of the retrieval, in the Caribbean, of that ‘Paradise Garden’ European botanists had hoped to find or later sought to create [. . .] The ‘fallen’ garden and the rose and the daffodil then became inescapable elements in the Jamaican, Antiguan, Dominican, and Trinidadian imaginaries [. . .]22

But for Rhys, a public garden was an originary place of hurt and confusion and her representation of private ones is either when cultivation has ceased (Coulibri) or there is indifference to gardening at all (as in her fictional urban spaces). She suffered child abuse in the Roseau Botanical Gardens at the hands of an elderly male friend of her mother’s visiting from Britain, and clearly indulging in elderly male impotent fantasies. Rhys had been instructed by her mother to show this man the Garden. Rhys’s Black Exercise Book has a rough telling of the tale, representing the trauma of the memory of his touching of her body and his creation of a sadomasochistic fantasy about her and himself. But as Sue Thomas points out, there is a specific association of this disturbing event with frangipani flowers in the Black Exercise Book.23 The environment (a lovely planned garden) was changed forever by association with sexual assault by an elderly man.24 ‘Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose’ represents this traumatic experience. The violation occurs under a large tree, and later walks with the abuser take Phoebe both back to the Gardens and up the Morne, during which she is not physically touched but drawn into the old man’s irresponsible and utterly selfish desires. This is not conversation but perverse control of a young mind. Importantly, below the surface of this terse account of the ending of a child’s sexual innocence (parallel with the loss of Eden) is a thread of connection between the violation of the natural environment (made into a sort of plant zoo, a botanical arrangement) and the violation of a child brought up to be obedient to colonial cultural mores. Phoebe, the girl victim, knows abut Kew and at first admires the botanical garden made by a man who came from there to make the Gardens in Roseau, a Mr Harcourt-Smith. The subsequent vanishing of details of the natural world as the story goes

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on is key: Rhys eradicates that which consorts with imperial and sexist control in Phoebe’s mind. We know victims of abuse so often erase memories. In ‘Kikimora’, the obnoxious Baron Mumtael appears to have a conversation with the protagonist about a painting called ‘Paradise’, which bears close relation to one Rhys owned and mentioned to a friend. Veronica Gregg describes the exchange (more the Baron trying to impose his mistaken ideas than a conversation) as being based in the Baron’s sense of exclusivity and Elsa’s of inclusion, for he wishes to find in his adopted homeland of England a security in ‘separation and exclusion’.25 It is another revision of the idea of Paradise in Rhys’s work. From the wild garden at Coulibri in Wide Sargasso Sea to the domestic space of the yard behind the family house in Roseau in Voyage, Rhys’s Caribbean is not an idyllic free space but a series of confinements for her protagonists, even for a man like Ramage in ‘Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers’, who abandons his European cultural directive to control nature for a baffling idyllic fusion of himself with a land he scarcely knows (his public nakedness is both a kind of futile innocence and a manifestation of arrogance in the light of alienating his wife and neighbours). This ultimately leads to his self-inflicted death. The irony of course is that Ramage is connected in the minds of local anti-colonial journalists to the ill-fated ‘Imperial Road’ project intended to open up the interior of Dominica to development by young colonial adventurer Englishmen. In this light, Ramage appears a self-styled ‘king of the cannibals’, his desire to be remote from urban settlement and to live by his own rules undermined by the community’s anxieties about a white man who neither explains himself nor seems to be behaving by colonial mores defining sanity. An interestingly different version of this ‘white’ affinity with the environment can be seen in Kamau Brathwaite’s praise of Julian Hunte, a white Barbadian considered mad by many, but unlike Ramage, a local. He swam around Barbados out of environmental concern and said he was saved at one point by a turtle.26 Caribbean nature is not, for Rhys, the contained and manicured habitat for tourists, but threatening, as in ‘The Imperial Road’, or beautiful but not understood by the outsider, as in ‘Mixing Cocktails’, or is sheer unstoppable power, the terrifying volcanic eruption in ‘Heat’. The struggle to tame nature is mostly inspired by English anxiety about the uncontrolled or the utterly strange. There is also a willingness on the part of the colonised to imagine details of an English environment with a certain wistfulness, though Eddie in ‘The Day They Burned the Books’ resents strawberries and daffodils: the most magnificent natural detail of his home is a ‘fine mango tree, which bore prolifically’ (152).

­92     Elaine Savory Then both Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), grounded in Dominica and the Caribbean, are a devastating dialogue between freedom and enslavement, wild nature and subdued nature, the Caribbean and England. In both, Rhys enacts her complex dialogue about power, people and place. The English countryside is complicated space for Rhys’s alienated women, whether it is real or the fake landscapes onstage (as when Rhys played in music hall). In ‘Till September Petronella’, Petronella remembers fluffing lines in a show which had a ‘lovely background of an English castle and garden – half ruined and half not’ (149). ‘Lovely’ is clearly hugely ironical. She lies to Marston when she tells him that it is a dream (something good) to leave London; in fact it is boring and a local farmer is hostile (133). After she gets back to London, alone, she goes to Hyde Park to sit – the taxi driver irritably demanding to know what she intends, to ‘Look at the trees?’ (146). Somehow trees in a park in London are more comforting than the alien English nature in the countryside. In some of Rhys’s novels, Quartet (1929, 1928 as Postures), After Leaving Mr McKenzie (1931) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939), protagonists are in entirely urban space, London or Paris, but urban space in which they do not quite fit, as if they were some sort of marginalised plant or animal which must find a small crevice in which to live or, having lost the battle for viable space, approach dying. They must put up with people who control their space and encounter certain places which are in service to those people. Her geographies of cities in her full length fiction are very accurate and economically inform the narrative, reflecting their differences; but ecologies of those cities are similar: the human powerless are ignored or hunted and in response defiant or compliant.27 The non-human world in the city is contained within urban needs. Urban space includes streets as well as parks, and both are highly controlled spaces. Even art becomes a possession of the wealthy, and if depicting nature, contains it within a house with an owner. In the story ‘Temps Perdi’, Rhys creates a dialectical tension between different representations or experiences of nature and the environment, in different geographical spaces, as she did in Voyage in the Dark. The house, Rolvenden, has been abandoned by its owner because of significant fear of bombing raids and perhaps invasion by Hitler’s forces. The wealthier take advantage of their opportunities both to make money from renting and to find safe haven somewhere else. The army has taken over two other houses on the property. All three houses are on the east coast of Britain, thus potentially vulnerable to invasions. The garden of the main house, Rolvenden, is highly controlled: ‘a lawn, a large veg-

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etable garden [. . .] a few sad flowers’ (256). The narrator is alienated in this English countryside at a dreary time of year, where everything ‘wears this neutral mask – the village, the people, the sky, even the trees’ (260). Nature is reduced to silence and dullness. The second thread of the story is Europe, and the narrator’s memories of Vienna long ago as smelling of lilac (264). She loved a particular dress, because it ‘was like cornfields and the sky’ and made her feel both happy and free. A third narrative line concerns the Carib Quarter in Dominica, at a house and estate called ‘Temps Perdi’ (meaning wasted time), where very tall white cedar trees have white flowers ‘very faintly tinged with pink’ (268), flowers celebrated in an old creole song the narrator cannot remember any more.28 Here everything ‘had run wild, but there was still hibiscus growing by the stone garden walls and butterflies made love over the thorny bougainvillea’ (368). The narrator and her party see a frangipani tree with blossoms coming out (271) and imagine the immortelles in blossom, which will happen soon. The narrator thinks of an illustration in a book of a Carib girl ‘crowned with flowers’, with a parrot on her shoulder (271). But this is not Paradise, for there are tensions and even violence as the Caribs resist incursions of their space and autonomy. Still, it is here that the narrator feels most at home, where nature is alive and taking care of itself, like the fireflies. Three spaces are important in the story, the war-threatened bleakness of rural England, Vienna in a happy time, evocative of spring (lilacs) and summer (cornfields and sky), and finally the tropical ebullience of home. Rhys employs the environment as a subtle language to extend and explore emotional and political contexts for her protagonists.

Predicaments of Roses, Other Flowers, Trees and Animals Carole Angier rightly says of Rhys’s work, ‘Flowers and trees are among the most common and permanent’ of her repertoire of images, and points out the importance of roses as an image of short, beautiful life in Wide Sargasso Sea.29 Rhys’s flowers fall into groups: the wild, often inconvenient; the cultivated, maybe empathetic to a character’s mood or reflective of human invasion into nature; cut or kept flowers which will soon die; and flowers which are artificial. As with geographical spaces, these groups carry different emotional and material resonances. Few are truly wild. The garden at Coulibri is overgrown, as indeed was Milton’s version of Eden in Paradise Lost, a place which needed pruning by as yet unfallen Adam and Eve. But there is evidence of a prior organisation, and there is a strong presence of plants not indigenous

­94     Elaine Savory to Dominica, such as roses, a favourite export of British colonials. It is significant that Rhys remembers her mother having green fingers and growing roses successfully (Smile, Please, 67), particularly given the fact that Rhys’s relationship with her mother was conflicted, with Rhys in rebellion against her mother’s conventionality. Roses become one of Rhys’s favourite tiny tropes: roses have a particularly conflicted space as a long-used literary symbol in English culture, and become useful to Rhys as emblems of conflict between confinement and freedom, between respectability and rebellion against conformity. Many plants in the Caribbean are transplants, imported to provide food or to add an ‘English’ touch to the décor of a garden. Jamaica Kincaid has compiled a long list of plants and trees in the Antigua Botanic garden which are well-established imports: bougainvillea, plumbago, croton, hibiscus, allamanda, poinsettia, Bermuda lily, flamboyant tree, casuarina, Norfolk pine, tamarind, breadfruit.30 Kincaid describes her garden in Vermont as having roses that she loved, which gave rise to ordering ‘a total of thirty-three bushes’ over the course of a long winter spent perusing lots of gardening catalogues.31 She concludes when they are finally planted that ‘abuse must be part of growing roses’32 and eventually she gives up on them as representing too much trouble.33 Rhys’s representations of roses are similarly vexed: they often help her make a point about conflict and hierarchical power, for roses are associated with Dominica but also strongly associated with British power over both flowers and people. Hence in the story ‘Mixing Cocktails’, Rhys remembers the beginning of a rose garden at the new house the family has in the hills: a hint of the Anglicisation of the grounds. For Antoinette, the pleasure of home inheres in whatever grows at home: orchids, roses, tree ferns and honeysuckle, each of which has its own ‘ruined room’, indicating they were ‘housed’ in the garden. She learns in her convent school that Theophilus received a rose which never died and later became a Christian and a martyr (49), so a rose becomes more than just a flower: it is an emblem of faith, but one associated with self-sacrifice and martyrdom. Significantly, the association of flowers with self-sacrifice emerges in the context of her honeymoon, where the honeymoon house is strewn with flowers, with coralita on the dining table and roses on a serving tray (73, 78, 82). That Antoinette herself is being ‘served up’ becomes ominously clear when her husband quotes a sad elegy, a sinister choice in which the speaker aligns roses with the short life of a beautiful young girl. Indeed, Rhys often turns to roses as emblems of death, for roses are associated with death throughout After Leaving Mr Mackenzie: Julia buys expensive roses for her dying mother, even though she thinks they are ‘poor devils’, as if the soon-to-die cut

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roses stand in for the frustrated and unhappy dying mother (Mackenzie, 127) After her mother’s death and burial, the room in which she died still faintly smells of roses (133).34 In the story ‘I Spy a Stranger’ (1969), set in Britain, roses carry mixed messages, sometimes ‘strong’ with a ‘defiant’ colour, but also overly sensitive. Here roses change their meaning dependent upon the emotional mood of the observer. Hence for Mrs Trant at the beginning of the story, the roses in the two beds in the front garden seem hardy, abundant, vital in their colour and abundance: ‘The roses were small, flame-coloured, growing four or five on the same stalk, each with a bud ready to replace it’ (242). The roses reassure her because they remind her of ‘last summer’, before ‘all the frightening changes’ brought by the onset of World War II. The roses shiver at an army lorry’s passing, so sensitive they ‘started shivering before you could see the lorry or even hear it’ (242). Yet they are also ‘strong; hardened by the east wind’, and they look ‘like they would last forever’. In addition, they are a ‘dazzling colour’. But after Mrs Trant is encouraged to think negatively about the lodger, Laura, her feelings about the roses change: their colour is ‘trying’, even ‘menacing [. . .] unreal’ (250). For Laura, the roses become a familiar trope of confinement: whereas Ricky feels ‘a bit ashamed’ in the garden as he takes Laura away, Laura looks at the roses and observes how ‘exquisite’ they are. She resists their cutting: ‘let them live [. . .] One forgets the roses – always a mistake’. She believes that what is happening cannot happen, ‘not while there are roses’ (254). In her new abode, she can see golf links – a manicured, controlled and man-made landscape − but not roses. In ‘Outside the Machine’, Rhys again links roses to entrapment in a system – here the social ‘machine’ – when Madame Tavernier’s ring is described as having ‘two roses, the petals touching each other’ (208). Flowers often feature in Caribbean settings as emblems of the lost or spoiled Paradise. Hence when Antoinette remembers the garden at Coulibri as one that contained ‘all the flowers in the world’ (119), she is trying to assert an Edenic memory. Flowers provide emotional lifts, as at her school, ‘sometime a bright bush of flowers’ (48), or in ‘blazing colours’ (52). She associates the pink and red hibiscus around Christophine’s house with hope when she seeks help to restore her husband’s love (107). Just before she wakes from her last dream and fires the house, she sees the flowers she so loved, stephanotis, orchids, jasmine, as well as tree-ferns, silver and gold ferns (170), flowers reminiscent of her memory of the fire as a child when she remembers ‘the golden ferns and silver ferns, the orchids, the ginger lilies and the roses [. . .] the jasmine and the honeysuckle’ (41). This litany of connection and reconnection

­96     Elaine Savory is an economical way for Rhys to demonstrate Antoinette’s passionate love for the flora of her childhood but more than that, for a lost mistaken innocence, one now known to have been built on an evil past of slavery: Emancipation has brought reality to Eden. Rhys gives this consciousness to Antoinette, though she is still caught between one side of the argument and the other (17). It is good to remember Molly Hite’s judgement (The Other Side, 1989) that Rhys’s achievement involved her placement of ‘marginal characters at the center of her fiction’ which Hite argues destabilises the novel’s traditional privileging of agency (25). In some important ways, flowers and trees destabilise conventional agency in the service of an alternative possibility. Antoinette’s love for the flowers contrasts strongly with her English husband’s reaction to them, and flowers become a powerful indication of the differences between them. Antoinette finds the ‘pop-flowers’ powerful: emblems of wildness, they come out in darkness, look like lilies and carry a strong scent (Rhys uses them in Voyage as well). Her husband, however, dislikes the ‘pop-flowers’, in the same way he finds the vivid colours of the tropics – such as red flowers – disturbing. Though he initially enjoys scents of orange blossom, roses, cloves and cinnamon when he first arrives at the honeymoon house, he carelessly crushes the lovely wreath of frangipani flowers, a gift for the newly married couple (66, 67), and he begins to believe that the flowers that open at the river make him giddy (73, 75, 80). Things really begin to go wrong when Daniel sends his poisonous letter, and the husband reads a book on obeah, in which flowers and fruit are mentioned as propitiating zombies (97). He will subsequently imagine Antoinette as and then turn her into the living dead. When he does notice flowers, significantly, he does so in a way that matches his blurring of Antoinette with Amelie: he compares the white flowers in the brown jugs to Amelie, just as he links Antoinette to Amelie. Flowers here demonstrate the mismatch of Antoinette and Rochester: her vision and his cannot come together, and they cannot respond with empathy one to the other. In urban space, flowers are apt to be cut and contained in vases, and they bear witness to entrapment and death. Julia, for example, remembers flowers being bought ‘by the tart downstairs’ when her baby son died (Mackenzie, 112). Julia also buys a bunch of violets from an old man, a purchase that emphasises both her empathy with the plight of the seller and her own sense of entrapment, for like the fragile, short-lived violets, she is marketable only for a brief time in the bloom of youth (67). Mr James has flowers in his hall, ‘flame-coloured tulips’, some of which are dying but ‘with curved grace’ (116), another image suggestive of Julia, who will briefly experience herself as a flame at her mother’s

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funeral before her rebellious spirit subsides again. Other images of flowers suggest entrapment within middle-class respectability. In ‘A Solid House’, again set in Britain, Captain Roper remembers a trimly maintained house with ‘flower boxes in the windows’, the home of a woman he once knew, a woman he dehumanises as a caged animal, the ‘creature inside’ (225). And throughout Voyage in the Dark, flowers appear at key moments of Anna’s downward spiral: when Walter first tries to seduce Anna, there are red carnations on the table; he sends the violets to her; mimosa is in a vase when she undergoes the abortion (176). Cut flowers can also make manifest an inarticulate sense of entrapment or powerlessness. In Good Morning, Midnight Sasha links key moments in her marriage to memories of cut flowers. Thus when she remarks of the tulips (114)35 that they lavishly give themselves – just as she has lavishly given herself to Enno – Enno responds that perhaps they know they had nothing to give, an ominous foreshadowing of their marriage’s collapse. Artificial flowers are even more dubious and threatening than cut ones. The artificial red rose on Norah’s green dress suggests a pathetic attempt to be chic and alive (71). The wallpaper in the hotel where Sasha and Enno stay in their brief time of happiness is rose-patterned, emblematic of their short-lived happiness (116). Cut roses only last for a brief time and can promise nothing of substance. Similarly, when Julia and Mr Horsfield go to dinner in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, the flowers in the wall paintings, along with dead creatures (lobsters, birds) and fruits (44) form more than still lives: they are associated with the violence of human consumption. Anna’s landlady’s hall table has a plant ‘made of rubber’, which seems to be proud that it is ‘going on forever and ever’ (Voyage, 34).36 It fits in with the ‘spiked railings outside’, presumably because it cheerfully supports the lifeless security of a house with so little of the spirit of happiness. The sofa Walter sits Anna on before taking her to bed has ‘a pattern of small blue flowers’ (36), nature reduced to subservient accomplice, as when in Laurie’s flat (used for paid sex) there is flowered wallpaper (114). In Anna’s new rooms, a dirty moulding of fruits and leaves explicitly mocks nature (40). In Quartet, Lois, Heidler’s partner, wears an overall to paint which has flowers printed on it – the height of removal from their live state (59) and an indication of how Lois belongs to the dead zone of Marya’s imagination. Even more distorted is the wallpaper in the hotel where Marya stays, ‘green and yellow flowers sprawling on a black background’ (111), perhaps somewhat erotic because vaguely reminiscent of Aubrey Beardsley’s work.37 The flowers eventually seem like spiders (117) and then like part of a scene from hell, as she tries to cope with quick sex with Heidler in this ­miserable

­98     Elaine Savory room. These flowers continue to haunt her later when she meets with her estranged husband Stephan (144). After Antoinette is taken to England and shut up in the attic of her husband’s house, she lives with wooden chairs carved with fruit and flowers, dead, fixed emblems (Sargasso Sea, 161). In ‘Outside the Machine’, an old lady trying to survive in a rehabilitation facility wraps herself in a shawl ‘embroidered with pink and yellow flowers’ (190), the only access she has to what might have lifted her spirits in the world she has left. Both she and the fake flowers are trapped. In ‘The Insect World’, Audrey, the protagonist, reads a book that proves depressing, partly because it has flowers with no scent (352). Throughout, these lifeless decorative flowers speak to the dehumanisation, entrapment and powerlessness of Rhys’s protagonists. Similarly, trees are of great importance. Lisa Paravisini-Gebert, who has done important work on the deforestation of the Caribbean, remarks with reference to Rhys: In postcolonial Caribbean literature, this symbolic relationship between the forests and modernity continues to be articulated through the representation of the forests as the ‘natural’ domain of the indigenous or the Creole. Jean Rhys, in Wide Sargasso Sea, addresses this understanding of this cultural role of the forest when she immerses Rochester in the dark (and to him) hostile world of Dominica’s dense forests as a means of narrating his discomfort in his Creole wife’s world.38

This is perfectly true with regard to this example, but trees across the whole of Rhys’s work have a complex and varied set of identities and play a number of roles in different texts. Rhys establishes a vocabulary of tropical trees in those portions of her fiction and her stories set in the Caribbean. Mango trees appear several times in her work, as do frangipanis and the sandbox tree. The white cedar tree, with its brief, delicate flowers, appears in the story ‘Temps Perdi’ and in Sargasso. Orange trees figure in Voyage, and the flamboyant is important in Sargasso, as is the Edenic ‘tree of life’ and the clove tree. Typically, these Caribbean trees signify more vibrant emotional connection than trees in British and European settings. In Voyage, ‘leaves of the beech trees were bright as glass in the sun’(77). In Midnight, Sasha, anything but confident, nevertheless thinks ‘I must be a strong as an oak’(43): like the beech trees, the oak tree speaks to a kind of lifeless strength. In ‘Vienne’ the sycamore trees in Budapest initially form the backdrop of delight, but also become emblematic of the frenetic and fragile happiness of Pierre and Francine (112). These specific trees are significant in their contexts in Rhys’s texts, for, as with flowers, trees often mark or provide a gloss on important emotional events. But they can also indicate a failure of emotion. In Mackenzie, Horsfield reaches his own house and closes the door to shut

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out his entanglement with Julia, a repudiation that marks the stunting of his emotional landscape, a stunting imaged as that of ‘Japanese dwarf trees, suppressed for many generations’ (175). Rhys typically refers more to generic trees and to forests than to specific trees. These vary in their reinforcement of mood and character. But generic trees are mostly a sign of emotional dislocation or stress, because the sense of a tree as particular and still connected to a specific environment is absent. References to trees in this generic sense thus amplify inner turmoil and fear. Rhys deploys this more generic sense of trees in the story ‘The Sound of the River’, in which a couple live in an isolated place the wife chose, which she now feels full of menace, a menace she projects onto the landscape, ‘the black pines or the sky without stars or the thin hinted moon, or the lowering, flat-topped hills or the tor or the big stones’ (237). The river dominates in this menacing place, even when, as on this evening, it is too silent. The husband has sensed something about the river too, thinking it metallic, not like water, and the wife answers it looks frozen. He disagrees, thinking it is much alive (the word ‘alive’ here recalls Rhys’s own sense of the Dominican landscape as both ‘alive’ and ‘indifferent’ to her, thereby breaking her heart). They go to bed, and she cannot easily sleep, but in the morning she speaks of a dream she has had of being in a wood where trees groaned. He does not respond, because he is dead. The groans were likely her husband in the pain of a heart attack which she slept through. She fails to alert help soon enough because she thinks she must listen for the sound of the river, and when she hears it it is, of course, the presence of death. Landscape in this piece is bleak and unhelpful in general, but the trees in the dream are particularly ominous. Generic trees similarly function as emotional markers in other texts. In Mackenzie Julia remembers touching a tree trunk as a child and being comforted ‘because you knew the tree was alive’ and ‘friendly to you, or, at least, not hostile’ (158), a statement that points to how much Julia finds hostile. In Paris as an adult, she observes how the trees are ‘formally shaped, much like the trees of a box of toys’ (179), cheap toys at that: here trees reflect her sense of herself as an object of amusement for men. Still later that same evening, Julia likens the tree branches to claws, a shift that once again reflects a shift of mood (188): now the trees mark her sense of the world as an arena of brutal predation. In Voyage, Anna also connects her moods and memories to trees. Hence she remembers reading about her country, Dominica, being ‘all overgrown with woods’, a dream that hints at her sense that Dominica is now inaccessible to her (17). In another dream she finds herself in a strange ship sailing close to somewhere she thinks is home, but the ‘trees were all

­100     Elaine Savory wrong. These were English trees, their leaves trailing in the water’ (164): the dream again marks her feelings of dislocation and estrangement. As with Julia, trees take on menacing resonances that reflect Anna’s mood. Hence when Anna visits an elderly client in his flat, the ‘big tree’ in the square outside has branches which resemble ‘fingers pointing’ (169). For Sasha in Good Morning, Midnight, trees tend to carry more positive resonances, but they are also stark emblems of bare survival. Thus when Sasha sits outside a bar, she feels she is empty of everything but ‘the thin frail trunks of the trees’ (56). In a terrible state when she is starving, she feels like she is in a dream, ‘where all the faces are masks and only the trees are alive’ (90). Sargasso’s generic trees suggest a subtle alienation or escape, a warning or premonition for Antoinette. Initially trees feel protective, so that when she and Tia bathe in a pool, it seems dark and green because of the trees overhead (21). Similarly, there are comforting trees in her protective convent school yard. But Antoinette’s second dream takes her to an enclosed garden with ‘different trees’ (55): one refuses her desire to cling to it, a warning of difficult times ahead. Trees speak a different language for Antoinette’s conflicted and increasingly lost husband. When drunk, he sketches a house with three floors and a woman in the top one, a house surrounded by English trees: this is his intention now, to take Antoinette and imprison her, if he reaches England again (148). English trees are his cohort of support. He has his own lens for assessing tropical trees. Coconut palms at the fishing village of Massacre are ‘sadly’ leaning (59). He does not like forests, believing them ‘hostile’ (94). When he enters the forest by himself, he finds roses are big as trees near the ruins of a house, and a wild orange tree, domesticated species which have escaped their European masters. He is frightened as night begins to fall and the ‘trees closed over my head’ (95): like so many white men in the tropics, wanting to impose their own will, he seriously fears what he cannot control, and in this he resembles Horsfield, both English men who are terrified by what is mysterious and remote. In ‘Vienne’, European woods round a hotel are frightening (103). The story ends with Pierre driving very fast, on the first leg of a journey to London, ‘flying between two lines of dark trees’, in danger of crashing into one tree, as his wife, Francine, hopes to die. A mass of trees, in the night, are associated here not just with danger and death but with a desire for death. Artificial trees, like artificial flowers, are dead and sometimes sinister. A tin lid features a ‘tidy green tree’ (Voyage, 149), the word ‘tidy’ speaking to its domestication and commodification. In Mackenzie, a lurid wallpaper features a large bird sitting on the branch of a tree which ‘sprouted fungus and queerly shaped leaves and fruit’ (10), an alarm-

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ing and unnatural growth that speaks to Julia’s estrangement and sense of her own unreality. Trees are totally contained in a fantasy world of cheap prints in a hotel where Anna stays with Walter, Vincent and Vincent’s girl: ‘the placid shapes of the trees made you feel that that time must have been a good time’ (Voyage, 77), a good time that is a far remove from Anna’s experience. These are truly dead trees in a ‘dead’ emotional space. Shadows of trees form another register of emotional meaning, for the living flora imaged through a casting of certain light are often sinister or dead. Though Julia finds the shadows of leafless trees fascinating (129–30), in Voyage, Anna, under duress, thinks about ‘the long shadows of the trees, like skeletons, and others like spiders and others like octopuses’ (142). Antoinette notices shadows of trees at times at her school (48, 52, 52, 159), indications of threat or anxiety that intrude into this particular Eden of youth, security and happiness. In the first enchanting evening of Antoinette’s honeymoon, the moon is so bright that shadows of trees lie on the floor, a marker of stress and anxiety for Rochester (74). At the end of the novel, Antoinette sees shadows in leaves on the floor as she imagines she is in Aunt Cora’s house, just before she burns her husband’s house which is her prison. Shadows of trees thus constitute a powerful metaphor of a character’s stress, anxiety and estrangement from setting, again indicating Rhys’s capacity to offer subtle details of dialogue between environment and people. Huggan and Tiffin (2010) argue that human employment of images of animals to represent subordinated peoples or to express racism and sexism problematically compromises our understanding of the nonhuman: (t)he history of western racism and its imbrication with discourses of speciesism; the use of animals as a basis for human social division; and, above all perhaps, the metaphorization and deployment of ‘animal’ as a derogatory term in genocidal and marginalizing discourses – all of these make it difficult even to discuss animals without generating a profound unease, even a rancorous antagonism, in many postcolonial contexts today.39

Though Rhys employs a variety of animals and birds, the most vivid are paired images of dog and wolf and cat and tiger. ‘Tigers Are Better Looking’ offers an intriguing idea of tigers in a letter from Hans, the absent partner of Mr Severn (the tame grey mare): tigers are betterlooking (176). When drunk, Mr Severn mutters about tigers and is thrown out of a bar, at which point he turns violent towards the men evicting him and yells, ‘What price the tame grey mare?’ (183). Here the untamed potential of the tiger contrasts with the domesticated and

­102     Elaine Savory tamed mare, a servant to human need. ‘Kikimora’ features a male cat who protects his owner against male human arrogance and ignorance. In Mackenzie, dogs are used as images of humans, and the most telling image is on the last page, where Julia speaks of ‘the hour between dog and wolf’ (191): dogs, pack animals, again function as markers of domestication to social norms, whereas wolves signify a wilder and less controllable potential. The wild genes in dog and cat relate back to wolf and tiger, but the wildness of the latter is not allowed in the controlled world in which Mr Severn or Elsa (Kikimora’s owner) or Julia live. This parallels ways Rhys’s protagonists battle expectations that they will be obedient to control and domestication; even those who try to connect to their wild genes in times of crisis. Rhys also details rats, insects, birds and pigs, employed as emblems of the subordinated condition of her protagonists or the world in which they live: her conflation of the human and non-human at times represents a fellow feeling for exploitation. But at other times, the non-human is unpleasant or even dangerous, or comparisons between animals and humans emphasise human shortcomings. Rats feature prominently and never seem to play a positive role; instead, they are conventionally nasty. In ‘From a French Prison’, an old woman seems like a rat (11). ‘Sleep It Off Lady’ is a horrific story of another elderly woman who collapses by the side of her dustbin and dies of a bad heart and fright at the idea that a rat she has feared before may approach her as she lies helpless: she has decided the rat means her harm and will find her. ‘The Sound of the River’ has an illustration of the protagonist’s fear of seeing ‘rat faces’ among people she might meet in the community (236). Rats tend to function as images of menace, harm and predation. By contrast, in ‘La Grosse Fifi’, Fifi is said to be anything but a little mouse: feisty, therefore different from the stereotype of the mouse (91), yet she still dies violently at the hand of her much younger lover (92).40 Rhys also finds space to detail insects (even titling one story ‘The Insect World’), and insects often stand in as images of human society. In ‘The Insect World’, Audrey struggles to read a book in which rats, snakes, scorpions, spiders, centipedes and termites abound (352), and she eventually likens people on an escalator to insects, a comparison that marks her serious alienation from human beings. Anna Morgan sees white people as woodlice because of their pale faces (54). In addition her landlady is like a prawn (Voyage, 103). A large crab figures in Sargasso (25): whereas Antoinette respects it, her husband is suspicious. Rhys’s inclusion of such generally unregarded or disliked creatures parallels her complicated understanding of people, who may be surprising despite being both unregarded or disliked.

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Sometimes animals are generic and Rhys is simply anthropomorphic. In ‘Vienne’, the narrator confesses to hating ‘most women here’, because they are ferociously jealous of each other and cunning ‘like animals’. Sometimes a creature represents something a human may not have understood about themselves before, in the way ancient peoples saw animals as totems of particular kinds, read for their connection to human experience as well as their powerful spirits. ‘The Whistling Bird’, a short memoir, is titled for a bird in the Dominican rain forest. It represents a cousin living in Britain who remembers this special bird, which has survived, whereas parrots have been wiped out in the Dominican forest because they can survive in captivity. The mountain whistler has no profit attached to its capture, precisely because it would die if caught. But Liliane, the cousin, says this would not happen ‘at once’, thereby connecting her exiled self to the bird. Sasha Jensen sees herself as ‘sad as a circus lioness, sad as a eagle without wings’ (Midnight, 45). At other times, nature seems to give a clue to the future. In ‘The Sound of the River’, the yellow breast of a bird makes the wife think of her own fear, which comes to be real when the husband dies of a heart attack. Then there are insults based on stereotypes about animals. Workingclass English girls express their cheeky spirit against those who expect to control them by saying men are swine (Quartet, 15). Elsewhere, people disliked are ‘monkeys’, sometimes ‘damn French monkeys’ (Voyage, 953). Minor as fauna are in Rhys’s work, she represents animals, birds, insects and very rarely fish (barracudas) in dialogue with her narrators and her characters. Frequently texts accrue meaning from linked sets of images of animals, as in Quartet.41 Rhys’s employment of details of the environment demonstrates how she understood power relations not just between human and human but between human and non-human. Tellingly, she did not make nature into a totally innocent entity, but rather assigns it an uncontrollable and untamed and unknowable potential that her most alienated characters perceive as reflective of their own emotional landscape. Though her work well predates what we now understand as postcolonial apprehensions of ecology, reading her work closely demonstrates how sensitive she was to the ways both people and the environment have been made hostage to power and money. Her vision begins as Manichean (in her own definition of this as oppositional) and is developed as dialogic, but contains moments when people and places push back against power: those moments find their expression in aspects of the environment which frighten her most insensitive characters, and which speak to the potential, typically stunted and denied expression, of those who would be better off ‘outside the machine’.

­104     Elaine Savory

Notes   1. Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (Berkeley: Creative Arts Company, 1979), p. 67. Rhys rarely speaks of the sea, unlike many other Caribbean writers. But she goes on in this piece: “blue and beautiful but underneath the calm – what? Things like sharks and barracudas are bad enough, but who knows, not the wisest fisherman nor the most experienced sailor, what lies in the Cuba deep’ (71). This sense of what nature may hide is relevant to thinking about her representation of the environment. All subsequent citations will be from this edition.  2. The chapter in Smile Please titled ‘Black/White’ talks about the ‘Riot’, about which Rhys’s parents sound very much like Antoinette’s stepfather and aunt in Wide Sargasso Sea on the night the house is burned, though the incident was far less threatening. However, Rhys traces a ‘wariness’ about black people in her thinking after that evening, reinforced by a beautiful fellow student at the Convent school whom she felt hated her for being white. She also developed envy of Catholics and what she as a child saw as greater ‘freedom’ for black children in Roseau. It is clear in this short piece that Rhys both accepted the binary black/white opposition about race which was dominant in her childhood and subverted it.   3. Rhys reports that 40,000 people died in the Martinique eruption, which is connected in her childhood memory with volcanic activity in Dominica (the Boiling Lake). Nature is at its most threatening in this moment.   4. Jean Rhys, The Collected Short Stories (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), pp. 267–8. All other short story references, except for those to ‘The Imperial Road’, are taken from this volume.   5. Rhys certainly noticed her environment, as numerous letters evidence. In 1959, she said that two places caused her to write ‘for love’, the only way she could write, and they were Dominica and Paris (171). She notices what surrounds her, whether gardens or trees or their lack (126), or birds (211), or gales and rain (175). Place, flora and fauna and weather are all important. References are from Jean Rhys, The Letters of Jean Rhys, ed. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly (New York: Viking, 1984).   6. Harris has a strong consciousness of environment as does Rhys, his even more vivid. See ‘Jean Rhys’s “Tree of Life”’ (pp. 118–22) and other essays in Selected Essays of Wilson Harris, ed. Andrew Bundy (London: Routledge, 1999).   7. Ibid., p. 119.  8. Bundy, ‘The Music of Living Landscapes’, p. 43, in Selected Essays of Wilson Harris.   9. In ‘The Fabric of the Imagination’, Harris offers a shrewd and again prophetic comment on the difference between knowledge of threats to seas, rivers, species and forests by ‘deprived societies’ and that by prosperous ones (176). Rhys’s earliest ecocritical imagination was shaped in Dominica. 10. Elizabeth Deloughrey and George B. Handley, Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 13. 11. Ileana Rodriguez, House, Garden, Nation: Space, Gender and Ethnicity

Rhys’s Environmental Language     105 in Post-Colonial Latin American Literatures by Women, trans. Robert Carr and Ileana Rodriguez (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 165. 12. ‘The Imperial Road’ exists in multiple drafts in the Rhys collection at the University of Tulsa. I edited the draft I consider the most finished and it was published in The Jean Rhys Review. 13. Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 13. 14. Ibid., p. 178. 15. Morton argues that saying ‘down with nature’ is not incompatible with ecocritique, relevant to thinking about Rhys’s broad variety of identifications of nature. 16. Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 57. For Clark, Heidegger understands an inherent wildness in the concept of nature derived this way. 17. Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). Drayton says of colonial botanic gardens that they had a complex agenda, not only as spaces to which Europeans could turn for evidence of ‘wise government’ of nature but which also gave them refuge from ‘the strangeness of alien environments’ (183). Rhys’s abuser was in a sense at home in the Garden created by his countrymen for their comfort and sense of national pride. 18. Ibid., pp. 182, 183. 19. Ibid., p. 183. 20. Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book) (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), p. 133. 21. Ibid., p. 130. Kincaid’s father took her for walks to the botanical garden in Antigua, where they spent the afternoon ‘sitting under a nice rubber tree’, after her father had collected samples of plants he would use to make medicinal tea (146). There was something powerful in the father’s claim to the plants and to the opportunity to sit and enjoy, despite colonial intentions in creating such a space primarily for transplanted Englishmen. Rhys’s sense of the relation of power and space and of the importance of the colonized claiming space not intended for them is made more particular by Kincaid’s account. 22. Helen Tiffin, ‘Man Fitting Landscape: Nature, Culture and Colonialism,’ Caribbean Liteature and the Environment, ed. Elizbeth Deloughrey, Renee K. Gosson, and George B. Handley (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), p. 203. 23. Sue Thomas, The Worlding of Jean Rhys (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), p. 38. 24. It is interesting to think about Rhys’s desolated Eden (the garden at Coulibri) in relation to the way colonial violence tries to hide within a beautiful landscape or garden: human sexual neurosis is aligned with abuses of political, social and economic power (slavery or, far later, the exploitation of a young girl to console the terror of an Englishman about growing old). 25. Veronica Marie Gregg, Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and

­106     Elaine Savory Writing the Creole (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 164. 26. Kamau Brathwaite, Barabajan Poems (New York: Savacou North, 1994). Brathwaite writes approvingly of Hunte as ‘white ITAL Baje’, whose swim (twelve days, fifty-nine miles) revealed ‘truly nativist knowledge of tides, beaches, landfalls’ (289). But his effort was not understood by many Barbadians (see Brathwaite’s account). 27. See Elaine Savory, The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 28. See Peter Hulme and Neil Whitehead (eds), Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). Hulme’s work on this topic is key. 29. Carol Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1990), p. 563. 30. Kincaid, My Garden, p. 135. 31. Ibid., p. 50. 32. Ibid., p. 52. 33. Ibid., p. 53. Kincaid’s tiny detail of a way children might scavenge their dead father’s possessions, including the choice of taking ‘cuttings of old roses’, serves to indicate once more how roses inhabit her imagination, though after an indulgent immersion in the ordering and planting of them, she determines one day she will ‘firmly denounce the whole idea of growing roses’ (52). Roses have an important and complicated presence in the postcolonial imaginary, as Rhys’s work also demonstrates. 34. Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (New York: Carrol and Graf, 1990). 35. Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (New York and London, 1986). 36. Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (New York: Norton, 1982). 37. Jean Rhys, Quartet (New York: Carrol and Graf, 1990). 38. Lisa Paravisini-Gebert, ‘Deforestation and the Yearning for Lost Landscapes in Caribbean Literatures’, in DeLoughrey and Handley, Postcolonial Ecologies, p. 211. 39. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 135. Huggan and Tiffin point out how hard it is to avoid anthropomorphism because of the way humans have made themselves central to everything on the planet (the era of the anthropocene), ‘most animals [. . .] exist for modern populations as primarily symbolic’ (139). 40. In Smile, Please Rhys speaks of the legend of rats in the dressing room when she was a chorus girl right before she mentions having her first ‘real’ affair ‘with a man’ (91), and, in a letter, she refers to the cliché, ‘the rat race’ (Letters, p. 187). Mice and rats are clearly connected: the idea of the first can turn into the horror of the second. 41. See Elaine Savory, Cambridge Introduction and Thomas Staley, Jean Rhys: A Critical Perspective (New York: Palgrave, 1979).

Chapter 5

Caribbean Formations in the Rhysian Corpus Carine M. Mardorossian

In ‘What is an Author?’ Michel Foucault highlights what he calls the ‘moment of individualisation’ through which the idea of the author came into being in the history of literature, philosophy and the sciences. Whereas most ‘commonsensical’ understandings of the term today conceive of the author as pre-existing the text as its source, Foucault reframes the author as an ‘author-function’ that has historically been produced through its interaction with both the text and its audience. For instance, he points out that before the seventeenth or eighteenth century, works like tragedies or comedies were evaluated for their content and didn’t ‘need’ an author as a guarantee of quality. By contrast, works of geography and science were only deemed accurate if attached to an author’s name. This relationship between subject and author has since been reversed with scientific discourses being accepted for their own merits, while literary creations are now dependent on the author function. What is more, Foucault highlights how the ‘author function’ is also tied to the legal system. Indeed, the latter needs authors insofar as it needs individuals that can be held accountable for potentially transgressive communications. Sometimes, the concept even transcends the person it is meant to refer to, since, as with Freud or Marx, we may have authors who are ‘not just the authors of their own works. They have produced something else: the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts’ as ‘founders of discursivity’, that is as founders of entire discourses such as psychoanalysis and Marxism. ‘Author’ in this reframed understanding therefore involves a plethora of endless meanings rather than a description of a self-determining and originating source. Therefore, as Foucault points out, it is an unnatural, historical phenomenon, a function of discourse, not because there is no actual, historical person behind the writing (there is), but because the meanings attached to the act of writing and its author are diverse and contextual. I argue that what a Foucaultian reading of Jean Rhys’s work reveals

­108     Carine M. Mardorossian is the extent to which non-human landscapes in literature similarly harbour a multiplicity of meanings. These meanings work in tandem with other sites of difference like gender, race and class to produce the category ‘human’ in a way that has gone unaddressed in the current ecocritical consensus surrounding the untenability of the human/nonhuman dyad. Instead of discussing the environment as a backdrop to human affairs and relations that it may or may not be seen as influencing, I propose that we approach the environment in Caribbean fiction like Rhys’s as a form of ‘landscape-function’ that echoes Foucault’s analysis of authorship. This ‘landscape-function’ challenges approaches that foreground the environment as a pre-existing space that evolves outside of the subject and instead sees it as a function of discourse in its constitutive relation to humanity. The landscape-function asks why landscapes are described the way they are, not in and of themselves but in and through narrative and in relation to the human subject. It asks what ‘classificatory function’ the environment and its representation in the text play. That the human and non-human worlds are connected is certainly true, but what an analysis of what I call ‘the landscape-­ function’ in Jean Rhys’s work highlights is how this interconnectedness leads not to a dissolution of boundaries between human and nature but to their very constitution. What emerges from a Foucaultian reading of the natural landscape in her fiction is the very production of the difference between the categories of human and non-human rather than a straightforward challenge to it. And it is insofar as this dynamic of production and reification is reproduced, highlighted and exposed throughout the narrative that the relationality and interdependence of the human and the environment becomes visible. Ecocriticism has heretofore been keen on emphasising that the subject is part and parcel of the very environment humanity has in fact constructed (William Cronon) or that the non-human Other is always already part of the human body (Timothy Morton’s ‘strange strangers’ and Donna Haraway’s ‘companion species’). For instance, William Cronon’s phenomenal anthology The Trouble With Wilderness was instrumental in raising consciousness about humanity’s imbrication with the natural world in a way that contested the elitist concept of ‘Natureas-tableau-in-natural-parks-for-the-rich’ that sometimes defined the nineteenth-century’s environmentalist movement.1 Similarly, Timothy Morton’s Ecology Without Nature and The Ecological Thought emphasise the interdependence of humanity and the environment in order to make people more accountable to an environment that is as much a part of them as they are of it. For Morton, thinking ecologically means acknowledging our ‘interconnectedness’ and realising that we live in a

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‘mesh’ where the human and inhuman are imbricated and inextricable rather than ‘putting something called Nature on a pedestal’.2 Both scholars’ emphasis on interconnectedness and on humanity’s inseparability from the environment emerges from an ethical imperative: it is motivated by the assumption that situating the human squarely within the natural rather than outside of it will lead to a more responsible relation to our surroundings, including our immediate urban environments. Indeed, the danger of seeing our cities and ourselves as separate from a supposedly pristine wilderness is that we would reserve our conservationist ethics for the categorically Other and ignore the destructive and polluting path that defines our cities. In dissolving the separation between urban and the environment, human and non-human, culture and nature, then, Morton and Cronon want to broaden the scope of the kind of environmentalist agendas of the past to locations that had previously been ignored. While more attention is now certainly being paid to protecting cities, the emphasis on placing humanity within the natural has led to a revaluing of urban landscapes at the expense of non-urban ones rather than to the dissolution of the boundary between the two. While we now witness a salutary and renewed attention to the greening of urban spaces, any emphasis on more remote and less inhabited parts of the globe is now seen as suspect, an extension of elitism, and a symptom of one’s nostalgia for the past environmentalism of deep ecology. One of my colleagues was recently praising his non-sprayed lawn as an ecosystem of sorts that deserved as much attention as the larger vistas of Alaska.3 Another scholar’s presentation and slide show displayed images in soft lighting of a field covered in the beautiful but aggressively invasive flower, the purple loosestrife, to argue for the aesthetic beauty we remain blind to when we adopt negative metaphors such as ‘invasive’ to describe these species of plants.4 Corporations involved in ‘environmental management’ can now promote themselves as being both ‘industry leaders’ and ‘environmentally sustainable’ at the same time, since the two are no longer to be opposed, until that is, a scandal erupts and their lack of environmental standards is exposed.5 While I am certainly on board with the claim that humanity and our environment are inseparable, the ways in which that assertion is being made ad infinitum often backfires to support non-conservationist and neo-conservative agendas that seek to valorise polluted, industrialised environments as potential sites of remedial improvements or as sites of hybrid human/nature interactions whose demarcations are no longer stable. Environmental pollution becomes conflated with cultural ‘pollution’, by which theorists mean ‘hybridity’, so that the denigration of one

­110     Carine M. Mardorossian becomes associated with a fascist rejection of multiculturalism, and a defence of toxicity and infection is conflated with a rhetoric of solidarity and social inclusion. My critical assessment of this latest trend in ecocriticism is not meant to promote a return to Nature with a capital N, untainted and exclusive of humanity, but rather to point out that the dissolution of the distinction between an acting human and a recipient nature is not a sine qua non of the deceptive conceptions of nature that the essays in Cronon’s phenomenal volume have unearthed. For instance, even as we can only marvel at the extent to which Niagara Falls is less a wonder of nature than of human design, this correction does not actually challenge the belief in the distinction between human and nature, only between humanity and this particular site of what can no longer just be viewed as nature. That people were instrumental in constructing what was once advertised as wholly natural does not really challenge the culture’s fundamental perception of the natural world as separate from humanity, and it certainly does not undo the distinction between people as rational agents and complex beings on the one hand and nature (whether partially constructed or not) as a passive and tractable surface on the other. It may question the wilderness ideals we once held dear as a civilisation but it does not undo the hierarchical separation between active, driven, determining subjects and their constructed contexts. These essays cannot do away with the cultural belief in consciousness and psychic depth as the fundamental distinction between the human and the natural spheres. That the boundaries between human and non-human are not truly challenged through such assertions of ‘interdependence’ is also true of more philosophical interventions like Donna Haraway’s and Timothy Morton’s. Both thinkers highlight how the non-human entities we routinely separate from the human are actually inhabiting us. Both remind us that our bodies consist of bacteria and life forms we like to think of as ‘foreign’ bodies but that are an inherent part of our bodily flora: ‘We are constituted of countless parasites and symbionts’,6 or, as Haraway points out, I love the fact that human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive at all, and some of which are hitching a ride and doing the rest of me, of us, no harm. I am vastly outnumbered by my tiny companions; better put, I become an adult human being in company with these tiny messmates. To be one is always to become with many.7

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This more philosophical take consists of questioning what being human actually means in light of the hybrid nature of our own material constitution, and it is certainly an important reminder of the interconnectedness of all beings. But again, this approach does not any more than Cronon’s challenge the fundamental distinction between attributes that have been historically viewed as constitutive of humanity (reason, perceptiveness, logic, intelligence, deliberation, agency, individualism, psychic fragmentation) and natural elements (instinct, genes, molecules where change occurs over generations and not in individuated instances). Human beings view themselves as wilful, and we make decisions that impact our bacteria; they don’t. They can be in a position of taking one path or another but do not consciously do so. Their trajectory is a function of biomechanics and biophysics. The critical thinking that both Haraway and Morton display over this process and bodily constitution is, for instance, an attribute of humanity and not of the microbiological world that they are foregrounding. This world contributes to our general health, but it does not directly or deliberately influence our decision processes. We would not be alive without them but our thought processes transcend our individual bodily boundaries through time and space in a way that these microbiomes do not.8 The hierarchical nature of the relation between nature and humanity is not ultimately threatened because what is revealed as a construction in these interventions remains predominantly nature, Nature, the environment and what is classified as non-human. The human part of the equation may be subject to influence, but the supremacy of the human as the being that recognises this state of affairs, directs the turn of events, enlightens and impacts, is not threatened. No matter how much philosophers, cultural theorists and political scientists strive to emphasise interconnectedness in the name of saving the environment, insofar as they highlight this ‘mesh’ by relying on their consciousness of humanity’s dependence on and imbrication with the environmental Other, they cannot challenge what ultimately drives anthropocentrism, namely the certitude that our depth and self-reflexivity, ability to critique and debate is what places us above the ‘shallowness’ of the surfaces we discuss as the environment, the Other and the non-human. This is where literature may provide an avenue to reframing humanity’s putative thinking supremacy over nature. Caribbean fiction in particular is a useful test case for this investigation in light of its unique status in world literature. According to the influential Martinican writer Edouard Glissant, the Caribbean ‘may be held up as one of the places in the world where Relation presents itself most visibly’.9 This ‘Relation’ or hybrid condition is also increasingly ‘making itself visible ­everywhere

­112     Carine M. Mardorossian [. . .] notably in the West’s megalopoli’, so that the rest of the world has much to learn from the condensed workshop the Caribbean archipelago is.10 This is a space in which the processes of historical and crosscultural interaction, the legacies of the intertwined histories of the colonial exploitation of humans and landscapes and of the enmeshment of slavery and (mono)agriculture in the plantation system are eminently visible and researchable (if only by virtue of the circumscribed geographical size of each island). The region can thus be said to function as the exemplar of the new global order, which explains why its literature occupies such a representative status in world literature today and why singling it out for a Foucaultian investigation of environmental debates makes so much sense. What my Foucaultian reading of Caribbean literature reveals is that as long as ‘thinking’ in general and critics’ reliance on or claiming of a critical distance in particular are involved, we will not challenge the fundamental dichotomy that drives the human condition’s exploitation of the natural world at our own expense. Whether we declare the natural as part of us or not will not change this state of affairs since humanity has had no qualms about squashing and dominating members of its own species for millennia, so it is unclear why ecocritics believe that highlighting nature as one of us or as one with us will make human beings want to embrace and protect it. Othering is a process that is directed as brazenly within as it is without the self. What ecocriticism has failed to register so far then is how it is not just our bodies that are inhabited by concrete, material forms of otherness, nor is it just that we are inhabiting and fabricating the very geographical and biotic spaces that are supposedly natural (Cronon) but that it is humanity itself, as rational, autonomous, complex, reflexive, multilayered, interesting, critically savvy and analytical that is constituted through its relation to the environment and its representation. It is, I argue, precisely through ideologically loaded representations of the environment as impenetrably or categorically Other that human nature gets delimited and defined as intimately and identifiably complex in novels like Wide Sargasso Sea. Like other Caribbean novels, the representation of nature in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea reveals the importance but also the limitations of ecocriticism’s seemingly corrective emphasis on the interconnectedness of the human and non-human worlds. Through the deployment of what I call, echoing Foucault, a ‘landscape-function’, the novel highlights the imbrication of nature and culture in a way that does not subordinate nature to a mere discursive construction by humans. Instead, it reveals how thoroughly dependent on the representation of

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a Romanticised nature the defining attributes of the human as human actually are. Rather than merely emphasise the natural as a construction, then, this landscape-function exposes the extent to which it is the human that gets narrativised, complicated and ultimately produced in his or her rounded complexity through an appeal to the landscape as a lush, untouched, wild and natural background that only a developed and round protagonist can genuinely appreciate and understand. It is through the recognition of a relation with the opaque, categorical Other that the profundity of humanity and of the protagonist in particular is established and produced. For instance, it is no coincidence that a more unidimensional Rochester in Wide Sargasso Sea cannot relate to the tropical landscape that surrounds him, while the more complex protagonist Antoinette can and does in a profound way. From her taking refuge in the Edenic garden of her childhood to finding serenity in the undisturbed nature of the Granbois estate during her honeymoon, she gets narrativised and produced as a protagonist through the specific landscape in which they evolve. This is why the representation of Caribbean natural landscapes in fiction is a particularly useful blueprint to take stock of the ideological repercussions of various representations of the relationship between humanity and the environment. That it fulfils a function and is itself a function of discourse becomes especially evident when we remember the contradiction that resides at the heart of the representation of the environment in Caribbean fiction. On the one hand, the description of the landscape often evokes the most majestic, lush, verdant, uncultivated, tropical greenness of environments that we typically associate with the wilderness William Cronon has identified as ‘trouble’, that is with ‘an idealized natural landscape that is devoid of human history and labor’.11 On the other hand, in stark opposition to this representation of unkempt and seemingly untouched nature, the Caribbean region’s physical environment is a reflection of its colonial history since, as DeLoughery et al. argue, ‘there is no other region in the world that has been more radically altered in terms of human and botanic migration, transplantation, and settlement than the Caribbean’.12 Colonialism, slavery, history and the sugarcane plantation system have irremediably transformed the Caribbean environment whether it is through humancaused intervention and extinctions or the introduction of new species to the island. Specifically, the arrival of Europeans led to ‘a period of mass extinctions after 1492’, in relation to humans (Caribs) as well as plant and animal species.13 Indeed, the establishment of monoculture farming necessarily came with destructive implications for the preexisting diversity of plant life for instance. Yet, despite this profound

­114     Carine M. Mardorossian overhaul of the natural ­landscape, novel after novel offers a description of landscape as rich, wild and seemingly untouched. The illusion of a parallel universe, a place where the protagonist may escape from history and the vicissitudes of social oppression, is maintained and continues to echo the Romantic overtones that have defined representations of nature and the wilderness since the end of the eighteenth century. Representations of the natural world in Caribbean fiction thus strongly evoke a ‘[w]ilderness [that] hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural’.14 They often evoke the doctrine of the sublime whose origins critics have traced back to Romantic as well as biblical influences. For instance, we may think of Paule Marshall’s divided landscape in The Chosen Place, The Timeless People and of her pristine, mythic and ancestral island in Praisesong for the Widow, Maryse Condé’s mapping of her characters on to the landscape in Traversée de la Mangrove and Simone Schwartz-Bart’s natural refuge in Pluie et Vent sur Télumée Miracle.15 One may wonder, however, what descriptions of natural landscape that seem closer to this Romantic legacy have to do in novels that are so intensely preoccupied with history and colonisation? Why passages and settings that seem to represent a flight from history in novels whose authors are so intent on highlighting history’s legacies? What are we to make of what appears to be a contradiction between the biotic and historical investments of these narratives? What function does this contradiction play? Can we identify a landscape-function at work, and if so, which one? An examination of the description of the natural landscape in Rhys’s fiction helps provide an answer to this conundrum even as it brings into relief the prevalence of this dynamic in Caribbean literature. Closer attention not only helps illuminate this dynamic pattern as common to other novels but also as inherently paradoxical, since it denotes a seeming complicity with a Romantic ideology of pure, exalted nature in novels that otherwise expose Romanticism’s flight from history. Why are so many Caribbean novels reinforcing the representation of nature as outside of human influence, as unbeatable Mother Nature in light of the ‘vulnerable island ecosystems, in which many of the endemic species have been destroyed’?16 Hoving identifies a contradiction in Caribbean (women’s) fiction but only insofar as their representation of the garden is a site of both delight and decay, delicious and repulsive smells. Hoving explains this ambiguity as an attempt ‘to radically redefine nature and create a new understanding of the natural’.17 By contrast, I argue that this treatment of Mother Nature is not in itself contradictory insofar as it can be traced back to the genealogy of the doctrine of the sublime

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Cronon has described. The Garden of Eden to which representations of Nature in literature and culture owe so much has historically been both a site of terror and beauty, identification and misidentification, and the taming of the sublime through the pastoral is a phenomenon that may or may not be operative in fictional representations. The main tension in Caribbean novels is not one that exists within the representation of Nature but rather between their representation of Nature as Edenic and as above the fray on the one hand and the vulnerability of Caribbean ecosystems and history on the other. I argue that the representation of profoundly historicised social oppressions in the context of seemingly ahistorical Nature cannot be understood outside of the landscape-function, that is, its foundational effect on the constitution of what is valued as humanity itself. Whether the nature–culture opposition ultimately holds or not throughout the narrative, its very deployment is what is constitutive of our identification with characters as round and complex beings whose sensitivity to the non-human Other marks them as profoundly human. As critics have noted, the portrayal of nature in Caribbean novels repeatedly evokes the lost Garden of Eden and the biblical imagery to which the very idea of wilderness can be traced. In Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, the story of a mysterious old woman Mala Ramchandin, Mala’s garden on the imaginary Caribbean island of Lantanacamara is set up like a primeval tropical rain forest and is contrasted with the professionally maintained institutional garden in the yard of the almshouse where she now resides. The eerie wildness and exceptional animal and plant life with ‘trees [that] had sprung wherever birds and insects dropped their seeds’ not only recalls the lost Garden of Eden but also functions as a site of physical and psychic refuge for Mala/ Pohpoh in the novel.18 Similarly, the Edenic garden is a place of refuge for Antoinette Cosway, the protagonist of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, a book that has now gained quite a canonical stature in postcolonial studies. The novel is set in British-owned Jamaica a short while after the 1833 Emancipation of the slaves. The protagonist, Antoinette, Jane Eyre’s madwoman in the attic to whom Rhys set out to give a voice, is a white Creole heiress whose story we follow from childhood to her arranged marriage to an unnamed Englishman (Mr Rochester from Jane Eyre). Significantly, Antoinette is ensnared by colonialist assumptions that she unsuccessfully and often grotesquely attempts to replicate. Like Rochester, she subscribes to colonialist ways of thinking even though hers are tempered by her marginalised status in relation to Britishness and the békés. The novel exposes the conventional cultural constructions through which both protagonists (Antoinette and the unnamed

­116     Carine M. Mardorossian Rochester) represent their racial Others, but it also opens the door to a more sympathetic relationship to her character. On the one hand, we are constantly made aware of the historical and discursive constructions through which Antoinette mediates her relationship to black otherness, while on the other, her indoctrination into ideals of Englishness and white supremacist thinking is not perceived as absolute or hopeless. She is quick to resort to cultural stereotypes about black Creoles when her black childhood friend Tia takes her money, but Tia is also the name she calls when she finds herself locked up and mad in the cardboard space that England is at the end of the novel. Along with her in-between status (she is not one of the ‘real [. . .] old time white people’ [24]), we maintain a sense of her allegiance to black traditions despite her internalisation of racist and classist assumptions.19 I argue that the contrast between the way the protagonist Antoinette and her British imperialist husband relate to racial alterity is premised on their respective perception of the Caribbean landscape as wild and tropical, an image with which black alterity has traditionally been identified. The landscape-function operative in Rhys adds a layer of complexity to the characterisation of a protagonist who otherwise runs the risk of becoming a unidimensional human being in the novel. Antoinette could or would have been a mere reflection of British imposed and internalised Christian doctrine had it not been for her association with non-human alterity on the one hand, and racial otherness on the other, that is, forms of difference that have been historically yoked through imperialist and dominant discourses. Antoinette’s relationship with Christophine, the obeah woman whose unfathomable opaqueness is so threatening to Rochester, evokes her relation to the otherness of her lush Caribbean environment. The two forms of difference are linked insofar as they confirm Antoinette’s ability to transcend the internalised racist and imperialist assumptions that would otherwise equally separate her from these two sites of difference. The workings of the landscape-function in the novel thus overlaps with the text’s racial/textual politics to contribute to the characters’ added depth and complexity by association. It literally saves the heroine from ideological and hence characterological uniformity in the same way as it saves Mala from a one-dimensional mental state induced by and reduced to trauma in Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night. Because of Antoinette’s association with a natural world that is represented as outside of the purview of the human world in which she is struggling, she immediately gains depth as a character. In fact, the potential for her growth and detachment from ideology is produced through this very association: ‘Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden

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in the Bible – the tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild’ (16). Like Mala, that Antoinette seeks refuge in her estate’s garden, a garden that is described as a Garden of Eden, generates a differentiated view of the character as her affinity with the natural is what distinguishes her from the uniformity and orderliness of colonialist thought. Antoinette may reproduce stereotypes but is unable to comprehend the relationships between the broader sociopolitical, historical and discursive fabric of the Caribbean and the individuals that people her world. The discrepancy between Antoinette’s (often unsuccessful) attempts at replicating dominant conceptual structures and her actual experience of the Caribbean space and people demonstrates that Rhys is scrutinising the position of the white Creole in post-Emancipation Caribbean society as conflicted and complex. During her honeymoon in Dominica at the small estate Granbois that used to belong to her mother, a similar identification with the natural landscape sets Antoinette apart from her colonialist husband: ‘This is my place and everything is on our side’ (74). Antoinette then leads him around the house, which he finds neglected, deserted and generally run-down. While Rochester believes that reality lies in the people, houses and streets of the city, Antoinette finds it in the rivers, mountains and waters of nature. In times of turmoil, she turns to nature again and again: ‘there was a smell of ferns and river water and I felt safe again’ (33). For Rochester, the walk through the verdant vegetation and breathtaking beauty of the natural landscape evokes menacing and unreal excess (‘Not only wild but menacing’ [87]) and sensory overload: ‘too much [. . .] [too] much blue, too much purple, too much green [. . .] [the] flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near’ [87]), whereas to Antoinette these represent refuge and self-actualisation: ‘But how can rivers, and mountains and the sea be unreal?’ (80). Even more so than with Emily Cartwright in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge, these interspersed associations of Antoinette’s character with nature on the one hand and black traditions on the other add to her complexity as a character. Antoinette’s close relationship to Christophine echoes indeed Emily’s dependence on Stella, the black maid and mother figure in the narrative. The difference between Rochester’s and Antoinette’s respective experiences of the environment mutually reinforces the notion of an untouched, inscrutable, other setting through which a certain image of humanist depth can be produced. As Gildersleeve puts it, Rhys’s texts recognize tropical landscapes as an unassailable mystery that cannot and will not be subsumed into an existing European plot. The tropics

­118     Carine M. Mardorossian of Rhys’s fiction might seem to be tropes because they are, in a sense, ‘all surface’, offering up little more than that which the tourist gaze wants to see, but this is, I think, precisely because she insists on maintaining the secrecy, or internal reliability, of these landscapes.20

I argue that it is precisely because the Rhys heroine can identify the ‘unassailable mystery’ and beauty in the otherness of a landscape that is represented as more or less sublime, untouched and self-renewing that a more complex stratification of the subject is generated. The representation of nature in Wide Sargasso Sea reveals that the subject in all her paradoxical complexity does not precede her representation of the natural world but rather is produced by it. It is the reader’s assumption, namely that the character precedes her representation of the natural landscape, that creates and perpetuates a separation between the human and the non-human worlds, whether that constructed non-human setting is identified as a construction or essentialised. This is not to say that the representation of nature in Caribbean fiction exactly reproduces the colonialist representations of the fertile and exotic Eden. It does not have to.21 It is to say, however, that no matter what variation of the myth these stories appeal to, the representation of the ‘wildness’ of the landscape serves a particular function, namely that of complicating and therefore humanising the characters who are associated with it. Without that level of identification, we would not, as readers, be able to sustain our belief in humanism, humanity and all of its attendant potential for self-development, critical distance, psychic improvement, reasoned or reasonable progress, and all the assumptions that drive our reading of fictional characters. Connecting to the landscape involves a different way of knowing and relating, one that adds depth to the character in an evocative, resonant and lingering way. It is what turns a passive victim into a resistant one, an individualised channel for ideology into a humanised and autonomously thinking individual who can then embody celebrated Western notions of embodied subjectivity and the liberal subject of today. The same dynamic is operative in ‘Mixing Cocktails’, one of Rhys’s early short fictional pieces, in which the narrator muses about her affinity with the tropical environment despite, or rather, because of (her awareness of) its unknowability. Not much happens in this story where the narrator is a little girl describing her dreams and impressions as she swings in a hammock on the veranda. What matters is her awareness and acceptance of the inscrutability of the Dominican landscape, ‘[a] wild place [. . .] Savage and lost’ (37), and the contrast between her perception of it and the imperialistic gaze of her visiting aunt.22 Unlike her

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white Creole relative or Rochester in Wide Sargasso Sea, her emphasis is not on ‘knowing’ and hence possessing the Caribbean environment or on wanting ‘what it hides’ (Wide Sargasso Sea, 87). Rather, she accepts her surroundings on their own terms. She stresses that ‘it was very difficult to look at the sea in the middle of the day. The light made it so flash and glitter: it was necessary to screw the eyes up tight before looking’ (37). This difficulty, however, is not something she bemoans but one she identifies with since, as a woman, she identifies with this ‘impossibility of completely narrativising the Other (both tropics and woman)’ and ‘resistance to being mapped’.23 This identification is what elevates her as a human being and provides her with the level of complexity required to be a rounded character. It is what distinguishes her from the stereotypical image of womanhood society imposes on her and ascribes her depth and consciousness. Rhys’s narratives reveal the limitations of ecocriticism’s insistence on the inseparability of the wrongly polarised terms of the human/nonhuman, nature/culture. Indeed, despite their efforts, ecocritics cannot unsettle human beings’ belief in some variation of the critical, distanced, reflexive, complex, analytical subject as what sets us apart from the non-human. In fact, ecocriticism’s deconstruction of the nature/culture binary does not hold water in light of the depth/surface dichotomy that mobilises this opposition no matter how much imbrication has been detected between the two. What is more, while there is a long history of analysing literary environments in terms of their effects on human subjects or on the actual biological environments they represent (and vice versa), interdependence and interconnectedness does not in itself undermine categorical difference. Sometimes it just reinforces it. Indeed, categorically other entities can be interdependent and interconnected. Unless we also account for the ways in which it is our very conception of the human as we know him/her that is constructed through our association with nature, we will not really undermine the hierarchical nature of the human/environment relationship which is itself premised on humanity’s ability to display a conscious or psychic detachment from our surroundings. The recognition of this landscape-function is important because it does not evacuate the urgency of politicised environmentalist and conservationist intervention. As mentioned earlier, critical interventions that focus on the constructedness of the natural world often do so at the expense of an environmentalist activist agenda; after all, who wants to get mobilised to protect what is a mere construction since, as Judith Butler has argued, the notion of constructedness often mistakenly implies something dispensable. By contrast, an approach that highlights how the

­120     Carine M. Mardorossian constructedness of the concept of the human as an analytical, complex, contradictory, polyvalent being is itself dependent on a particular portrayal of nature as a stable, pure, self-contained and self-renewing entity does not reduce the workings of representation to misrepresentation or to a dispensable fiction. If our very depth as human beings depends on the representation of nature as the categorical Other through which we associate and reconnect with a deeper version of ourselves, then, it is the instrumentality of the representation rather than its fakeness that is foregrounded. It is no longer an issue of feeling manipulated into seeing nature as separate but an issue of nature being portrayed as such in order to generate a self-understanding of the human as complex. What is potentially exposed as fiction, then, is humanity rather than the natural. And we all know that that fiction is not one which we will let go of or perceive as dispensable any time soon.

Notes  1. William Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, in William Cronon (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1995), pp. 69–90.  2. Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 5. The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).   3. Conservation biology places a value on uniqueness and fragility. You can recreate a lawn any time anywhere but you cannot recreate the bio communities that constitute the landscape in Alaska. Heterogeneity results from protecting environments that are rare, ancient, complex, fragile, easily disturbed and easily altered. Conservation of ‘the wilderness’, as flawed as that concept may be, helps to delineate its difference from mass-produced lawns. Lawn is an interesting natural community that is colonising the world and it is not disappearing, and there will be more and more.   4. This is all the more ironic since purple loosestrife not only rapidly degrades wetlands, thereby diminishing their value for wildlife habitats, but it also degrades areas where wild rice grows and is harvested, and where fish spawn, as well as agricultural land. The plant is increasingly encroaching on farmers’ crops and pasture land, and has had an economic impact of millions of dollars. http://www.seagrant.umn.edu/ais/purpleloosestrife_info   5. Ecology and Environment Incorporated, the corporation that was hired as an ‘independent consultant’ by NY Governor Cuomo’s administration to assess the economic impacts of fracking in New York, is one such company that claims to work with ‘industry leaders’ to ‘promote environmental sustainability’. The company was later revealed to be a member of the Independent Oil and Gas Association, a pro-fracking lobbying group. This conflict of interest quickly called into question the integrity of the surpris-

Caribbean Formations     121 ingly sunny economic assessment the company had completed for the state in 2011.  6. Morton, Ecology Without Nature, p. 36.   7. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), pp. 3–4.   8. This is not to say that microbiomes cannot have influence on thought and behaviour, but these cases are rare and would be seen as a disruption and diseased limitation. Even in cases of toxoplasmosis and parasitism that do affect conscious decision making, the parasite influencing the behaviour of the host does not do so as an extension of agency or individuation but as an extension of evolutionary processes that allows the parasite to pass itself onto the next host.  9. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), p. 33. 10. Raphael Confiant and Aimé Césaire, Une Traversée paradoxale du siècle (Paris: Stock, 1993), p. 266. 11. Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Renée K. Gosson and George B. Handley (eds), Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), p. 2. 12. Ibid., p. 2. 13. Samuel M. Wilson, Archeology of the Caribbean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 26. 14. Cronon, Uncommon Ground, p. 69. 15. As Cronon notes, the sublime is instantly recognisable through the awe and emotions it has historically evoked in the human psyche. It is a doctrine whose genesis can be traced back to the eighteenth century and whose more tamed permutations have continued to affect human beings’ relationship to nature in subsequent centuries. Cronon notes, for instance, that the sublime went from evoking the sacred to a more sentimental demeanour. 16. Isabel Hoving, ‘Moving the Caribbean Landscape: Cereus Blooms at Night as a Re-imagination of the Caribbean Environment’, in DeLoughrey et al., Caribbean Literature and the Environment, p. 155. 17. Ibid., p. 155. 18. Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999), p. 124. 19. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1992); all other quotes are taken from this publication of the novel. See Sandra Drake and Veronica Gregg on Antoinette’s relation to black cultural practices: Sandra Drake, ‘All That Foolishness/That All Foolishness: Race and Caribbean Culture in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea’, Critica, 2.2 (1990): 97–112; Veronica Marie Gregg, Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 20. Jessica Gildersleeve, ‘Jean Rhys’s Tropographies: Unmappable Identity and the Tropical Landscape in Wide Sargasso Sea and Selected Short Fiction’, etropic, 10 (2011): 34. 21. In both Cereus Blooms at Night and Wide Sargasso Sea, the garden is represented as a strange and creepy paradise where beauty and decay are intermingled.

­122     Carine M. Mardorossian 22. Jean Rhys, ‘Mixing Cocktails’, in Diana Athill (ed.), Jean Rhys: The Collected Short Stories (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1987), pp. 37–8. 23. Gildersleeve, ‘Jean Rhys’s Tropographies’, p. 37.

Chapter 6

‘From Black to Red’: Jean Rhys’s Use of Dress in Wide Sargasso Sea Maroula Joannou At the end of her last novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Antoinette, the central protagonist, finding herself abject, destitute and alone in a foreign country, muses upon what little remains to her that is still of any consequence: ‘my red dress, that has a meaning’.1 In 1960 Rhys wrote privately to her daughter, Mayvonne Merman, ‘My dream is to finish my book, get a face lift and a bright red wig. Also a lovely fur coat. Underneath I will wear a purple dress and ropes of pearls, or what do you say to rags? Then, in all my glory, I will come and see you.’ The importance that Rhys attaches to dress in her fantasy life – even at the age of seventy – mirrors the importance that dress had held throughout her writing career. This fascination with clothing dates back to the neverending search for the unattainable: ‘the dress, the perfect Dress, beautiful, beautifying, possible to be worn’2 that gave one story in her first published collection, ‘The Left Bank’ and Other Stories (1927) its title, ‘Illusion’. Dress is integral to Rhys’s vision as a writer and to the manner in which she communicates that vision. As an essential condition of subjectivity dress articulates the body and in ‘articulating the body, it simultaneously articulates the psyche’.3 Freud termed the ego a ‘bodyego’, that is, a mental projection of the surface of one’s physical body, and that bodily surface, in practice, is a clothed body, made visible to others and perceived through dress.4 However, the potency of dress as a signifier in Rhys’s oeuvre is not only due to its articulation of the body but also to its prominent role in the dreamscapes of her fiction: dress is present in imagination and fantasy, and satisfies visceral longings for sensual pleasures in her characters’ lives. As Iris Marion Young puts it, ‘Women take pleasure in clothes, not just in wearing clothes, but also in looking at clothes and looking at images of women in clothes, because they encourage fantasies of transport and transformation.’5 Moreover, Rhys’s ‘work on representing memory and psychic states places her at

­124     Maroula Joannou the centre of modernist debates about female subjectivity and aesthetics’.6 Items of dress feature with frequency and insistence in Rhys’s characters’ subjectivities and memories and are vested with much of their explanatory power because they transpose her female characters’ reveries into the public domain. In Wide Sargasso Sea Antoinette’s ‘mode of perceiving the world even when she is awake is continuous with the world of dreams’.7 I have discussed Rhys’s characters’ preoccupation with ‘self-fashioning’ and her use of sartorial tropes to explore subjectivity, identityformation and a myriad of connections between capitalism, the market place and the reification of the female body in the 1920s and 1930s elsewhere.8 All of Rhys’s protagonists are ‘creative artists: creating themselves is their only steady occupation’.9 The Rhys who emerges from the early fiction is, however, very much a European figure. But what happens when she chooses to locate her final novel in the historical past? To sever dress from modern urban subjectivity? To locate her work in the Caribbean, where the great fashion houses of the metropole, the bars, streets, hotels and cafés of Paris and London, frequented by her deracinated fashion-conscious women, have no place? In emphasising Rhys’s preoccupation with dress do we risk casting her merely as the subaltern of metropolitan values and modes of thought? This chapter addresses these and related questions by analysing her last novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, in which Rhys forsakes the heavily populated urban spaces of the early twentieth century ‘meaning the action to take place between 1834 and 1845 say’,10 setting the book partly in the tropical islands of the Caribbean and the rest in a Victorian English country mansion in an unspecified location. It explores how dress retains the significance in Rhys’s postcolonial novel that it has in the European fiction, informs her critical scrutiny of the Caribbean plantocracy after the Emancipation of slaves in the British Empire, and carries the freight of her concern with racial hierarchy and difference. However, the cultural work performed by dress in identity-formation in the concluding sequences of the novel appears to break with patterns hitherto established and to usher the reader into unfamiliar territory. In the final postcolonial phase of Rhys’s writing, dress is used as a marker of Caribbean identity, and its importance to the colonised female subject is separated from the former associations with the innovative and the new. In Part Three Rhys associates Antoinette’s red dress positively with ideas of durability, origins, rootedness and ‘home’, and she deploys the red dress to intimate a deeper existential identity that is no longer associated with the shifting vagaries of fashion. Wide Sargasso Sea appeared in 1966 after a hiatus in Rhys’s career: she

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had ceased to publish and disappeared from public view during World War II. She resurfaced in 1949 in response to an advertisement placed in the personal column of the New Statesman by the husband of Selma Vaz Dias who sought permission to adapt Good Morning, Midnight for the theatre.11 Living in Europe during the 1930s Rhys had escaped the worst of the labour disputes, anti-colonial struggles and political turbulence that had shaken much of the Caribbean. The relationship of Britain to the colonies changed as a result of World War II. Volunteers from the region had made a valiant contribution on the side of the allied forces, although many service personnel returned home disillusioned by the experiences of racism in the ‘mother country’.12 Jamaica, where Wide Sargasso Sea is set in part, had gained her independence from Britain in 1945. Hence the postwar literary scene in Britain was to be very different from the one that Rhys had known before. Writers from the Caribbean, the best known being George Lamming (In the Castle of My Skin, 1953), Samuel Selvon (The Lonely Londoners, 1956) and V. S. Naipaul (A House for Mr Biswas, 1961), were attempting to develop a postcolonial literary culture and exciting literary attention, while at the same time large numbers of black immigrants, some fleeing destitution in the wake of the Jamaican hurricane of 1944, made Britain their home. The arrival at Tilbury of the Empire Windrush in 1948 inaugurated a period of mass migration from the Caribbean.13 Wide Sargasso Sea responds, then, to the challenges of a radically altered postwar cultural and political landscape. The novel reflects Rhys’s awareness of her marginal status as a colonial subject and her knowledge that the Caribbean voices being listened to belonged, in the main, to a generation of young black men, some of whose histories and experiences she shared, while other aspects of their perspectives on life were very different from her own.14 Mary Lou Emery makes the point that in its uses of dream and dream space Wide Sargasso Sea resembles the dreamlike narrative of Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock (1960), and suggests that Rhys’s novel ‘belongs as much to a Third World Modernist tradition as to a European’.15 In Wide Sargasso Sea Rhys concentrated her attention on her own colonial subjectivity, her origins as a white Creole woman, and her longstanding desire to vindicate the vilified outsider in Jane Eyre. In 1966 Rhys wrote to Diana Athill, I came to England between sixteen and seventeen, a very impressionable age and Jane Eyre was one of the books I read then. Of course Charlotte Brontë makes her own world, of course she convinces you, and that makes the poor Creole lunatic all the more dreadful. I remember being quite shocked, and when I re-read it rather annoyed. ‘That’s only one side – the English side’ sort of thing.16

­126     Maroula Joannou In Wide Sargasso Sea Rhys entered into dialogue with the Victorian novel, drawing out the implications of its hidden secret and rewriting the demented figure of gothic convention as a woman driven to extremis by the traumas of slavery and empire that demarcate all relationships in the novel. Rhys’s depiction of dress in Wide Sargasso Sea is reliant on material outside her direct experience. Her one historical novel is set more than half a century before her birth in 1890 as Gwendolyn Ella Rhys in Roseau, Dominica, the daughter of Minna Williams (née Lockhart), a white Creole of Scottish descent, and William Rees Williams, a Welsh medical practitioner. What matters in the fiction is not just how clothes look, which is often left to the imagination: sartorial detail can be sparse – a dress described simply as ‘long white’, an evening gown as ‘cut very low’, or a shawl as ‘yellow silk’– but how the wearer or observer feels about clothes and her evocation of nineteenth-century dress is rendered in a tone of detached observation. The sartorial content of the novel is drawn from her storehouse of early visual memory of the Caribbean and its content is inseparable from the wearer’s feelings, while it also allows for a sense of distance. Rhys’s sense of how clothes looked and felt is always informed, irrespective of the context, by her critical appreciation of style and her expert knowledge of the sensual, aesthetic and erotic pleasures afforded by dress. In later life Rhys herself is said to have speculated, albeit fancifully, that her love of beautiful clothing was so deeply ingrained that this may have been passed down to her through a Cuban great-great-grandmother: ‘Where else would I get my love for pretty clothes?’17 As Helen Carr puts it, ‘What Rhys constructs through her fiction is a feminine sensibility, becoming aware of itself in a modernist European context, where a sense of colonial dispossession and displacement is focused on and translated into gendered terms, so that all these conditions coalesce, transformed into her particular version of feminine pain.’18 In Rhys’s final novel the empire ‘writes back’ to the imperial centre and the meaning of ‘home’ ‘emerges from the difference between metropolitan and colonial spaces as a means of establishing and protecting the cultural orders of the metropole against the (inevitable and mutual) processes of cultural hybridization that occurs in the contact zones of Empire’.19 The concerns of the Caribbean ‘plantation modernist’ discussed by Mary Lou Emery in this volume, and the author’s interest in the relationship between dress, subjectivity, visceral longing, reverie and fantasies of escape that characterises her European novels, intersect in the narrative of Antoinette Mason, née Cosway, who makes the long journey from the peripheries of the British Empire to the

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England of her dreams at its heart. This is the same transatlantic crossing that marked a momentous change in Rhys’s own economic and personal circumstances after her arrival in Southampton from the country of her birth, Dominica, as a sixteen-year old ingénue in August 1907. The crossing is also made by countless young colonial exiles and émigrés filled with hope and by the central character, Anna Morgan, in Voyage in the Dark (1934). The cultural work performed by dress in the context of race, as this is discursively constructed in Wide Sargasso Sea, marks out subjectivities and identities shaped and complicated by the histories of slavery and migration which are responsible for the particular cultural constructions of race, sex and class that inform the text. In Joanne Entwistle’s sense, dress is an ‘embodied practice, a situated bodily practice’ in which body and dress ‘operate dialectically: dress works on the body, imbuing it with social meaning while the body is a dynamic field which gives life and fullness to dress’.20 Thus I use dress, in the main, as a synonym for clothing, but in its widest sense this includes millinery, the application of make-up, perfume, cosmetics, jewellery, shoes and hair-styling, all of which mattered to Rhys, whose characters deploy them for the purposes of ‘self-fashioning’ and presenting the woman’s body and self to best advantage. Rishona Zimring examines Rhys’s fascination with the rituals of make-up in the novels set in the twentieth century, noting that it is through the importance of the ‘cosmetic mask as both literary metaphor and women’s real condition of existence that Rhys’s fiction speaks to the overlay of the symbolic and the real in a rather startlingly obvious way’.21 Antoinette’s sense of her identity as a white Creole has been shaped by a psychic, familial and political history setting her apart ontologically and epistemologically from the black majority, who all have bitter and recent memories of slavery. This history also sets her at a distance from the ruling white elite on the island: ‘Antoinette is not a woman who is troubled by a lack of cultural identity; she is a woman who perceives herself troubled by others on account of her cultural identity.’22 Dress plays a key role in Antoinette’s attempts to situate herself within European racial hierarchies through her marriage to an Englishman and her attempts to claim her place within the white plantocracy that has hitherto excluded mother and daughter: ‘They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks’ (Sargasso Sea, 7). Dress also throws into relief the contradictions and tensions in Antoinette’s overtures to the racial ‘Other’, not only represented by her servant, Christophine, and Tia, a little black girl whose freedom she

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Figure 6.1  Christophine in Martinique style handkerchief

admires, but also by the non-white descendants of ‘Old Cosway’, her slave-owning father, whom she acknowledges as her relatives. In Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (1979), Rhys explains how as a child she had coveted the freedom enjoyed by the black islanders: ‘Side by side with my growing wariness of black people there was envy. I decided that they had a better time than we did.’23 Finally, there is disillusionment and anger at her rejection and mistreatment in a country that she does not recognise from the romanticised descriptions she has heard at the outposts of empire (‘This cardboard house where I walk at night is not England’) (Sargasso Sea, 181). The anger is symbolised in the red dress which reminds the exiled Antoinette of her origins in the Caribbean. In Wide Sargasso Sea sartorial detail registers habits and practices that speak of the variegated and culturally diverse history of the Caribbean as a result of the migration both from Europe and from one Caribbean island to another: Christophine ‘wore a black dress, heavy gold earrings and a yellow handkerchief – carefully tied with the two high points in front. No other negro woman wore black, or tied her handkerchief Martinique fashion’ (21). ‘Dominica has a strong French-derived cultural identity as does nearby St Lucia, and the nearby islands Martinique and Guadeloupe are still part of France today.’24 Women have frequently been depicted visu-

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ally as mothers of the nation or as the wearers of the national costume. Dress calibrates the idea of nationality due to its proximity to the female body and its uses in iconography in which the nation is personified as a woman (Hibernia, Britannia, Caledonia, Marianne and so on). In a Joycean stream of solipsistic association and confused non sequiturs Antoinette internalises the notion of France as a woman using sartorial imagery. In the following syllogism Marianne, the national emblem of the French republic, and Annette, the mother from whom Antoinette is separated, and who came originally from the French colony of Martinique, are linked in the girl’s imagination by a white dress. Antoinette’s school friend, Louise de Plana, who was born in France, provides the link between the two female figures. ‘France is a lady with black hair wearing a white dress because Louise was born in France fifteen years ago, and my mother, whom I must forget and pray for as though she were dead, though she is living, liked to dress in white’ (55). As R. S. Koppen puts it, dress is an ‘immediately available way of proclaiming different corporealities, different ways of being a body in the world, and different interpersonal relationships, whether of gender or class’.25 Rhys uses sartorial tropes to intimate social privilege and to delineate the careful and the precise distinctions of status that pertain on the island: Antoinette notes that her Aunt Cora was ‘wearing a black silk dress, her ringlets were carefully arranged. She looked very haughty, I thought’ (38). Cora, who has married an Englishman and spent many years away from the Caribbean, is wearing a black silk dress that denotes her status as a prosperous widow. Hairstyle, dress and facial demeanour all lend her an aura of privilege and social superiority. Antoinette also notices that the English visitors to the house are ‘very beautiful and wore such beautiful clothes’ (25). There are local niceties and customs, the significance of which is lost on outsiders. When the Englishman suggests that Christophine ‘“might hold her dress up. It must get very dirty, yards of it trailing on the floor”’, Antoinette explains that, ‘“You don’t understand at all. They don’t care about getting a dress dirty because it shows it isn’t the only dress they have”’ (85). After he compliments Amelie on her ‘graceful’ dress she demonstrates the many ways in which it can be worn: ‘trailing on the floor, lifted to show a lace petticoat, or hitched up far above the knee’ (90). In her reading of the episode in which Tia helps herself to Antoinette’s dress, ‘starched, ironed, clean that morning’ (25), but not to her playmate’s underclothes since the black girl never wore any, Veronica Marie Gregg identifies the crucial importance of dress as a trope in power relationship that ‘demystifies and undercuts’ the ‘sentimental fiction of friendship between the black and white girls’.26 When Antoinette

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Figure 6.2  Antoinette in the dirty dress

goes home wearing the shabby dress that Tia has left at the side of the pool, her mother demands that it be burned and is humiliated when Christophine tells her that Antoinette has nothing else to wear. The lack of appropriate clothing produces consternation because it jeopardises the social standing of the family among the white Creole plantocracy who depend on good clothing and outward signifiers of status to differentiate themselves from the black majority population. In Voyage in the Dark (1934), for example, Anna remembers a stiffly starched white embroidered dress that she associates with the discomfort and repression of her childhood, ‘white drawers tight at the knee and a white petticoat and a white embroidered dress – everything starched and prickly’.27 The white dress, a garment that requires frequent washing, starching and ironing, not only illustrates the exacting sartorial standards to which the dominant white elite in the colonies expected its members to conform, but also intimates the plentiful supply

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of cheap domestic labour that made possible the time-consuming household rituals of laundering and ironing in the early part of the twentieth century when Voyage in the Dark is set. In Wide Sargasso Sea Annette is at first defiant when she appears in public in the clothes that advertise the drastically reduced circumstances of the slave-owning families betrayed by the lack of financial compensation they had been led to expect after the ‘glorious Emancipation Act’ (96). However, the sartorial signifiers of white poverty are quickly seized upon: ‘She still rode around every morning not caring that the black people stood about in groups to jeer at her, especially after her riding clothes grew shabby (they notice clothes, they know about money)’ (18). Here, as throughout Rhys’s fiction, good dress is crucial to the woman’s self-esteem and women who are poorly dressed experience feelings of humiliation, social stigma and discomfort. Embarrassed by Antoinette’s dirty dress in the presence of her well-todo visitors, Annette feels deeply ashamed of her daughter. Inappropriate dress is not merely an individual faux pas, for ‘dress is the insignia by which we are read and come to read others, however unstable and ambivalent those readings may be’.28 The stakes, as Annette is fully aware, are exceedingly high: remarriage, security and social acceptance. A bout of uncharacteristic practical exertion thus replaces her usual lassitude. She and Christophine embark upon a week’s frenzied sewing and mending in order to produce the two new dresses deemed necessary to secure the family’s future wellbeing: ‘I don’t know how she got the money to buy the white muslin and the pink. Yards of muslin. She may have sold her last ring, for there was one left’ (27). The emphasis on what clothes cost and on their methods of acquisition, often by women who are scarcely able to afford them, is as strong in Wide Sargasso Sea as it is in Rhys’s earlier writings which are set in Paris or London. In Good Morning, Midnight (1939), for example, the little black dress for which the stylish but impoverished Sasha longs costs as much as her entire monthly salary. Sasha is also well aware that the shopping expedition which she pleasurably anticipates must be conducted within the constraints of a very tight budget: ‘Tomorrow l’ll go to the Galeries Lafayette, choose a dress, go along to the Printemps, buy gloves, buy scent, buy lipstick, buy things costing fcs. 6.25 and fcs.19.50, buy a­ nything cheap.’29 As Alexandra Warwick and Dani Cavallaro put it, ‘Clothes acquire the status of a culturally legitimated imaginary scene, allowing points of contact between more or less suppressed personal fantasies and the cultural ensemble, mediating between them and remodelling private yearnings according to the requirement of a collective web of tropes and myths.’30 In exchanging the dresses, Tia audaciously reverses,

­132     Maroula Joannou albeit temporarily, the markers of white and black cultural identity and her exchange punctures the naïve personal fantasy of happiness that Antoinette has entertained: ‘We had eaten the same food, slept side by side, bathed in the same river. As I ran, I thought, l will live with Tia and l will be like her’ (45). It is at this point that any possible equation of happiness with the freedom that Tia possesses, but which the white Creoles lack, is ruptured by the economic realities represented by Tia’s dirty, ill-fitting garment. Having no option but to wear Tia’s grubby dress, Antoinette is forced to live the materiality of race subordination and to experience through her senses (in the touch of the borrowed clothing on her skin) the shock of physical intimacy and proximity to the racial ‘Other’. Rhys offers the starched white dress symbolising racial privilege as a visual shorthand for the impossibility of Antoinette’s desire to escape her own unhappiness through claiming affinity with the poor blacks: her position as the descendant of white slave owners makes any voluntaristic identification with black subjugation impossible. A similar point is made through hair styling in an incident at the convent school. The nuns hold up the De Plana sisters, Louise, Germaine and Hélène, as paradigms of good poise, manners and deportment. Hélène’s coiffure is styled without the use of a mirror, forbidden in order to discourage vanity. Antoinette turns to Hélène for advice: ‘“Please Hélène, tell me how you do your hair, because when I grow up I want mine to look like yours”’(54). Hélène explains how to comb and pin up her hair, to which Antoinette’s reply is: ‘“Yes, but Hélène, mine does not look like yours, whatever I do”’ (54). Hélène is ‘too polite to say the obvious thing’ (54). Antoinette’s hair can never resemble hers because Hélène is of black descent with thin brown hands and black curly hair and Antoinette is a white Creole. Carole Angier points out that Antoinette’s ‘main modes of understanding the world and her fate to which she resorts are subconscious ones: dreams, emotion and image’.31 On the verge of leaving the sheltered environs of her secondary school as she comes of age, Antoinette recounts the second of the clairvoyant dreams. In this dreamscape she is clad in thin slippers and a long white dress and walks with difficulty among tall dark trees following a man. She holds up the skirt of her dress (‘white and beautiful and I don’t wish to get it soiled’). Though his face is ‘black with hatred’ and she is ‘sick with fear’ (59) Antoinette can ‘make no effort to save myself; if anyone were to try to save me, I would refuse. This must happen’ (60). She follows him from the forest into an enclosed garden with a stone wall and steps leading upward, where she stumbles over the dress. The passage is eerily significant in that it registers cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject who is simul-

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taneously attracted to and repulsed by that which confronts her. The convent-educated Antoinette clearly dreads the sexual initiation that marks her transition from a girl to an adult woman, while accepting this rite of passage as inevitable and offering no resistance. Hence the white dress that impedes her freedom of movement or hope of escape comes to symbolise the purity and innocence that her impending marriage is to destroy. It is the white dress, virginal and unsullied, that delivers her to a malignant stranger whose facial expression registers his loathing and intent to do her harm. The dream thus uncannily prefigures how the hapless Antoinette will shortly be consigned to the man who is to betray her trust. To borrow Gérard Genette’s term, this is an example of ‘repeating prolepsis’, a ‘narrative manoeuver that consists of narrating or evoking in advance an event that will take place later’,32 and which foreshadows or tells the future before its time. To distinguish between the manifest and latent content of the dream, the dress brings to mind the traditional nuptial gown, the white dress par excellence, and Antoinette must know at a subconscious level that she is a jeune fille à marier, a young woman shortly to become a bride. As Patricia Moran suggests, ‘the events in the narrative present reactivate for the protagonists anterior experiences that then emerge in fragmentary form. This temporal split is characteristic of traumatic memory’.33 Maren Linett observes that the type of chronic psychological helplessness that Antoinette demonstrates here is ‘quite distinct from moral weakness having both a different etiology and different ontological (and political) status’.34 Insecure, disoriented and fault-finding though the Englishman whom Antoinette meets shortly after leaving school may be, he does ‘not relish going back to England in the role of rejected suitor jilted by this Creole girl’ (78). His initial impression of her is formed by her appearance, which speaks of the desire to please as well as to conceal. She is dressed in a ‘tricorne hat, which became her’ (67) – worn in Europe where it kept off the rain but adapted in the tropics to keep off the sun – with a brim turned up on three sides to shade the eyes. Under his critical scrutiny these reveal her Creole descent, her ‘foreignness’ or subordinate place in the racial hierarchy: ‘Long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either’ (67). The sexualised female subject participates in collective psychic processes and Antoinette’s performance of femininity, constituted through learned cultural codes and behaviour patterns calculated to charm, is mediated in this instance by her realisation of the unsettling effects that the unfamiliar poses to uncomprehending European sensibilities: ‘“Don’t put any more scent on my hair. He

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Figure 6.3  Antoinette in her long white dream dress

doesn’t like it.” The other: “The man don’t like scent? I never hear that before”’ (79). In Wide Sargasso Sea vestimentary choices and codes are not only inflected by racial differences but are also potent signifiers of erotic potentialities. According to Karl Kraus, the ‘configuration of eroticism

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Figure 6.4  Antoinette wearing the ‘tricorne hat, which became her’

has gone hand in hand with the configuration of clothing’ to such a degree that ‘in our unconscious experience eroticism and clothing are no longer at all separable from one another’.35 The ‘meaning of body and garment is produced by their juxtaposition, and changes according to the context in which it is worn’ and the erotic ‘comes into existence at their junction’.36 The couple attempt to establish communication at the start of the marriage, when physically attracted. With her luxuriant black hair displayed to her best advantage Antoinette is seductively attired in an elegant dress in the high-waisted style made fashionable by the Empress Josephine, who had been born in 1763 in the French colony of Martinique in the Windward Islands, where her father, JosephGapard de Tascher de La Pagerie, had owned a sugar plantation. Antoinette’s choice of dress suggests more than individual style, personal preference and taste. Situated at the interface of the subjective and the public, dress ties the wearer to a particular topos and aesthetic and historical moment, while its texture and materiality evoke the technologies, skills and practices of the material habitus whence it came. Antoinette’s mother and her maternal family originate from Martinique.Thus the fine imported garment that Antoinette wears speaks eloquently of her French family history. It has been commissioned with insider knowledge and proclaims the fashion consciousness of the island which Antoinette, in the face of the condescension that constructs the Caribbean as the ‘Other’ of Europe, spiritedly defends to

­136     Maroula Joannou her i­ nterlocutor as the ‘“Paris of the West Indies”’ (80). The male narrator comments that she ‘seemed pleased when I complimented her on her dress and told me she had it made in St Pierre, Martinique: “They call this fashion á la Joséphine”’ (80). Here we see the effects of the dressed body with its ‘unsettling ability to arouse the passions, to seduce, disturb, deceive, and to threaten even the wearer with its occult “otherness”.’37 After his compliment, the Englishman’s distaste for his bride, hitherto artfully concealed in his ‘faultless performance’ as the perfect suitor (77), momentarily gives way to the admiration of Antoinette’s physical appearance that transforms her into the object of his desire: ‘I wondered why I had never realised how beautiful she was’ (80). Antoinette’s image is painstakingly constructed, reconstructed and reflected in the looking-glass that becomes an object of contention as the loveless marriage disintegrates. Criticising Antoinette’s vanity and narcissism the male narrator punishes her by removing the mirror that reflects her image back to herself: ‘She’ll not laugh in the sun again. She’ll not dress up and smile at herself in that damnable looking-glass. So pleased, so satisfied’ (165). As Alison Bancroft puts it, the ‘scopic regime of the mirror is the place where the self is constantly negotiated and renegotiated, in an interminable process of mis/identification that is the certain consequence of an alienated subjectivity’.38 To deprive Antoinette of her reflection is to deprive her of her means of recognising who she is, thus compounding the anxiety, insecurities, conflict and distress attendant on her wrongful imprisonment with which the novel ends: ‘There is no looking-glass here and I don’t know what I am like now [. . .] What am I doing in this place and who am I?’ (180). Antoinette attempts to please her husband by wearing a white dress that he likes. However, his approval is predicated on the equation of the dress with European notions of innocence, purity and decorum. As Homi Bhabha notes, the success of colonial appropriation or mimicry depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects so that mimicry is both resemblance and menace at the same time. Under what Bhabha terms the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double we see how the ‘excess or slippage produced by the ambivalence of mimicry (almost the same, but not quite)’39 produces the opposite of the intended effect. The white dress – ‘it had slipped untidily over one shoulder and seemed too large for her’ (127) – becomes linked in his mind with the lascivious physicality that he has come to dread in the non-European wife and with the rampant uninhibited sexuality of the dreaded black ‘Other’ he now associates with the wife whose previous sexual history he cannot know. This confirms his very worst racial fears and prejudices: ‘For a moment she looked like Amelie. Perhaps they are related, I thought. It’s possible,

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it’s even probable in this damned place’ (127). But the irony of these associations is wholly lost on Antoinette, who is naïvely copying the subject of a painting that she used to love when she was a child: ‘“The Miller’s Daughter”, a lovely English girl with brown curls and blue eyes and a dress slipping off her shoulders’ (36). ‘The Miller’s Daughter’ is the title of a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson first published in 1833, revised in 1842, and illustrated by John Everest Millais in 1857 and then by John Alfred Vinter in 1859. However, the pictorial detail Rhys offers in the novel does not correspond with either of the two Victorian illustrations, which depict the subject of the painting as a child rather than as a nubile young woman and in neither the Millais nor the Vinter is there a dress slipping off the girl’s shoulder.The divergence in detail that Rhys introduces in Antoinette’s naïve attempt to visualise and reproduce ‘The Miller’s Daughter’ not only draws the readers’ attention to the unreliability of memory but also to the infant sexuality that the modern reader is able to detect behind the pieties and sentimentality of Victorian representations of childhood. The husband’s response of recoil and fastidious distaste makes these associations explicit. As J. G. Flügel argued in 1930, clothes are ‘exquisitely ambivalent, in as much as they both cover the body and thus subserve the inhibiting tendencies that we call “modesty” and at the same time afford a new and highly efficient means of gratifying exhibitionism on a new level’, by displaying the self as a sexual being, thus suggesting the erotic potentialities of the body at the same time as they hide them.40 What the white dress registers for Antoinette is desire and jouissance: her longing for love, her dreams of occupying the rightful place in her husband’s affections and the position in the English social hierarchy that is her due as his lawful wife. In contrast, his extreme reaction intimates the gendered asymmetries of desire and power. As an Englishman he knows what the dress should look like so only particular variations are noteworthy. Rhys uses dress to show the radically divergent corporeal assumptions and presuppositions of the colonising man and the colonised woman. Antoinette’s illusions about the marriage contract are shattered (‘I have not bought her, she has bought me, or so she thinks’ [70]) and the incident with the dress exposes the reality of female helplessness in the face of male power. It seems that neither the munificent dowry, handed over without question by her family, nor her own beauty and desperate attempts to please through ‘self fashioning’, can win the love of her husband. If dress functions in the novel as the vector of Antoinette’s hope it also functions as the vector of her failure and rejection. The red dress of Part Three is used to connect Antoinette’s unhappy state of diasporic exile in England to her life in the Caribbean and to

­138     Maroula Joannou show how her experience of the present is ineluctably haunted by her memories of the past. In Derridean terms, the red dress constitutes a ‘trace’ of the past, a ‘trace’ that marks the past as present while drawing attention to its absence as a ‘simulacrum of a practice that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself’.41 The dress that stands in a metonymic relationship to Antoinette also comes to represent an important milestone in her journey to understand who she is and to live by her own standards rather than by the alien standards imposed upon her by uncomprehending outsiders. R. S. Koppen explains this: ‘Clothes have a curious presence in modern fiction, a presence which at once asserts and denies its significance, and whose relation to character, much like that between an individual’s physiognomy and his or her secret subjectivity, hovers uncertainly between the synecdochic and the allegorical.’42 Angier has discussed Rhys’s exposure to Cinderella stories from a very young age and the fact that she had acted in the pantomime of Cinderella.43 The use of dress as part of a Cinderella motif is a recurrent feature in Rhys’s work, for example, in Sasha’s ‘transformation act’ in Good Morning, Midnight.44 In Wide Sargasso Sea Rhys invests the red dress with the talismanic qualities that her women attribute to the sartorial items they superstitiously believe can bring them luck or radically transform their personal circumstances. In one instance, Sasha refers to ‘dresses that will be lucky, dresses that won’t, and so on’.45 Although in the strict sense the red dress is a commodity it differs from others in Rhys’s work in that it is not linked to the means of acquisition or the act of purchase. In the fashionable milieux of London and Paris in Rhys’s early fiction questions of identity are often addressed in material terms, if not defined by material things. But in an impassioned defence of her mistress, Christophine insists that Antoinette cares nothing about money or material values: ‘“She is more better than you, she have better blood in her and she don’t care for money – it’s nothing for her”’ (152). Antoinette, as Angier reminds us, ‘like all Rhys’s heroines, lives almost entirely in feeling, and relies on her inner feelings to get at the truth’46 and to make such sense as she can of the outside world. Thus she does not value the red dress as a material object but because it is rich with salient memories and associations from her past. Indeed the red dress is the only memento of Coulibri that Antoinette retains during her detention in England and offers the reader suggestive comparisons with the sophisticated black garments favoured by Rhys’s European women. Much of the ‘pleasure of clothes is the pleasure of fabric and the way the fabric hangs and falls around the body’.47 However, we are not told the fabric of the dress, an absence that heightens the importance

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Figure 6.5  The red dress

of the information we are told, its flaming red colour and its lingering scent. The red dress is described in natural imagery as the ‘colour of fire and sunset’ and the ‘colour of flamboyant flowers’ (185), thus linking the subject’s diasporic present with her past in the hot tropical climes which its perfume and colour evoke. Whereas dresses in Rhys’s European fictions belong to a world of expensive bottled perfumes such as the L’Heure Bleue (Guerlain) and Nuit de Chine (Poiret) in Good Morning, Midnight, this dress is scented faintly with the fragrances of the Caribbean and retains the ‘smell of vertiver, and frangipani’ (185). Vertiver, the ‘oil of tranquility’, is an unguent with soothing restorative qualities derived from tall grasses with long thin leaves, and frangipani is a tree ‘covered with pink sweet-smelling flowers’ that Rhys remembered fondly from her childhood.48 So powerful is the effect of the f­ ragrance – the scent of ‘cinnamon and dust and lime trees when they are fl ­ owering.

­140     Maroula Joannou The smell of the sun and the smell of the rain’ (185) – that the garment no longer appears to be an artifact but almost an extension of the natural landscape. The red dress is not only naturalised through its associations with habitation and place but also associated with the memories of family, which represents Antoinette’s only hope of deliverance. The one person with the authority to come to Antoinette’s rescue is her step-brother, who does not recognise her in unfamiliar garments (‘I said, “If I had been wearing my red dress Richard would have known me”’ [187]). The red dress has happy connotations because Antoinette had worn a dress of that colour in her last assignation with her cousin, Sandi, and it invokes the joyous extra-marital sensuality of their relationship. Unlike her censorious husband, Sandi does not think badly of her because he understands and indeed shares her family history, and provides Antoinette’s only respite from her agonised marriage to ‘that man’ (186). Her cousin had also offered another possible avenue of escape from the ill-fated marriage. He posed the question: ‘“Will you come with me?”’ to which she had replied: ‘“I cannot”’ (187). In rescuing a travestied marginal figure, Rhys invents a new identity for Brontë’s ‘madwoman’, investing the silenced character with subjectivity, a voice and a history – ‘She must be at least plausible with a past, the reason why Mr Rochester treats her so abominably and feels justified’49 – and she subverts the authority of the Victorian intertext by revisiting its tropes, historical facts and cultural references. But at the same time as Rhys’s impassioned defence of her white Creole identity leads her to question the Eurocentrism and metropolitan bias of her early fiction, she retains the sartorial discourse that is seldom far from identity formation and from fragmentation, insecurity and self-doubt. Hence Antoinette’s question – ‘“Does it make me look intemperate and unchaste?” I said. That man told me so’ (186) – is directly concerned with the connections between identity and dress. The question about the red dress is rhetorical, requiring no answer since Antoinette addresses it to the self. But it registers more than the sartorial anxieties that we have come to recognise in Rhys’s European protagonists. Antoinette’s words bear no relationship to any incident depicted in Wide Sargasso Sea. They are, however, identical to those uttered by Edward Rochester in condemnation of his wife while attempting to justify the indefensible, his bigamous attempt to marry in the intertext Jane Eyre: ‘Bertha Mason, – the true daughter of an infamous mother, a wife at once intemperate and unchaste’.50 In Archive Fever Jacques Derrida argues that ‘there would be no future without repetition’ and that ‘one [. . .] is the condition of the other’.51 To repeat, to replicate word-for-word what is familiar in an

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old text always creates something different and it is the difference that is significant because it carries traces of the past while simultaneously being redolent with new meaning. In ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, Gayatri Spivak famously contends that ‘Antoinette is forced to act out the transformation of her “self” into that fictive Other, set fire to the house and kill herself, so that Jane Eyre can become the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction.’ 52 Pace Spivak, Rhys uses the question about the red dress in the postcolonial re-visioning of Jane Eyre to emphasise the resemblances between two sensitive, articulate women, Jane and Antoinette, both of whom are lied to and mistreated by their respective masters, Edward Rochester in Jane Eyre and his unnamed counterpart in Wide Sargasso Sea. Jane has every sympathy for Bertha but none for Rochester at this point in the narrative (‘“Sir,” I interrupted him, “you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady: you speak of her with hate – with vindictive antipathy. It is cruel – she cannot help being mad”’).53 Earlier she has jested that she would ‘“preach liberty to them that are enslaved – your harem inmates among the rest”’ and ‘“stir up mutiny”’54 in protest at his attempts to buy her fine dresses and transform her into the creature of his fancy that she is not. Infantilised by her husband, who has reacted to her innocent questions about England with condescension (‘if she was a child she was not a stupid child but an obstinate one’ [94]), the mature Antoinette is now able to recognise her own critical intelligence for what it is. Moreover, she is able to direct this intelligence to the subject of her ontological insecurity, to question how and why the subaltern comes to internalise and appropriate culturally specific, racist and misogynistic values and judgements. The red dress is used paradigmatically in Antoinette’s attempt at logical deductive reasoning. Rhys has her question the existence of meaning as a philosophical abstraction outside its material base in lived experience (‘Time has no meaning. But something you can touch and hold like my red dress, that has a meaning’ [185]). In much the same way, she had questioned the Englishman’s use of the philosophical abstraction ‘justice’ in his defence of slavery because this usage took no account of anything she recognised from her empirical knowledge of what slavery actually entailed (146). As Anne Hollander puts it, ‘although dress has much to do with people’s deep theatrical impulses, their desire to be costumed characters, especially because it functions only in wear and in motion’, it cannot be altogether ‘dramatic or theatrical because people are not always acting or performing, even though they are always appearing. It is the inner theatre that is costumed by the choice in clothes and this is not always under conscious management’.55

­142     Maroula Joannou The red dress is not a projection of ambivalence about the self, the desire for the new, or an expression of changing and changeable subjectivity, since Antoinette no longer has any interest in acting or performing a part. In the closing pages of the novel the red dress is divested of one of the key functions that we have come to expect dress to perform in Rhys’s fiction: to augur an imaginary better future. Antoinette is incapable of envisaging happiness in the locked room where she is to stay for the rest of her life and neither can the dress be worn for the purpose of courting admiration or to seduce the other sex. On the contrary, the garment speaks of depth rather than surface, of continuities rather than change, or what Hollander calls the ‘inner theatre and not always under conscious management’.56 Dress and undress entail the ‘building up and casting aside of different identities by means of clothes. To this may be added the theme of “redress”: the choosing of alternative images with the rediscovery of self that this sometimes implies’.57 What now matters most to Antoinette about the dress is that it is old, worn and reassuringly familiar, reminding her of happy times in the past, and that the garment remains exactly as she has always known it: ‘But I held the dress in my hand wondering if they had done the last and worst thing. If they had changed it when I wasn’t looking’ (186). Whereas the colour red is associated for Jane Eyre, from the very start of the novel, with the childhood terrors of the red room her dead uncle is said to haunt, Antoinette has chosen to make the colour red her own, associating this with her name and the first-person pronoun. As a school girl she stitched silk roses on canvas in her needlework class: ‘Underneath I will write my name in fire red, Antoinette Mason, née Cosway, Mount Calvery Convent, Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1839’ (53). Also associated textually with passion, fire and anger, the dress comes to symbolise the tone of subaltern defiance with which the novel ends: the red dress is ‘beautiful and it reminded me of something I must do’ (187). Is the arson to which Antoinette refers, then, a triumphant, if desperate, gesture of redemption and revenge? Can we read this as an antidote to feminine passivity, acquiescence and despair? Alternatively, is it a tragic self-destructive deed whereby her short unhappy life is doomed to extinction at the same time as her oppressor’s house? There is some ambiguity. Rhys herself writes: ‘Her confinement doesn’t last long. She turns down the house and kills herself (bravo!) very soon.’58 The ubiquitous ‘little black dress’ that speaks eloquently of modern times, of the break with the Victorian and the modernist ‘moment’, is the sartorial preference of Rhys’s stylish fashion-conscious women from The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927) to Good Morning, Midnight

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(1939). Moreover, Rhys’s ‘fascination with the sartorial – her women character’s propensity for self-fashioning or dressing up’ can be read as ‘a textual metaphor for modernism’s refusal of the stable, unitary self’.59 But it is precisely this fixed unchanging unitary self that Antoinette longs to reclaim at the point in the narrative when she is at her most vulnerable and her understanding of who she is the most deeply threatened. If the sartorial pursuit of the new and the fashionable in Rhys’s early fiction addresses the modernist question of how to express character when the traditional understandings of the ‘self’ have been overturned by the discourse of psychoanalysis, the pendulum appears to have swung full circle at the end of Rhys’s writing career. Writing about the red dress Rhys appears to revert to, or at least to have some sympathy with, an essentialist notion of human identity as rooted and fixed that is akin to the notion of human identity that informs Jane Eyre, the nineteenthcentury intertext that resonates in Rhys’s final novel.

Notes I am deeply indebted to my colleague and friend, the children’s book illustrator, Pamela Smy, for the beautiful line drawings that were commissioned for this article.   1. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (London: Deutsch, 1966), p.185. All quotations are from the first edition and are given parenthetically in the main body of my text.  2. Jean Rhys, ‘Illusion’, in Jean Rhys, The Left Bank and Other Stories (London: Cape, 1927), p. 34.   3. Kaja Silverman,‘Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse’, in Tania Modleski (ed.), Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 139–52, p. 147.   4. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (London: Hogarth, 1949), p. 31.  5. Iris Marion Young, ‘Women Recovering Our Clothes’, in Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 177–88, p. 184.   6. Patricia Moran, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and the Aesthetics of Trauma (London: Palgrave, 2007), p. 3.   7. Carole Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 557.   8. Maroula Joannou, ‘“All Right, I’ll do Anything for Good Clothes”: Jean Rhys and Fashion’, Women: A Cultural Review, 23.4 (December 2012): 463–89.   9. Helen Carr, Jean Rhys (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996), p. 58. 10. Letter from Jean Rhys to Diana Athill, 20 February 1966, Letters (1982), p. 297. 11. Letter from Jean Rhys to Hans Egli, 5 November 1949, ibid., p. 59.

­144     Maroula Joannou 12. Peter Fryer, Staying Power: A History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto, 1984), see pp. 362–6. 13. Ibid., p. 372. 14. Carole Angier, Jean Rhys, p. 557. 15. Mary Lou Emery, Jean Rhys at ‘World’s End’ (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), p. 37. 16. Letter from Jean Rhys to Diana Athill, 20 February 1966, Letters, pp. 296–7. 17. David Plante, Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three (London: Gollancz, 1983), p. 17. 18. Helen Carr, Jean Rhys, p. 5. 19. Erica L. Johnson, Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of Location in Works by Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell ’Oro (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), p. 15. 20. Joanne Entwistle, ‘The Dressed Body’, in Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wilson (eds), Body Dressing (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 33–58, pp.34 and 36. 21. Rishona Zimring,‘The Make-Up of Jean Rhys’s Fiction’, Novel, 33.2 (Spring 2000) 212–34, p. 214. 22. Carmen Wickramagamage, ‘An/other Side to Antoinette/Bertha: Reading ‘Race’ into Wide Sargasso Sea’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 35.1 (2000): 27–42, pp. 30–1. 23. Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (London: Deustch, 1979), p. 50. 24. Elaine Savory, The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 13. 25. R. S. Koppen, Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 10. 26. Veronica Marie Gregg, Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 89. 27. Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (London: Constable, 1934), p. 45. 28. Joanne Entwistle, ‘The Dressed Body’, p. 47. 29. Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (London: Constable, 1939), p. 206. 30. Alexandra Warwick and Dani Cavallaro, Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and the Body (Oxford: Berg, 1998), p. 47. 31. Carole Angier, Jean Rhys, p. 557. 32. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY: University of Cornell Press, 1980), pp. 48, 71. 33. Patricia Moran, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and the Aesthetics of Trauma (London: Palgrave, 2007), p. 118. 34. Maren Linett, ‘“New Words, New Everything”: Fragmentation and Trauma in Jean Rhys’, Twentieth Century Literature, 51.4 (Winter 2005): 437–66, p. 440. 35. Karl Kraus, ‘The Eroticism of Clothes’, in Daniel L. Purdy (ed.), The Rise of Fashion: A Reader (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), pp. 239–44. 36. Alexandra Warwick and Dani Cavallaro, Fashioning the Frame, p. 86. 37. Clair Hughes, Dressed in Fiction (Oxford: Berg, 2006), p. 2.

Rhys and Dress     145 38. Alison Bancroft, Fashion and Psychoanalysis: Styling the Self (London: I. B. Taurus, 2012), p. 25. 39. Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, in Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 121–31, p. 123. 40. J. C. Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes (London: Hogarth, 1930), p. 120. 41. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), p. 24. 42. R. S. Koppen, Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity, p. 1. 43. Carole Angier, Jean Rhys, pp. 60–1. 44. Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, p. 85. See Patricia Moran, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and the Aesthetics of Trauma, p. 144 for discussion of Rhys and the Cinderella motif. 45. Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, p. 40. 46. Carole Angier, Jean Rhys, p. 557. 47. Iris Marion Young, ‘Women Recovering Our Clothes’, p. 183. 48. Jean Rhys, Smile, Please, p. 23. 49. Letter from Jean Rhys to Selma Vaz Dias, 9 April 1958, Letters, pp. 156–7, p. 156. 50. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 261. 51. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 79–80. 52. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1985): 243–61, p. 251. 53. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 257. 54. Ibid., p. 230. 55. Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 451. 56. Ibid. 57. Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (London: Hurst, 1996), p. 1. 58. Letter from Jean Rhys to Diana Athill, 20 February1966, Letters, p. 297. 59. Maroula Joannou ,‘“All Right, I’ll Do Anything for Good Clothes”’, p. 2.

Chapter 7

The Discourses of Jean Rhys: Resistance, Ambivalence and Creole Indeterminacy H. Adlai Murdoch Jean Rhys (1890–1979) was born a Creole named Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, daughter of a Welsh doctor; her mother, Minna Williams, was a third-generation Dominican Creole of Scots ancestry, and she called the city of Roseau, capital of the island of Dominica, home for her first sixteen years, until her departure for England. Best known, perhaps, as the author of Wide Sargasso Sea, the ‘prequel’ to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Rhys also authored a number of other works, including The Left Bank, Quartet, Good Morning, Midnight and Voyage in the Dark. Rhys thus spent her most formative years as a Creole in a Caribbean colony, overdetermined by many of the same cultural patterns and strictures as her black and ‘coloured’ counterparts – for Rhys, growing up ‘white’ in the Caribbean also meant being inculcated with an ineluctable ‘Caribbeanness’. It should come therefore as no surprise that Rhys frequently returns to this world of familiar doubleness, one whose contradictions continually undermined the sterile world of metropolitan whiteness to which her skin colour appeared unequivocally to condemn her. Rhys was a white Creole, and featured white Creoles and their paradoxical subjectivities as protagonists in several of her books, including those to be read here, Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark. The complex depths of the creole figure in Caribbean literature and culture continue to demand further exploration, inflected as they are by the long presence and pervasive traces of colonialism in the region and its attendant corollaries of hierarchical social separation and ethnocultural difference inflected by perceptions of race. Thus the shifting and structurally unstable inscription of the creole figure echoes, in a key way, critical ambiguities of political structure and social position that shaped the colonial encounter in the region in a number of ways. The suspect beginnings of the term ‘creole’ as embodying colonialism’s repulsion for the fearfully unnameable and unplaceable hybrid monstrosity, the undesired product of colonial métissage, ultimately overdetermined the

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ostensibly separate races of white and black, even as the boundaries and practices that presumably separated them were increasingly and unalterably blurred. In The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770–1820, Edward Brathwaite proposed that the principle of cultural distinctness upon which much of the historical definition of the region was drawn be abandoned in favour of an increasing recognition of the intrinsic sociocultural pluralism of the islands. This pluralism was itself predicated on the plural patterns of population displacement that were the corollary of the sugar-driven process of Caribbean colonialism. Given this background of cultural intersection and interaction, close examination of the term ‘creole’ will show it to be an inherently unstable category, shot through with the ambiguities and essentialisms of its origins in the colonial period. The OED standard definition gives its etymological origin as the Spanish criollo, and inscribes the Creole in terms of instability and alterity, since it figures a European or an African subject linked to displacements of place rather than race. Even more striking is the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica definition, one to which a number of authors have made reference. Indeed, the depth and breadth of racialised assumptions and stereotypes here is nothing short of astonishing: CREOLEspan> (the Fr. form of criollo, a West Indian, probably a negro corruption of the Span. criadillo, the dim. of criado, one bred or reared, from criar, to breed, a derivative of the Lat. creare, to create), a word used originally (16th century) to denote persons born in the West Indies of Spanish parents, as distinguished from immigrants direct from Spain, aboriginals, negroes or mulattos. It is now used of the descendants of nonaboriginal races born and settled in the West Indies, in various parts of the American mainland and in Mauritius, Reunion and some other places colonized by Spain, Portugal, France, or (in the case of the West Indies) by England.

Those contemporary prejudices grounded in race and place, which are all too apparent in this entry, reinforce the fact that contemporary discourses, from science to popular culture, understood the Creole to be marked and overdetermined as different. And in fact, this definition goes to some length to stress a reductive set of differences between whites, based on geography and climate; as it continues, In the West Indies it designates the descendants of any European race; in the United States the French-speaking native portion of the white race in Louisiana, whether of French or Spanish origin [. . .] The difference in type between the white creoles and the European races from whom they have sprung, a difference often considerable, is due principally to changed environment – especially to the tropical or semi-tropical climate of the lands they inhabit.1

­148     H. Adlai Murdoch This implicit degeneration of European stock due to the corrupting influence of the tropics has long been a staple of colonialist discourses and prejudices, and the degree to which this persistent trope undergirds and undermines the female creole subject of Voyage in the Dark will shortly become apparent. It is this conundrum of ‘racial’ variation and admixture within a larger Caribbean framework of supposedly rigid, racialised social hierarchies, then, that gave rise to interlocking ideologies of race and sexuality, empire and colony, gender and class, and that ultimately separated even creole whites from their metropolitan colonial counterparts. It is the ambivalences and slippages in the inscription of social subjectivity and subject positions that I intend to explore in selected examples of Rhys’s work.

Voyage in the Dark I have written at length on the subject of Voyage in the Dark elsewhere,2 but in this instance I would like to approach the text from a somewhat different discursive perspective. This reading centres on the fact that Voyage in the Dark, as we know from its initial publication in 1934, appeared with an ending in fact suggested – if not mandated – by the publisher, and different from the one originally proposed by Rhys. This fact was unequivocally demonstrated when the original ending was found and published some six years after Rhys’s death by Nancy Hemond Brown in 1985, lengthening Part Four of the novel by over two and a half thousand words.3 Indeed, as Mary Hanna points out, ‘Rhys’s original ending in which Anna dies, was rejected by three British publishers – Cape, Hamish Hamilton, and Constable.’ This decision was said to be ‘a straightforward matter of accommodating market tastes, since according to Rhys’s letters, all three publishers felt that Anna’s death was sordid’.4 And while it often makes for facile and reductive argumentation to try to establish parallels between authors’ lives and those of the characters depicted in their works, in Rhys’s case it seems that we do not have to look too far afield. Once displaced to England at the age of sixteen for further schooling, where she was blindsided by the cold and mocked at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for being an ‘outsider’ whose intractable Dominican accent would prevent her from ever speaking ‘proper English’ and so from getting any good parts, ‘An aristocratic financier, Lancelot Hugh Grey Smith, fell for her,’ as Lesley McDowell writes. ‘He was the first of the men she came to depend upon. When Smith finally cast her off, Ella was left to fend for herself, and,

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in a deep depression and without any acting work, she sank into prostitution and alcoholism. She soon became pregnant. Smith, who wasn’t the father, paid for an abortion.’5 In addition, she was reputed to be quite traumatised by her father’s relatively early death, in 1910, when she would have been about twenty. To what extent, then, is the materiality of these colonially-derived cultural, geographical and subjective displacements, and the reductive stereotypes that undergird and enable them, reflected and inscribed in the content and formal structures of Voyage in the Dark? This novel recounts the trajectory of displacement undergone by Anna Morgan, a white female Caribbean creole subject. Through the framework of a first-person narrative, Anna tells the story of her arrival in England, her continuing subjection to the dis-ease of stereotypical othering in the metropole, her frustrated attempts at a career on the stage, her succession of friendships both male and female, and her eventual pregnancy and subsequent abortion. For the most part, Rhys does not exploit the intrinsic ambiguities and slippages of first-person narrative, and Anna’s hindsight-marked tale remains more or less linear. However, the narrative is marked by a number of intratextual passages coded as separate through their reflective tone and lack of punctuation. Such a combination suggests the interpolation of internal monologue and its structural opposition to linear narration. This differential discourse highlights her fragmented positionality and interstitial, unlocalisable perspective, highlighting those moments when Anna expresses the cultural displacement, alienation and lack of belonging that increasingly characterise her British sojourn. Autobiography has long been a primary discursive means of mediating identity and culture in the Caribbean context, illuminating and interrogating the compound, overlapping patterns produced by the region’s complex historical experience. Here, self-division becomes a prerequisite for, or a key constituent of, autobiographical re-pre­sentation (literally as a secondary presentation of a distant, primary set of events), since a comprehensive analysis of the relationship obtaining between author and presentation must also ‘focus on the inability of language to bridge the distance between what he takes to be a past self and a present self’, as Paul Jay explains.6 But while exploring and enriching such questions has long been part and parcel of the Caribbean author’s discursive arsenal, it is also beyond question that Rhys places these and a number of related techniques at the service of the narrative re-presentation of Anna’s colonially-derived split subjectivity. Mary Lou Emery points out that ‘techniques of narrative intersubjectivity and shifting point of view decenter the traditional “character” as a unified self. This displacement

­150     H. Adlai Murdoch challenges the status of the stable and unified ego that, in Victorian novels and experience, depends upon the organization of sex and gender in a distinct separation of public and private worlds’.7 At bottom, then, it is Anna’s problematic (for the period) creoleness that engenders a series of subjective slippages, such that her perceived racialised ambiguity is inscribed and reflected in a series of discourses whose form embodies the growing fragmentation that metropolitan society imposes on her. With regard to Anna’s creoleness, then, we should recall the discursive and locational slippage that attaches to the term, so that a creole person can be either white or black, coloniser or colonised, articulating an essential ambiguity that paradoxically reinscribes the strategies of containment that have driven the dominant designations of difference at the centre of the colonial encounter. Carole Boyce Davies provides an interesting take on the implications of the term for Caribbean subjectivity, ‘The creoleness that is essentially Caribbean identity is the necessity of accepting all facets of experience, history and personhood in the definition of the self.’8 However, as we shall see, the acceptance of plural positionalities that such a definition implies flies in the face of the rigid binaries that Anna will be forced to countenance. If, then, a creole subject or culture may be black, white, brown, or East Asian, colonial or metropolitan, or, for that matter, the product of myriad ethnic and linguistic influences and cross-fertilisations; in other words, if the creole figure can be located only as one among several ethnocultural possibilities, or even, in some cases, several such possibilities at once, then this Caribbean creoleness embodies multiple sites and strategies of doubling, difference and dislocation on the cultural and performative planes. To this subjective maelstrom must be added Anna’s contradictory, proteiform subjectivity as a white creole Caribbean subject, one whose rarity is consistently and persistently out of place; as Evelyn Hawthorne puts it, she is ‘an insecure, vulnerable Caribbean immigrant who feels herself a victim of the British gender and class system, as well as its racial biases: she lacks financial means and social standing, is hardly a “real” Englishwoman, and as a colonial Creole is racially suspect as having mixed blood’.9 And indeed, Hawthorne extends the racialised ambiguities here by positing Anna as a marginalised subject who, like her author, assuaged her feelings of exclusion through identification with social figures made similarly suspect. There are a number of ways to read the novel’s complex intersections of race, colonialism and alterity. For example, in her essay ‘Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark as a Trans-Atlantic Mulatta Narrative’, Ania Spyra posits that ‘the early and tragic death of the protagonist [. . .] places the novel firmly in the tradition of the “tragic mulatta” narrative, which

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– transplanted to the British context – calls for a more complex understanding of the transatlantic reverberations of the plantation economy and the racial hierarchies and categories it left in its wake’. For Spyra, then, the primary contribution made by the novel is ‘in teasing out the critique of racial ideologies of the plantation system’.10 More broadly, however, the racial codes through and against which Anna is figured in the novel function as inscriptions of colour – white, brown and black – that have historically driven perceptions and prejudices of race, racial difference and racial hierarchies, particularly in a context of colonial segregation and separation. The implications for Anna as subject that emerge from the discursive and symbolic framework of racialised colour coding at work in the novel operate through difference, or in fact a specific iteration of difference that inscribes racial belonging as both fixed and binary. As Stuart Hall explains, ‘It is the code that fixes the meaning, not the colour itself [. . .] meaning depends on the relation between a sign and a concept which is fixed by a code.’11 It is this colonial entwining of race and colour that codes Anna as white and presumably privileged on the one hand, while simultaneously ostracising and stigmatising her as a colonial creole marked by interstitiality, exclusion and alterity. Such ambiguities effectively address the core paradoxes of the post/ colonial condition, and illuminate the extent to which any assumptions regarding post/colonial subjectivity – with its implicit inscription in and articulations of race, culture and temporality – are predicated on binary principles of being and knowing. These are the difficulties that converge upon and emerge from Rhys’s inscription of the pluralities inherent in the term ‘creole’: by deliberately disturbing and destabilising the boundaries and distinctions between ‘racial’ and cultural worlds, Rhys succeeds in problematising our understanding of and relation to these worlds. As Peter Hulme points out: ‘in the West Indies the “native” is either for the most part absent – if what is meant is indigenous – or “creole” – if what is meant is “born in the West Indies” [. . .] to distinguish between black creole and white creole is already to blur the desired distinction’.12 This process of othering is extended through Anna’s representation through and assimilation to a number of colonial stereotypes, especially that of the Hottentot, as her friend Maudie explains, ‘“She’s always cold. She can’t help it. She was born in a hot place. She was born in the West Indies or somewhere, weren’t you, kid? The girls call her the Hottentot. Isn’t it a shame?”’ (13).13 Anna’s assimilation here to tropical heatas-difference draws on a European discursive tradition of creoleness as otherness, exacerbated by colonialism’s conflation of blacks with a general spirit of lasciviousness, so that as the white subject is doubly

­152     H. Adlai Murdoch and paradoxically inscribed as both implicitly or symbolically black and non-metropolitan, it is simultaneously located as the epitome of the colonial neither/nor. These associations make Anna an inherently unstable character, overdetermined by a doubly interstitial inscription between both the black and white creole worlds and those of the Caribbean and of the metropole. Even apart from her growing metropolitan dis-ease, Anna is haunted by her own internal convictions of unbelonging; the complex social patterns of her native, colonial Dominica seem to drive her to disown the white world into which she is born, even as the black world she desires, and in which she is convinced she will feel more comfortable, insists on resisting her. This doubled terrain of cultural ‘in-betweenness’ by which Anna is framed has been mined in interesting ways by Homi Bhabha. As Bhabha maps the role of the interstices in colonial discourse, he posits the disturbing ambivalences of the interstitial space as ‘the specific “interruption” [. . .] through which the colonial text utters its interrogations, its contrapuntal critique’.14 As colonial interstitialities persistently undermine the more visible binaries of its discourses, they produce a critical doubleness, an ambiguous hybridity whose subversiveness, as Bhabha insists, ‘erases any essentialist claims for the inherent authenticity or purity of cultures’.15 Such overdetermining structures create valid contexts for concluding that protagonists like Anna are representative of a social and cultural duality, highlighting an instability that suggests in its turn colonialism’s unequivocal imbrication in the very patterns of ambiguous difference it had sought to locate among the colonised and through which it had sought to rationalise the colonial project itself. In sum, then, subjective overdeterminations such as these simultaneously elaborate patterns of exclusion that foreclose the possibility of authenticity for the broad spectrum of colonial subjects. Anna’s displacement is reciprocal, then; she is as alienated and culturally different and distant from her metropolitan counterparts as they are from her. This condition is formally inscribed in the narrative in a number of ways, and is made abundantly clear in a series of passages couched in internal monologue, in which Anna expresses her discomfiture and sense of exclusion to an unnamed and unlocalisable interlocutor. These passages mark their difference from the rest of the text by their elliptical style, repetitive phrasings and absence of punctuation, a deliberate discursive strategy meant to define Anna’s cultural duality and lack of grounding in the metropole: ‘a small tidy look it had everywhere fenced off from everywhere else . . . I had read about England ever since I could read – smaller meaner everything is never mind – this

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is London – hundreds thousands of white people white people rushing along and the dark houses all alike frowning down one after the other all alike all stuck together . . . oh I’m not going to like this place I’m not going to like this place I’m not going to like this place’ (17). In their difference, then, these phrases appear to make up a single utterance, delivered from start to finish in a single breath. However, their disjointed structure simultaneously marks them off as separate in form and content from the rest of the narrative. Now if, on the face of it, the structure of this passage is distinctive enough to constitute an embedded narrative, it constitutes, in formal terms, an event where, as Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan succinctly states, ‘one sequence is inserted into another as a specification or detailing of its functions’.16 Such an analysis suggests that Anna’s stream-of-consciousness delivery acts as a structural and thematic commentary on the thematics of the primary narrative, highlighting through its difference from the latter’s order and linearity the subjective disjuncture of Anna herself. In other words, if Anna’s ‘in-betweenness’ marks her as being out of place, then such a dis-placement arguably inflects several levels of Anna’s subjectivity. Put another way, if Anna is ‘unhomed’, to coin a phrase, and this ‘unhomeliness’ operates as a disjuncture, then Anna is not only out of place in her creole whiteness and in her identification with the indigenous Caribs; as we will see, she is also out of place in that she expresses a desire to be black, inscribing her problematic subjectivity through a form of alterity that makes common cause – albeit symbolic and limited – with the slave descended axis of the population to which her white creole counterparts were presumably superior. Interestingly, this subjective shift is predicated on the valorisation of her phenotypical, or ‘racial’, rather than her cultural characteristics; such a desire for cultural (re)affiliation encompasses new patterns and principles of subjective belonging, ‘And the heat pressing down on you as if it were something alive. I wanted to be black, I always wanted to be black [. . .] Being black is warm and gay, being white is cold and sad’ (31). Such an ambivalence is both strategic and critical, as Ania Spyra argues, ‘Anna remains ambivalent towards race, because despite her denial here she [. . .] idealizes the lives of people of African descent on her island’.17 These oscillating shifts between whiteness and blackness appear even more concretely near the end of the novel, when Anna’s botched abortion causes her to hallucinate, and she returns in her mind’s eye to a moment when, during her Caribbean childhood, she watched a carnival procession with other members of her family. Interestingly, this internalised moment is inscribed in italics, and its accompanying absence of punctuation and stream-of-consciousness style mark it as an additional,

­154     H. Adlai Murdoch specific instance of an identitarian internal monologue that functions thematically as an embedded narrative: A pretty useful mask that white one watch it and the slobbering tongue of an idiot will stick out – a mask father said with an idiot behind it I believe the whole damned business is like that – Hester said Gerald the child’s listening . . . Aunt Jane said I don’t see why they should stop the Masquerade they’ve always had their three days Masquerade ever since I can remember why should they want to stop it some people want to stop everything. (184–5)

While the full import of this quote will shortly be discussed in depth, what is most apparent in Anna’s singular articulation of this alternative ethnocultural affiliation is the extent to which it marks her separation from the familial strictures and structures of white creole belonging and her implicit inscription in the Caribbean region’s cultural pluralism and its metamorphoses of intersecting cultural practices and belief systems. As Bettelheim, Nunley and Bridges point out in Caribbean Festival Arts, Caribbean carnival came to be a direct reflection of the region’s plural ethnic and cultural history, ‘The Caribbean’s ethnic complexion, as well as its dynamic economic and political history, are the ingredients of its festival arts [. . .] Caribbean festival arts are evidence of the transformation worked by a creole aesthetic.’18 Seen in these terms, Carnival is inherently a postcolonial celebration of identity, multiplicity and ethnic and historical survival, in which subversion, parody and performance play equally critical roles in defining and disseminating a national sense of self. In this act of self-identification, then, Anna lays claim to the innate, unspoken creativity of her in-betweenness. Despite the several paradoxes posed by their divergent ethnocultural history, the few thousand Caribs remaining of Dominica’s indigenous population symbolise the colonial patterns of exploitation and manipulation that all but exterminated one population group while inscribing two others in colonial patterns of creole doubleness; ‘Rhys seems mainly to deploy the Carib as a metaphor of her alienation,’ Hawthorne claims, and goes on to posit that ‘Rhys was so often preoccupied with her own victimization and death wishes, and characteristically used marginalized figures, the Carib among these, to mirror her own state of alleged defeat.’19 Within this conundrum that inscribes whites over against indigeneity, however, the colonial origins of this subjugation are inescapable, ‘In the novel, Anna identifies with the Carib as a symbol of loss, defeat, and passivity; like her, a victim of European domination.’20 These analyses make clearer the extent to which the inscription of Anna’s problematised subjectivity is re-presented through racialised patterns of subjection, exclusion and othering.

Resistance, Ambivalence and Creole Indeterminacy     155

In an important reading, Mary Lou Emery remarks on the complex ways in which Anna’s interior monologues ‘create a dynamic movement [. . .] that bridges the gap between Anna’s fragmented fields of consciousness and the social world outside her drawn curtains’.21 Emery’s perceptive analysis highlights the shifting discourses that mark Anna’s troubled subjectivity at various points in the narrative, and concentrates on a particular passage just past the novel’s mid-point, in which Anna, depressed in the wake of her abandonment by her suitor and seducer Walter Jeffries, engages in a new discursive shift, one that places her dis-placement and dis-ease on a different plane. As this analysis has noted, Anna’s conflicted and contradictory subjectivity is inscribed and reflected in specific patterns of discursive dislocation that cause the narrative to reflect her situation in its formal structures, as Emery substantiates, ‘Throughout the narrative, formal devices unite the conflicting fragments in a deliberate movement between inner and outer forms of discourse, creating logical associations among seemingly subjective and irrational juxtapositions.’22 In Emery’s specific example, while this passage is arguably a variant of the embedded narratives we have seen, what sets it apart are the repeated shifts from first-person commentary to an extended, verbatim quote from a history text rather than the stream-of-consciousness internal monologue that has characterised Anna’s discursive disjunctures thus far: ‘And drift, drift/Legions away from despair.’ It can’t be ‘legions’. ‘Oceans’, perhaps. ‘Oceans away from despair’. But it’s the sea, I thought. The Caribbean Sea. ‘The Caribs indigenous to this island were a warlike tribe and their resistance to white domination, though spasmodic, was fierce [. . .] They are now practically exterminated. The few hundreds that are left do not intermarry with the negroes. Their reservation, at the northern end of the island, is known as the Carib Quarter.’ They had, or used to have, a King. Mopo, his name was. Here’s to Mopo, King of the Caribs! But, they are now practically exterminated. ‘Oceans away from despair . . .’ (90–1)

There are a number of remarkable aspects to this passage, and they deserve careful unpacking. The primary challenge here is perhaps to isolate the passage’s most exceptional characteristic, for there are several. On the one hand, the extended quote is drawn from a historical text on Dominica, but, as if that weren’t enough, Anna quotes it at length and by heart. In addition, the key aspect of Dominican history that it uncovers, the ongoing if marginalised presence of the original Carib population, inscribes plural, overlapping patterns of ethnicity, culture, history, subjectivity and belonging. As Emery points out, The paragraph strikes the reader because of its improbability. Anna, nineteen and uneducated, suddenly quotes at length and from memory a text

­156     H. Adlai Murdoch c­ oncerning Caribbean history. This voice does not paraphrase the text but bounds it definitively with quotation marks signaling, not a loose association in the character’s stream of consciousness, but an excursion outside of that consciousness into the realm of public discourse. The quotation marks and the academic tone define both the excursion and its formal accuracy.23

On the one hand, then, questions swirl around the wholesale integration of this historical text into what is purportedly a relatively spontaneous commentary on Anna’s part. On the other, venturing into Carib territory opens up unheralded complexities of colonialism and ethnocultural extermination; the Caribs were the primary ethnic group encountered by Columbus’s colonisers, but their virtually complete disappearance within a century or so – mainly due to disease and overwork – ­problematises Anna’s attempts to establish bonds of belonging with the ‘native’ population. For indeed, the question here is how is a native, or authentic population defined? Is it in temporal, numerical, or cultural terms? And what precisely constitutes authenticity in such a context? Emery identifies the chief conundrums well, The heroine’s own experience shapes this dynamic. Anna associates her personal situation with the history of the Caribs, portraying her sense of an individual past and identity within the context of a wider social and cultural past [. . .] Anna links her exploited situation to that of other oppressed people, not in slave-like submission this time, but in resistance to it no matter what the odds [. . .] The merging of private and public forms of discourse shapes and is shaped by Anna’s wish to live between cultures – that of her native Caribbean and that of its colonial ruler.24

While much of this reading is commendable in its clarity and perspicacity, I wish to take issue with the notion – implicit in this citation – that Anna’s dilemma is a binary one that locates her midway along a complex continuum marked by the Caribbean and the colonial metropolis on the one hand, and the black and white creole worlds on the other. For in fact, the insertion of the Caribs complicates the spaces and discourses of Anna’s un/belonging and alienation in a number of critical ways. Firstly, the fact that the Caribs are the only ethnic group in Dominica – or in the wider Caribbean, for that matter – who can lay claim to originary, or first nation status, effectively designates all other groups as other, including the white Creoles from whom Anna springs and the black Creoles to whom she gives her subjective allegiance. As the late, lamented Stuart Hall has explained, the New World presence is the juncture-point where the many cultural tributaries meet, the ‘empty’ land (the European colonisers emptied it) where strangers from every other part of the globe collided. None of the people who now occupy the islands – black, brown, white, African, European, American, Spanish, French, East

Resistance, Ambivalence and Creole Indeterminacy     157 Indian, Chinese, Portuguese, Jew, Dutch – originally ‘belonged’ there. It is the space where the creolisations and assimilations and syncretisms were negotiated.25

Indeed, the so-called ‘Carib Quarter’ or Carib Territory of Dominica is to all intents and purposes a 3,700–acre reservation, established by the British in 1903; the Carib Reserve Act, enacted in the year of Dominica’s independence in 1978, reaffirmed the Carib Territory’s boundaries and the principles and practices of local government for its population of about 3,000. And so while it is true that ‘Neither the Spanish in the sixteenth century nor the English in the seventeenth ever entirely defeated the Dominican Caribs’, as Emery claims, they can, and do, symbolise resistance to military, political and cultural colonial domination on the one hand, but ultimately are also a population that has been exploited and victimised in what one might term the most even-handed of ways, by both the black and white creole arrivants to Dominica.26 And so if, indeed, ‘Anna associates her personal situation with that of the Caribs’, she is effectively eliding the history of suppression, exclusion and eradication that undergirds and overdetermines the temporality of the encounters between white Creoles and Caribs in a colonial context.27 The paradox of colonial subjectivity that she elaborates here is predicated on her alienation from her own white creole community, her desire for integration into the perceived greater warmth and security of the black creole community, and the implicit need for resistance that she will extrapolate from the Carib community. But there is a problem here in the orientalist overtones of Anna’s longing for belonging, which in their turn give rise to an ethnocultural compression of otherness where the extent to which the subtleties of cultural diversity escape her attention only illuminates her ambivalence on the question of difference. Both Caribs and black Creoles are implicitly conjoined in their difference and their mediation of her alterity while her white creole appropriation of Carib origination, resourcefulness and nonconformity effectively effaces these categories, such that differential cultures, similar only in their otherness, appear to become interminably interchangeable with each other, a discursive phenomenon that Edward Said has tellingly described: ‘it is enough for us here to note how strongly the general character ascribed to things Oriental could withstand both the rhetorical and the existential force of obvious exceptions [. . .] The unisons are made within general categories, not between categories and what they contain’.28 What this says about Anna’s perception of self and other(s), then, is quite revealing, suggesting strongly that any simulacrum of creole subjectivity articulated as the other of these layered inscriptions of ambivalence must itself also be marked by fragmentation and disjuncture.

­158     H. Adlai Murdoch In the end, then, it is not so much that Anna ‘wish[es] to live between two cultures,’ as Emery puts it, but rather that she feels obliged to do so, since she experiences neither acceptance nor integration in either of the two white worlds – the metropolitan and the Creole – that are presented as her primary subjective contexts.29 Further, while on the one hand ‘she recognizes that the island belongs truly to its natives’, leading to the conclusion that ‘she longs to be black in an effort to feel at home with the people she admires but who must, inevitably, distrust her’, as Emery continues, such a binary reading of colonialism’s complex encounters and interactions, particularly in the Dominican context, can account only partially for Anna’s pervasive subjective displacement.30 In other words, while the binary relation outlined here might apply across much of the Caribbean, the specificities of the Dominican situation complicate the matter insofar as the Carib presence is concerned, a presence which in fact obtains in almost no other Caribbean territory. To fulfil the hypothesis that the island truly belongs to its natives, then, the Carib spirit of resistance with which Anna desires to assimilate would need to be released from its confinement on the reservation and regain its rightful hierarchical place over both creole communities and the metropolitan community that had all relegated it to geographical, political and cultural marginality. And while Anna may become, albeit symbolically, a ‘true’ native subject in this way, such a process of cosmopolitan affiliation would ultimately have the effect of realigning colonial hierarchies of subjectivity and belonging that were spawned in the wake of the earliest colonial encounters, and which, through an easy acceptance of practice and presumption, came to be inscribed as a convenient truth. In such an active engagement with difference, what is required is an alternative perspective on such categories as ‘nation’ and ‘identity’, to be predicated on a principle that ‘rejects a unified, fixed, and essentialist concept of identities (or communities) [but] Rather [. . .] sees identities as multiple [. . .] the products of ongoing differentiation and polymorphous identification [. . .] taking place between permeable, changing individuals and communities’, as Shohat and Stam argue.31 Only in this way will new patterns for shaping identity and ensuring cultural change slowly but inexorably emerge.

Wide Sargasso Sea So much has been written, over time, about Wide Sargasso Sea, the novel for which Rhys is perhaps best known, that coming up with new pronouncements or insights on the subject is arguably a major chal-

Resistance, Ambivalence and Creole Indeterminacy     159

lenge. The novel is conventionally understood as a ‘prequel’ to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847); as Elaine Savory puts it, Rhys’s version comprises ‘the story of the woman who is mad in the attic and Rochester when he was young’. More to the point, for the purposes of our analysis, is Savory’s insistence that ‘Rhys revisioned Jane Eyre’s lurid description of the Creole wife, which reflected nineteenth-century British stereotypes about white Creoles’.32 If Rhys’s goal in this text was to rescue and revalorise Bertha Mason from the ethnic, discursive and representational marginalisation that she suffered in Brontë’s novel, then she accomplished this goal on several fronts, inscribing a new postcolonial paradigm in the process: ‘Wide Sargasso Sea is a writing back to Jane Eyre done before such intertextuality became identified as a widespread postcolonial response to colonial literary canons’, as Savory succinctly puts it. Indeed, colonial issues of race and gender identity are arguably front and centre in Wide Sargasso Sea. As Bertha Mason is reinscribed and reinserted into the new identitarian framework figured by Antoinette Cosway, the backstory of how this young Jamaican Creole became, or was made into, the madwoman in the attic becomes the novel’s prime consideration, as Savory asserts, ‘Race is a key element in this story. But it is complexly portrayed and tangled with gender, class, and national identities in Antoinette, and these designate her as different in complicated ways from those around her.’33 As Antoinette Cosway, then, Rhys’s protagonist embodies often-negated elements of creole Caribbean female subjectivity, such that she is figured as much by gender as by geography, by her national/colonial as well as her ethnic/ racial difference. Perceiving and defining key aspects of Antoinette’s creole character in this way is borne out by key descriptive passages and character statements, in and through which it becomes increasingly evident that Antoinette is consistently figured as other, as not English. When she balks at the prospect of marrying Rochester just before the ceremony, he insists that ‘I did not relish going back to England in the role of rejected suitor jilted by this Creole girl’ (65).34 Here, invoking the word ‘Creole’ suffices to mark and measure Antoinette’s distance from the metropolitan English ethnocultural norm supposedly embodied by Rochester. A little later, when she tries to teach him her songs, he re-cites one of them as Adieu foulard, adieu madras (76), embedding her through a classic, indeed an infamous colonial stereotype, the symbol and synecdoche of the foulard and the madras undergirding the theme song that came to define the othered creole French doudou, as Edwin Hill explains,

­160     H. Adlai Murdoch The classic colonial doudou (there are variants) represents a black or métisse Creole woman who loves a white French man, but who can only melancholically sing the impossibility of their relationship [. . .] the doudou represents the Creole woman of colour desperately in love with a French man but stranded in her colonial place. Caged in by geography, culture, and colour, she melancholically sings, in the Doux parler des îles (‘the sweet speech of the islands’, Creole), her hopeless plight of seduction, love and abandonment.35

Clearly, here, both colonial and creole discourses have been harnessed to further Antoinette’s implicit alterity. Additionally, this is discursively linked to the fact, several pages earlier, of her proud claim of having had her dress ‘made in St Pierre, Martinique: “They call this fashion à la Joséphine [. . .] the Paris of the West Indies”’(67). In other words, Antoinette is simultaneously inscribed as both Caribbean and as a creolised Other, in a doubled act of discursive marginalisation that underlines the complex contradictions of colonial control in the Caribbean. While her enclosed existence as a white creole female in the postEmancipation Caribbean suggests that she is already an implicitly liminal figure, this latent subjective slippage is exacerbated by the negative economic realities that followed in the wake of slavery abolition. Here, personal and political patterns collide with the givens of race and class, as Veronica Gregg explains, ‘The death of her planter father and the ending of slavery reduce Antoinette and her family to penury, from white to black. “Real white people” have money. The racial superiority of the whites depends on the economic ascendancy achieved by unpaid black labor. Without money, Antoinette’s family become niggers, isolated from the rest of white society.’36 Clearly, the key question here is how ‘real white people’ are defined, and arguably the most pressing criteria have to do with the conjunction between race and economic status; in the slave colonies, it is wealth that makes one white, with a capacity to mitigate both blackness and its creeping adulteration by the Creole. And so if a change in economic fortunes can concomitantly imply a shift in subjective inscription, Antoinette’s creoleness, with its intrinsic social and subjective ambiguities, paradoxically delimits any capacity for certainty in her self-definition. Importantly, this ‘effect of uncertainty’ is acknowledged by Antoinette herself. In a key passage, striking for its pejorative language, the multivalent terms of Antoinette’s self-description simultaneously inscribe negativity on multiple levels, ‘a white cockroach. That’s me. That’s what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders. And I’ve heard English women call us white niggers. So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all’ (85).

Resistance, Ambivalence and Creole Indeterminacy     161

On both the material and the symbolic levels, both key phrases here, ‘white cockroach’ and ‘white nigger’, conjure tautological images; each contains within it the inverse of itself. Through the chiasmus adumbrated by these twin images, Antoinette is effectively framed by images of detritus that stem directly from the functioning of the slave colony. Yet at the same time, the subjective arc of her encounter with Rochester traces beginnings and outcomes already seen in colonial settings, as Mishra and Hodge point out, ‘there is always, in the colonial regime, a tantalizing offer of subjectivity and its withdrawal which, for the colonized, momentarily confirms their entry into the world of the colonizer only to be rejected by it. The colonized never know when the colonizers consider them for what they are, humans in full possession of a self, or objects’.37 The slippage of her subjectivity from ambiguity to nonbelonging is exacerbated by the ineluctable imbrication of both her and Rochester to the dictates of a colonial discourse. More broadly, and, indeed, more critically, it is arguably the entirety of this colonial regime, focused by and figured through Antoinette as discursive subject rather than as marginalised and stereotyped object, that is at the centre of Rhys’s act of (re)writing. By making Caribbean characters, culture and landscape part of the centre rather than the periphery of the unfolding narrative, Rhys repositions and redefines the ethnocultural norms that overdetermine Antoinette’s subjectivity, engaging in a conscious act of resistance as cultural affirmation; as Veronica Gregg explains, Rhys’s reworking of historical data, cultural references, and literary allusions suggests that, in rewriting the Victorian novel, she is calling into question the entire Book, the metatext of the dominant, metropolitan discourse. In order to demonstrate the implausibility and the ‘lie’ of the English portrayal of the West Indian Creole woman, Rhys [. . .] reads the precursory novel as a production of its cultural and social ethos.38

It is critically important to realise that the calling into question of the Book, as Gregg notes it here, engages directly with those contemporary colonial hierarchies and binarisms that undergirded society’s world vision. Put another way, as Homi Bhabha explains, such colonial contradictions make clear that ‘these crucial moments [. . .] are also the signs of a discontinuous history, an estrangement of the English book. They mark the disturbance of its authoritative representations by the uncanny forces of race, sexuality, violence, cultural and even climactic differences which emerge in the colonial discourse as the mixed and split texts of hybridity’.39 Rhys’s goal, then, is not simply a rewriting or remapping of colonial history’s primal scene, but rather ‘to write into being the

­162     H. Adlai Murdoch life of the Creole woman in terms of its conditions of possibility in the West Indies of the 1830s and 1840s. The Creole woman is made of the substance and its representational language’, as Gregg puts it.40 And so as Rochester’s metropolitan subjectivity is itself rewritten through the frame of Antoinette’s creoleness, the hybridity that she embodies increasingly constitutes a threat; as Bhabha explains, ‘Hybridity [. . .] is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the “pure” and original identity of authority.’41 As a result, out of the critical intersection of language, culture and history that Wide Sargasso Sea adumbrates, patterns of uncertainty emerge to contest assumptions of metropolitan singularity and supremacy at various key points. For example, elements as simple as the colours of nature begin to overwhelm Rochester almost immediately upon his arrival in the Windward Islands following his marriage, inflecting his familiarity with and capacity to control both the landscape and its female creole subject, ‘Everything is too much [. . .] Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. And the woman is a stranger’ (59). Paradoxically, while such details would have been of little consequence back in the metropolitan centre, they take on an outsize importance in the colonial periphery, signifying the alienation and dis-ease to which these tropical surroundings subject him. But this is not the first time that Rochester has voiced such a combination of reticence and lack of familiarity, ‘Long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either’ (56). Here, in voicing the innately debilitating character of the in-betweenness, of the neither/nor by and through which the colonial creole has long been figured, Rochester arguably dis-places his own alienation and lack of subjective grounding onto Antoinette even as he acknowledges the implicit threat of identitarian contamination posed by the foreignness of the Creole. Paul Gilroy puts it this way, When national and ethnic identities are represented and projected as pure, exposure to difference threatens them with dilution and compromises their prized purities with the ever-present possibility of contamination. Crossing as mixture and movement must be guarded against. New hatreds and violence arise not [. . .] from [. . .] the identity and difference of the Other but from the novel problem of not being able to locate the Other’s difference in the common-sense lexicon of alterity.42

In a certain way, then, it is the implicit threat of erasure posed by this doubled indeterminacy of the Creole that Rochester seeks to contest in renaming Antoinette, which perhaps explains why he gives no specific reason for doing so, ‘“My name is not Bertha; why do you call me

Resistance, Ambivalence and Creole Indeterminacy     163

Bertha?” / “Because it is a name I’m particularly fond of. I think of you as Bertha”’ (111). But citing the internal contradictions undergirding presumptions of the pure and the adulterated remains of limited value, Gilroy goes on to identify ‘the greater menace of the half-different and the partially familiar. To have mixed is to have been party to a great betrayal. Any unsettling traces of hybridity must be excised from the tidy, bleached-out zones of impossibly pure culture’.43 In other words, to coin a phrase, resistance is futile if the menace is to be confronted and eradicated, ‘“Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name”’ (121). These key moments mark Rochester’s recognition and contestation of creole difference, and the inception of the othered subjectivity by which Antoinette is increasingly overdetermined; an othering, as Gregg remarks, that in its turn divides her against herself: ‘In renaming Antoinette Bertha, the husband does not succeed in changing her, but in splitting her identity. This split subjectivity becomes the fate that she must confront.’44 But more than this, one might equally argue that Antoinette’s renaming is of critical importance to Rochester’s constitution and continuity as dominant English colonial subject, appropriating his vision of Antoinette’s creole ambiguity to displace and erase it, as Gregg continues, ‘The identity of the husband is constituted by the history and narrative of Europe and is dependent upon the “breaking up” of Antoinette, the Creole woman.’45 In this landscape of splitting, Mary Lou Emery provides an alternative gloss on the text, stressing specific sites and images of domination and possession, ‘Rochester soon grows to despise both the island with its strange intensity and his wife [. . .] Branding her like a slave, he renames her Bertha [. . .] Their marriage, an exchange of property and sexuality, repeats master/slave relations; husband and wife enact the traditional rites of possession and revolt.’46 Arguably, here, Rochester’s slave-like domination, possession and division of Antoinette as other are what ultimately drive her to destruction. Importantly, Antoinette does resist, and if, in her attempts at resistance, what her ‘broken’ subjectivity seeks is reconstitution through the elision of Bertha, it is this ineluctable encounter between split subjects that brings Antoinette face to face with Bertha at the end of the novel, when the erupting candle incinerates Thornfield Hall. Ultimately, this extended confrontation with the doubled subjectivity of the Creole engenders a catastrophic series of events within the metropole that disturbs the hitherto presumptively stable ground of the colonial order, inscribing what Bhabha defines as the effect of uncertainty that afflicts the discourse of power, an uncertainty that estranges the familiar symbol of English ‘national’ authority and emerges

­164     H. Adlai Murdoch from its colonial appropriation as the sign of its difference [. . .] Hybridity represents that ambivalent ‘turn’ of the discriminated subject into the terrifying, exorbitant object of paranoid classification – a disturbing questioning of the images and presences of authority.47

But here, authority effectively occupies multiple levels of signification. Clearly, then, one principal outcome of the discursive encounter between Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre is to place the contextual and subjective presumptions of the latter text in question, distributing an ‘effect of uncertainty’ that renders its discourse of power both unstable and elusive. Subjectively, the latent ambiguity residing in Antoinette’s renaming as Bertha at the hands of Rochester impacts directly her social and economic inscription in the novel; it is an act encoded through multiple resonances, which reverberate across the complex intersection of identitarian inscription and cultural difference. Confronting her debilitating multivalency is arguably what undergirds Rochester’s engagement, in Mary Lou Emery’s important reading, in Antoinette’s renaming and subsequent imprisonment ‘in the names of reason, morality, and civilization. Exiled from her country, her people, and her marriage, Antoinette finds herself again marooned, living the half-life of a prisoner, her only crime her sexuality and cultural difference’.48 What conjoins the tropes of difference and exile here, precipitating and cementing her split subjectivity, is precisely that sense of creole indeterminacy that is presumed to lie beyond a boundary, unlocalisable and, for all practical purposes, undefinable as well. Finally, what any analysis of Rhys’s inscriptions of the Creole reveals is not necessarily a discursive or representational uniformity, but rather a set of nuanced contradictions best characterised as a conundrum. This is likely due, at least in part, to the collision of her personal world with that of her fiction. On the one hand, as Judith Raiskin points out, ‘while Rhys may have longed for an affiliation with Caribbean Blacks and eloquently described the shared Caribbean culture of Blacks and white Creoles, she nevertheless occupied a privileged position racially and economically as she grew up in Dominica, a position that she knew made an easy affiliation impossible’.49 Despite her probable dis-ease both in the colony and in the metropolitan centre, then, the possibilities for redress would have been limited by this perspective. By the same token, these discursive acts that seek to represent the white creole experience produce scriptive and symbolic consequences of their own, as Raiskin continues, ‘While Rhys expresses an ambivalent longing to identify with black Caribbeans – and Antoinette’s burning of Thornfield Hall can be read as a political expression of that identification – her appropriation of Afro-Caribbean culture necessarily transforms it into a different symbol

Resistance, Ambivalence and Creole Indeterminacy     165

of white creole psychology.’50 Along this axis of ambivalence and appropriation, the transformation of Afro-Caribbean culture that Rhys’s discourse engages, while unintentioned, betrays an intrinsic doubleness, or ambiguity, at the centre of the white creole experience in the Caribbean. The key point here was perhaps made best, as was his wont, by the late Stuart Hall, ‘Race is not a “pure” category in the Caribbean [. . .] In the Caribbean, even where a strong white local elite is present, race is defined socially.’51 In these terms, both the scope and the substance of Rhys’s discourse(s) would arguably locate her ahead of her time.

Notes   1. Entry for ‘Creole’. 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica: http://www.studylight. org/enc/bri/view.cgi?number=8113. 1910. Accessed 6 March 2014.   2. H. Adlai Murdoch, ‘Rhys’s Pieces: Unhomeliness as Arbiter of Caribbean Creolization’, Callaloo, 26:1 (Winter 2003): 252–72.   3. See Nancy Hemond Brown, ‘Jean Rhys and Voyage in the Dark’, London Magazine, 25.1–2 (April/May 1985): 40–59.   4. Mary Hanna, ‘White Women’s Sins or Patterns of Choice and Consequence in the Two Endings of Voyage in the Dark’, Journal of West Indian Literatures, 15.1–2, Edward Baugh: Special Festschrift Issue (2006): 132.   5. Lesley McDowell, ‘Jean Rhys: Prostitution, Alcoholism and the Mad Woman in the Attic’: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/ books/features/jean-rhys-prostitution-alcoholism-and-the-mad-woman-inthe-attic-1676252.html. Accessed 7 March 2014.  6. Paul Jay, Being in the Text: Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 30.  7. Mary Lou Emery, ‘The Politics of Form: Jean Rhys’s Social Vision in Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea’, Twentieth Century Literature, 28.4 (1982): 419.   8. Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing, and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 122.   9. Evelyn Hawthorne, ‘“Persistence of Colonial Memory”: Jean Rhys’s Carib Texts and Colonial Historiography’, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 32.3 (2001): 93. 10. Ania Spyra, ‘Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark as a Trans-Atlantic Tragic Mulatta Narrative’, Sargasso: Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture, 1 (2009–10): 80. 11. Stuart Hall, ‘Pluralism, Race and Class in Caribbean Society’, in Race and Class in Post-Colonial Society: A Study of Ethnic Group Relations in the English-Speaking Caribbean, Bolivia, Chile and Mexico (Paris: UNESCO, 1997), p. 27 (emphasis in the original). 12. Peter Hulme, ‘The Locked Heart: The Creole Family Romance of Wide Sargasso Sea’, in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen (eds), Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 75.

­166     H. Adlai Murdoch 13. Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (New York: Norton, 1982). All other quotes from Voyage in the Dark are taken from this volume. 14. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 174. 15. Ibid., p. 58. 16. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (New York: Methuen, 1983), p. 23. 17. Ibid., p. 83. 18. Judith Bettelheim, John Nunley and Barbara Bridges, ‘Caribbean Festival Arts: An Introduction’, in Judith Bettelheim, John Nunley and Barbara Bridges, Caribbean Festival Arts (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), pp. 34–5. 19. Hawthorne, ‘Persistence of Colonial Memory’, p. 93 (emphasis in the original); 92. 20. Ibid., p. 94. 21. Emery, ‘The Politics of Form’, p. 421. 22. Ibid., p. 420. 23. Ibid., p. 421. 24. Ibid., pp. 422–3. 25. Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), p. 234. 26. Emery, ‘The Politics of Form’, p. 422. 27. Ibid., p. 422. 28. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), pp. 101–2. 29. Emery, ‘The Politics of Form’, p. 423. 30. Ibid., p. 423. 31. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 48–9. 32. Elaine Savory, The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 79. 33. Ibid., p. 86. 34. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (London: Penguin, 1966). All other quotes from Wide Sargasso Sea are taken from this volume. 35. Edwin Hill, ‘Adieu Madres, Adieu Foulard: Musical Origins and the Doudou’s Colonial Plaint’, Ethnomusicology Forum, 16.1 (2007): 19–20. 36. Veronica Marie Gregg, Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 89. 37. Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, ‘What is Post(-)Colonialism?’, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 278. 38. Gregg, Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination, p. 84. 39. Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 113. 40. Gregg, Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination, p. 86. 41. Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 112. 42. Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 105–6.

Resistance, Ambivalence and Creole Indeterminacy     167 43. Ibid., p. 106. 44. Gregg, Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination, p. 98. 45. Ibid., p. 103. 46. Emery, ‘The Politics of Form’, p. 427. 47. Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 113. 48. Emery, ‘The Politics of Form’, pp. 427–8. 49. Judith Raiskin, Snow on the Canefields: Women’s Writing and Creole Subjectivity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 12. 50. Ibid., p. 136. 51. Stuart Hall, ‘Pluralism, Race and Class in Caribbean Society’, in Race and Class in Post-Colonial Society (Paris: UNESCO, 1977), p. 170.

Chapter 8

The Empire of Affect: Reading Rhys after Postcolonial Theory John J. Su The canonical status Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) acquired within postcolonial literary studies has shaped readings of not only the novel but also the entire corpus of Jean Rhys’s work. In giving voice to the mad Creole Bertha Mason of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Wide Sargasso Sea emblematises social and political concerns that became central to postcolonial theory in the 1980s. Rhys’s critical rewriting of Brontë’s novel provided a key example of how the ‘Empire writes back’ to the imperial centres of Europe, to use Salman Rushdie’s phrase: challenging Eurocentric histories of progress and civilisation by presenting images of the dehumanising effects of European colonialism. An enormous body of scholarship on Wide Sargasso Sea has emerged along these lines, eclipsing the scholarly output on Rhys’s four earlier novels and short stories. Transformations in postcolonial studies over the past decade offer the opportunity to rethink Wide Sargasso Sea and its relationship to Rhys’s other work. The shift away from the centre-periphery model of postcolonial theory toward more multilateral, multinational analyses of globalisation among theorists of postcolonialism opens up possibilities for more nuanced readings of a writer who never fit terribly well within the categories of modernist, feminist, or postcolonial authorship. From her earliest writings, Rhys explored the victimisation of women within a patriarchal and capitalist system, one that placed racialised Others in situations of particular vulnerability. Yet her writings also demonstrate a fascination with the various currents of existentialism that were circulating in Paris while she was living there. She experimented with modernist literary forms, but her deep interest in the relationships among patriarchy, capitalism, racialisation and existentialism separated her from many of the more canonical modernist authors. I am hoping to contribute to this volume’s project of developing twenty-first-century approaches to Jean Rhys, then, by troubling easy binaries between the

­172     John J. Su postcolonial Rhys of Wide Sargasso Sea (and, to a lesser degree, Voyage in the Dark) and the modernist Rhys of everything else.1 In particular, I am interested in pursuing Rhys’s representations of the affective experiences produced by a form of European modernity whose emergence was inseparable from imperialist forms of capitalism that developed in Great Britain. I will argue that shifting away from the preoccupations of earlier postcolonial scholarship on Rhys – which focused heavily on thematic representations of voice and subjectivity – can provide a productive mode of connecting Rhys’s experiments with literary form to her efforts to describe the particular experiences of disorientation of her characters. Rather than seeing the novel structured around the opposing narrative voices of Antoinette and her unnamed husband, I will argue that the novel is attempting to reproduce through its formal features (which include shifting narrative voice) an experience of disorientation that is symptomatic of the particular conjunction of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy that emerged in the late nineteenth century.

Voice and the Unvoiced Since Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), the field of postcolonial studies has been preoccupied with exploring the history of European imperialisms in terms of their discursive effects. For Said, political, cultural, scientific, religious and other discourses were essential to the successful expansion of European empires across the globe. In identifying the central role played by colonialist discourses in the creation and maintenance of modern European empires, Said implicitly defined what would come to be seen as the central project of postcolonial scholarship: to give voice to colonised peoples and their descendents by recovering or reconstructing alternative histories and memories. These concerns resonated with the works of postcolonial scholars throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Homi Bhabha’s theory of colonial ‘mimicry’ or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s question ‘can the subaltern speak?’ represent perhaps the two most well-known examples of scholarship focusing on the processes of reclaiming, rewriting, or otherwise redefining histories associated with colonialism and its aftermath. These shared concerns rapidly became institutionalised in the fields of postcolonial studies through overviews written by Bill Ashcroft, Ania Loomba, Leela Gandhi and others, as well as prominent critiques of the field by scholars such as Aijaz Ahmad, Arif Dirlik and E. San Juan, Jr. Indeed, critics of the field were often some of the most acute observers of the intimate connection between voice and subjectivity in postcolonial theory.2

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The connection between voice and subjectivity in scholarship on Wide Sargasso Sea – particularly a subjectivity that provides a critical lens through which to view imperialism – is logical, and can be inferred from Rhys’s own correspondence. In one of the most cited passages of Rhys’s letters, she writes of Bertha Mason: ‘She’s necessary to the plot, but always she shrieks, howls, laughs horribly, attacks all and sundry – off stage. For me (and for you I hope) she must be right on stage.’3 Placing Bertha Mason ‘on stage’ serves to provide her a meaningful voice – not a series of inhuman noises or the ravings of the quintessential madwoman in the attic, but the articulations of a woman providing a rationale for her violent acts, which would otherwise seem to be indications of madness. Seminal scholarship on Rhys re-emphasises this point: Wide Sargasso Sea provides what Molly Hite calls ‘the other side of the story’, suggesting that subjectivity is fundamentally produced from language, particularly voiced speech.4 In granting Antoinette Cosway a voice, Rhys creates a coherent and rational subject. By ascribing a privileged status to voice as the basis of subjectivity, the novel registers the capacity of those marked outside the colonial centre to narrate their own stories without being determined by the prescriptions of colonial history. In Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason’s past is related entirely through Rochester. At no point in Brontë’s novel is Bertha Mason allowed to speak, to give her version of events. The persistent tendency of Jane to describe Bertha Mason using animal metaphors ensures that Jane’s own trajectory from orphan to Mrs Edward Rochester is seen to be entirely appropriate in the context of Victorian sensibilities. Jane can marvel at the creature that ‘grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal’, but her feelings of compassion and pity for the ‘clothed hyena’ reaffirm her rightful role as the true wife of Rochester.5 As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and others have noted, Jane Eyre diminishes the boundaries between the human and the animal in its representations of Bertha Mason in order to rationalise Rochester’s imprisonment of her in the attic of Thornfield Hall and his subsequent marriage to Jane.6 Reading Wide Sargasso Sea as giving voice to a colonised Other, however, highlights the contradictions in the novel, particularly around Rhys’s own potentially racist representations of Afro-Caribbeans. Veronica Marie Gregg, for example, argues that the novel reproduces the historical silencing of Afro-Caribbean populations. Gregg writes: ‘The racialist usurpation of the voices, acts, and identities of “black people”, so central to Rhys’s writing as a whole, is the psychological cement in the architecture of this novel.’7 For Gregg, Rhys collapses a diverse range of voices of colonised Others into her single creole

­174     John J. Su ­ rotagonist in an effort to ‘reclaim hegemony’ over representations of p the Afro-Caribbean populations of the West Indies. Antoinette’s narrative voice in Wide Sargasso Sea reproduces the same silencing of AfroCaribbean voices that Bertha Mason experiences in Jane Eyre. Spivak takes a somewhat different tack from Gregg, suggesting that the silencing that Wide Sargasso Sea reproduces is not specific to Rhys; rather, it points to a more fundamental challenge in the very project of envisioning subjectivities who could be genuinely critical of imperialism. For Spivak, the novel can succeed only to the extent that it points to its own limits – specifically, its inability to give voice to black characters. Spivak argues: ‘No perspective critical of imperialism can turn the Other into a self, because the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been the absolutely Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates the imperial self.’8 The debate between Spivak and Benita Parry over the extent to which Wide Sargasso Sea can effectively articulate a counterdiscourse to British representations of the West Indies has been significant not only to readings of Rhys but also to debates over postcolonial studies more generally, because it highlights a tension over the capacity of literature to express resistance to imperialism.9 For Spivak, imperialism functions as the dominant world system, incorporating expressions of resistance within its own terms; as such, postcolonial literary texts are celebrated for their capacity to identify the limits of representation. For Parry, in contrast, the historical contingency of imperialism suggests that literary texts can represent voices who actively disrupt colonial representations. The difference between Spivak and Parry is most recognisable in their conflicting readings of the family servant Christophine. Christophine stands out in the novel in every respect – she is described as physically different (taller and darker), she possesses a strong voice from the first paragraph of the novel (she, not Antoinette, is the first named speaker), is an obeah practitioner treated with respect and fear, and is seemingly unafraid of white authority. Both Spivak and Parry place significant emphasis on an exchange between Christophine and Rochester late in the novel, particularly her enigmatic final words in the text. After confronting Rochester over his abusive treatment of Antoinette, Christophine refuses to entertain his vague concessions. When Rochester offers her the opportunity to write to Antoinette after they leave the island, Christophine states: ‘“Read and write I don’t know. Other things I know”’.10 For Spivak, this line stages what she sees as the most significant strength of Rhys’s novel: its refusal to contain Christophine within its own narrative framework, thereby allowing her to mark the limits of the novel’s discourse. Spivak writes: ‘Taxonomically, she belongs to the category of the good

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servant rather than that of the pure native. But within these borders, Rhys creates a powerfully suggestive figure.’11 Christophine cannot represent a subject genuinely capable of challenging colonial discourses because she is defined vis-à-vis an established colonial type, ‘the good servant’.12 As such, Rhys may employ her to suggest that colonial forms of knowledge are not all-encompassing, but cannot directly articulate those alternatives. Parry, in contrast, argues that Christophine is asserting the basis of an alternative epistemology, which challenges the authority of Rochester as a character and the colonial discourse with which he is associated. Indeed, for Parry, Spivak’s analysis ambiguously blends historicist analysis of the rise of British imperialism with an idealist philosophical paradigm that finds the power of colonial representations to be a consequence of language itself.13 Despite their significant differences, Spivak and Parry share a more basic sense that resistance to historical representations of colonial history can be read through literary characters, particularly Christophine. Resistance is measured in terms of her ability either to speak or to remain silent: to disrupt the discourses of English colonialism or to identify the limits of such discourses. Another approach might begin from the basic recognition that Christophine, like any character, is inseparable from the text in which she appears – that is, ‘Christophine’ has no necessary ontological reality outside of Wide Sargasso Sea. As a consequence of her being inseparable from the novel, she is inseparable from the points of view of other characters as well as other textual descriptions. That is to say, Christophine may or may not function as an allegory of a subjectivity, but she does serve as a narrative device for representing a specific point of view. More precisely, she represents one point of view whose particular characteristics emerge in relation to the points of view of the other characters in the text, particularly the narrators of the text, Antoinette and Rochester. Both Spivak’s and Parry’s arguments can accommodate the shift in focus proposed in this essay: Christophine’s enigmatic final words (161) and Rochester’s inability to respond to them signal a break in the narrative. Such a break could be read as highlighting either the epistemic limits of colonial discourses described by Spivak or the critical response to colonialism described by Parry. The formal techniques employed by the novel signal that the exchange between Christophine and Rochester is significant for what is not voiced. The issue is less whether a critical response cannot be voiced than what the effects of that silence are on interpretations of the novel. By attributing to Christophine a set of words that have no response from Rochester, either aloud or internally voiced, Wide Sargasso Sea invites readers to explore what the text itself

­176     John J. Su cannot or will not directly represent. The non-represented becomes, in other words, the primary subject rather than the actual exchange between the characters. Focusing on the formal techniques used by the novel reverses the privileging of voice in readings of Wide Sargasso Sea, emphasising instead the pattern in Rhys’s writing of highlighting moments of silence – or, more precisely, thoughts that are only partially formed or left unsaid. Some of the most dramatic articulations by Rhys’s characters are never voiced. In Good Morning, Midnight (1939), for example, the narrator Sasha Jansen finds herself publicly castigated by a visiting English boss. The absurdity of the situation is accentuated by the fact Sasha’s ‘mistakes’ are actually the result of the boss’s incomprehensible French (Sasha, in contrast, is fluent). Waiting mutely as her boss is preparing to fire her, Sasha thinks: Well, let’s argue this out, Mr Blank. You, who represent Society, have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month. That’s my market value, for I am an inefficient member of Society, slow in the uptake, uncertain, slightly damaged in the fray, there’s no denying it. So you have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month, to lodge me in a small, dark room, to clothe me shabbily, to harass me with worry and monotony and unsatisfied longings till you get me to the point when I blush at a look, cry at a word [. . .] Let’s say you have this mystical right to cut my legs off. But the right to ridicule me afterwards because I am a cripple – no, that I think you haven’t got. And that’s the right you hold most dearly, isn’t it? You must be able to despise the people you exploit. But I wish you a lot of trouble, Mr Blank, and just to start off with, your damned shop’s going bust. Alleluia! Did I say all this? Of course I didn’t. I didn’t even think it.14

The novel does not imply that Sasha is silenced – rather, she is unable to articulate the particular perspective that the novel provides readers through her focalised narrative. ‘I didn’t even think it’, she acknowledges. Her frustration and humiliation are experienced affectively – she blushes.15 At least in the moment in which she feels shame, however, she lacks the ability to put her feelings into words. The text marks the gendering of labour exploitation by marking the inability of Sasha – as a victim of it – to voice her experience directly. Indeed, this becomes a primary mode of signalling to readers how exploitation is experienced as an affective phenomenon: felt but unexpressed, referenced but not articulated. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette lacks Sasha’s acuity, but her narrative nonetheless draws attention to moments in which she has similar experiences: the inability to match words to her feelings. She desperately desires not to leave the island, abandoning her family in the midst of a riot to join her sometime Afro-Caribbean friend Tia. Antoinette is

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unable to diagnose her situation in ways that Sasha was able – she can articulate why she feels connected to Tia, but she cannot recognise that Tia might not share her feelings. As was the case in Good Morning, Midnight, the discontinuity between what the novel uses a character to signal and what that character herself can discern become central to the reading experience. The poignancy of this discontinuity becomes acute when Tia responds to Antoinette by throwing a rock at her. Antoinette cannot register the act of violence immediately, noting: ‘I looked at her and I saw her face crumple up as she began to cry. We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass’ (45). Gregg’s intervention is important to recall here: Tia functions in this scene not as a human being able to articulate her own needs or motivations but as a means to certify the genuineness of Antoinette’s feelings. But Antoinette’s feelings signal her limited perspective, against which readers are invited to interpret the text: the narrative focalises attention through the perspective of a girl who understands neither the rage felt by post-Emancipation Afro-Caribbeans nor even the abandonment felt by other Creoles.16 This helps to explain the function of Rochester assuming the narrative voice in Part Two. Like Antoinette, Rochester’s narrative voice repeatedly draws attention to moments in which he cannot find the words to voice his feelings. On three separate occasions, he begins to compose letters to his father to describe his feelings of betrayal and frustration. Rochester is portrayed in the novel as a second son, victim of primogeniture, sent to the British West Indies by his father to acquire economic security through marriage to a Creole. On each of these occasions, the letter is left unfinished or filed away; on at least one occasion, the letter is simply dictated in his mind and is never written (70). When Rochester finally posts a letter to his father (162), he finishes it only after imagining an alternative version in which he articulates his frustration and anger at being manipulated. The imagined letter openly expresses his feelings: ‘You had no love at all for me. Nor had my brother. Your plan succeeded.’ The actual letter posted by Rochester, however, is descriptive but devoid of feeling even as he acknowledges his own role in exploiting Antoinette for her family’s wealth (162). The moment Rochester claims his voice is not cast as a triumph: it occurs as he finally commits himself to forcefully removing his wife from the West Indies, beginning the process that will culminate with her imprisonment in the attic of Thornfield Hall. The argument I am developing here can be seen as an extension of Carine Mardorossian’s suggestion that the ‘novel deconstructs the opposition between silence and voice and, in so doing, questions the

­178     John J. Su Western assumption that the speaker is always the one in power’.17 For Mardorossian, the novel encourages readers to read against the grain of Antoinette’s narrative, revealing thereby Antoinette’s reproduction of racist attitudes and assumptions. The elegance of Mardorossian’s argument lies in its ability to account for the apparent racial biases of the text without dismissing its capacity to critique colonial representations of West Indians. The argument I am presenting suggests that sections in which Rochester functions as narrator are fundamental to this critique. That is, Rochester does not function as an oppositional figure to Antoinette, at least not solely. The continuities between Antoinette’s and Rochester’s narratives suggest that they function together to produce a particular form of disorientation for readers.

Disorientation The formal features of Wide Sargasso Sea make reading a disorienting experience. From the first paragraph, readers are faced with questions of identification that cannot be answered on the basis of the information provided: ‘They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks. The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, “because she pretty like pretty self” Christophine said’ (17). The pronouns ‘they’ and ‘we’ have unclear antecedents, and the clarifications destabilise the racial categories invoked. What constitutes ‘white people’, such that the narrator is excluded? What is the basis of the connection between the narrator’s mother and Christophine – readers are later told that Christophine is much blacker than the other Afro-Caribbeans on the island. So is the implication that the narrator’s mother is black? While this possibility is rapidly dispelled, questions about the racial identity of Antoinette’s mother and subsequently Antoinette herself keep recurring in the text. Unmoored from the obvious categories of racial identification, which are evoked but destabilised, readers have a difficult time identifying the narrator’s position within the social and racial hierarchies of the novel. She is called a ‘white cockroach’ and a ‘white nigger’ (23, 24); Rochester will also be puzzled. Noting her ‘sad, dark alien eyes’, Rochester can define her only in terms of identity categories from which she is excluded: ‘Creole of pure English descent she may be, but [her eyes] are not English or European either’ (67). In an environment in which social relations are defined primarily by racial identifications, the absence of clear identity categories for Antoinette disorients readers. The shifts in narrative voice further complicate efforts to identify reli-

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able standpoints from which to interpret the statements and attitudes of characters. Wide Sargasso Sea abruptly shifts narrative voice from Antoinette to Rochester in Part Two of the novel, without directly informing the reader. The pronoun ‘we’ is reinvoked in the third sentence, but the narrator subsequently references ‘my wife Antoinette’ (65). Indeed, readers never know with complete certainty whether the second narrator is in fact Rochester. He remains unnamed in the novel, though it is a common scholarly convention to identify him as such. The traditional function of the narrative voice, to orient readers’ interpretation, is shifted: the narrative voice functions as a formal technique for disorienting the reader. The narrative voice will shift several more times: abruptly back to Antoinette (107–18), again with no warning or explicit signal; briefly to Grace Poole at the beginning of Part Three (177–8); and finally back to Antoinette for the remainder of Part Three, though the narrative voice is more fragmented, more uncertain of itself, leaving readers with greater doubts about its reliability. Not only does the narrator insist that she is in a ‘cardboard house’ which is not England (181), she shifts backwards and forwards in time, and demonstrates anxieties about whether her favourite red dress has perhaps been replaced by a look-alike. The time shifts can be read in terms of the formal experiments of literary modernists to produce the perception of a stream of consciousness. But they have a consistent pattern in Wide Sargasso Sea, which is also apparent in earlier works including Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight. Rather than functioning to represent the non-­linearity of cognitive processes, the time shifts in Rhys’s narratives mystify readers by referencing specific events that are never explicitly described. In a crucial passage in Wide Sargasso Sea that culminates in Antoinette writing her name for the first time in the novel, the paragraph establishes an ominous but unknown threat through its timeshift: a section break is immediately followed by Antoinette’s interjection ‘[q] uickly, while I can, I must remember the hot classroom’ (53). Readers are given no information on Antoinette’s current location (except that it’s not a hot classroom) or when in the chronology of her life story she is currently speaking (is she perhaps in Thornfield Hall remembering?); readers have no information on the nature of the threat (why ‘[q] uickly’?). All readers know is that some event is looming, one so profoundly disorienting to Antoinette that she would not be able thereafter to identify her name, location and time – precisely the orientation points she provides at the end of the same paragraph: ‘I will write my name in fire red, Antoinette Mason, née Cosway, Mount Calvary Convent, Spanish town, Jamaica, 1839’ (53).

­180     John J. Su Rhys reinforces the reader’s awareness of the disorienting elements of her narrative by casting disorientation as a defining experience for her characters. As with the time shifts, experiences of spatial disorientation felt by characters occur at moments in which they feel unable to make clear judgements for themselves. The connection is more explicitly stated in Voyage in the Dark: feeling bereft and utterly abandoned after an ex-lover pays her to get an abortion, Anna loses all spatial orientation, noting ‘Everything was so exactly alike – that was what I could never get used to. And the cold; and the houses all exactly alike, and the streets going north, south, east, west, all exactly alike’.18 Implicit in her self-reflections are a set of questions that she cannot yet bring herself to articulate: did she make the right decision, what will she do next and where will she go? She experiences these half-formed questions bodily, in her physical inability to distinguish among the cardinal directions. Rochester, too, experiences spatial disorientation accompanied by a sense of being unable to make clear judgements of his own: suddenly realising that his father knowingly sent him to marry a purported madwoman, Rochester walks off into a forest and gets lost. He wonders as he wanders: ‘How can one discover the truth I thought and that thought led me nowhere. No one would tell me the truth. Not my father nor Richard Mason, certainly not the girl I had married [. . .] I was lost and afraid among these enemy trees, so certain of danger that when I heard footsteps and a shout I did not answer’ (104, 105). The inability to judge his circumstances is cast in terms of a spatial metaphor, a thought that leads Rochester ‘nowhere’. The connection between a sense of spatial orientation and an ethical or moral compass has a long philosophical history, according to Edward S. Casey. In Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (1993), Casey argues: ‘To lack a primal place is to be “homeless” indeed, not only in the literal sense of having no permanently sheltering structure but also as being without any effective means of orientation in a complex and confusing world.’19 Extending Casey’s argument, then, the experience of losing a sense of connection to a childhood home renders more difficult and confusing the decisions faced by Rhys’s protagonists. The key consequence of disorientation appears to be passivity, though not in the reductive terms associated with the ‘Rhys woman’ familiar to earlier lines of scholarship. Wide Sargasso Sea suggests that Antoinette learns at a very young age to read feelings of disorientation and helplessness in her mother’s body language: ‘My mother walked over to the window. (“Marooned,” said her straight narrow back, her carefully coiled hair. “Marooned”.)’ (26). Whether or not her mother actually

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feels marooned, the young child Antoinette is cast in the novel as unable to look to others for emotional support. For Patricia Moran, this provides the basis for the psychological trauma that will later lead her to develop a masochistic sensibility in her relationship with Rochester.20 It is part of a pattern in Antoinette’s narrative in which a sense of disorientation produces feelings of helplessness. As mentioned above, her defining experience in the novel is exclusion from the familiar categories of racial identification, which orient individuals and their relationships. She will remain uncertain about her own racial status throughout the novel, referring to her stepfather as ‘white pappy’ (33). Some of the clearest indications of the alignment between physical disorientation and helplessness occur in a series of dreams that she experiences. In these dreams, Antoinette foreshadows her adulthood experience of being forcibly taken from the West Indies and incarcerated in the attic of Thornfield Hall by her husband. In the second dream, Antoinette finds herself being led from her home into a forest, and from the forest to an unidentified and unfamiliar garden, and up a set of steps that she cannot even see in the darkness. Yet she does not run away from this alien environment or the man who is leading her onward: ‘I follow him, sick with fear but I make no effort to save myself; if anyone were to try to save me, I would refuse. This must happen’ (59–60). The notion that disoriented individuals are rendered passive is articulated more explicitly in Good Morning, Midnight. Sasha notes: ‘When you’ve been made very cold and very sane you’ve also been made very passive’ (12). In order to accommodate herself to abandonment by her lover, Sasha is expected to relinquish her right to complain. She is expected to mute her negative affects, which she manages through alcohol abuse and scheduling her days to conform to a monotonous routine that skirts places, people and memories that could trigger anger. The word Sasha uses to describe herself is ‘automaton’, an entity without feeling (10). The language of dehumanisation resonates with the experiences of Bertha Mason that troubled Rhys so profoundly – that the maturation and happy reincorporation of Jane Eyre into bourgeois England depends on the dehumanisation of Rochester’s first wife. What is striking in Good Morning, Midnight is how the familiar pattern of abandonment of a female protagonist, which appears in all of Rhys’s novels, is cast in terms different from her earlier works. Rather than a personal romantic tragedy, abandonment in Good Morning, Midnight is symptomatic of an economic and social system that places women in positions of dependence. Whereas the protagonist of Quartet will lament the cruelty of the world when she is abandoned, Sasha recognises that her personal experiences are not distinctive to her, but replay the world around her:

­182     John J. Su Venus is dead; Apollo is dead; even Jesus is dead. All that is left in the world is an enormous machine, made of white steel. It has innumerable flexible arms, made of steel. Long, thin arms. At the end of each arm is an eye, the eyelashes stiff with mascara. When I look more closely I see that only some of the arms have these eyes – others have lights. The arms that carry the eyes and the arms that carry the lights are all extraordinarily flexible and very beautiful. But the grey sky, which is the background, terrifies me [. . .] And the arms wave to an accompaniment of music and of song. Like this: ‘Hotcha – hotcha – hotcha . . .’ And I know the music; I can sing the song . . . I have another drink. Damned voice in my head. I’ll stop you talking . . . (187)

The arms are beautiful and flexible, to Sasha’s mind, but they all sway to the music, a song that Sasha must drown out with more alcohol. Her experiences are not even distinctive to her, nor is she an autonomous being: she is simply one more arm hoping not to recognise the music to which she is swaying. The representation of what Sasha calls a ‘whole social system’ that describes modern capitalism as the basis of individual experiences of exploitation suggests an evolution in Rhys’s thinking (38). The experience of women being rendered non-human – automata, dolls, mannequins – is apparent from Rhys’s earliest writings. In Quartet, Marya experiences the acute frustration of being financially dependent on Hugh and Lois Heidler. Pressured by the Heidlers to cheat on her husband while he is in prison, Marya is expected to have sex with the husband and conform to the social rules imposed on her by the wife. Her self-description marks her dehumanised state: ‘She had felt like a marionette, as though something outside her were jerking strings that forced her to scream and strike. Heidler, weeping, was a marionette, too.’21 The precise force or person manipulating the strings is never clearly articulated. Lois is the last person with whom she speaks, and someone who expects Marya to continue her affair with Heidler and bear repeated shaming in front of Lois’s friends – but the novel never explicitly identifies her as the puppeteer. Marya identifies the manipulating force as ‘something’ rather than ‘someone’, suggesting that her suffering is more of an existential condition than the result of exploitative social and economic relationships. This notion is reinforced by extending the dehumanisation to Heidler, who appears to be equally manipulated. The novel, in other words, neither identifies the nature of Marya’s exploitation nor distinguishes it from that felt by Heidler, who nonetheless enjoys the economic security and social standing that Marya conspicuously lacks.22 The term marionette appears again in Wide Sargasso Sea, but the dif-

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ference is striking. In a series of unvoiced recriminations against his wife, Rochester declares that he will make her into a marionette in order to ‘(Force her to cry and to speak)’ (154). The usage of the term, in other words, clearly identifies the source of manipulation, and the ways in which manipulation is unevenly experienced by men and women. The colonial system may have exploited both Rochester and Antoinette, but not to the same degree and not in ways that exonerate Rochester’s behaviour toward her. Much as is the case in Good Morning, Midnight, Wide Sargasso Sea characterises the personal affective experiences of helplessness or passivity as a logical consequence of an economic and social system that deprives individuals of the opportunity to make constructive choices for themselves. The difference is that the latter novel casts the social system less in terms of global capitalism than in terms of British imperialism. The racialisation that underlies the hierarchical system of exploitation in the novel is not governed purely by efforts to distribute wealth unevenly. In Rhys’s portrait, exploitation functions in part to sustain British attitudes about the superiority of their civilisation – the denial of alternative epistemologies functions as much to deny the possibility that racialised Others have access to culture and knowledge separate from what is imported from Britain. Hence, Rochester’s need to assert contra Antoinette that the West Indies, not England, are a ‘dream’ (80–1).23 The shift in emphasis away from industrial capitalism to British imperialism as the basis of the disorientation that characters experience clarifies the nature of colonial violence in Wide Sargasso Sea. Rochester’s increasing obsession with what he feels is a ‘secret’ protected by the island, its residents and even his wife points to the consequences of his obsession with rendering the world within his epistemological limits (172). Because he believes that all features of the world can be made sensible through a kind of Eurocentric positivism associated with the rotting books in his library, Rochester feels fundamentally threatened by events or experiences suggesting that other forms of knowledge exist outside of his ability to understand them. Christophine’s final words to him thus could speak to the crucial insights of both Spivak and Parry: to the extent that representations of Christophine point to the limits of knowledge in the novel, such representations are themselves a form of resistance. This is a significant shift away from the relatively unmotivated, existential violence experienced by Rhys’s protagonists in her early work. When Marya is struck and perhaps killed by her own husband in the final pages of Quartet, it is a moment signifying the cruelty of existence, not specifically an act of violence that can be directly traced to the social and economic circumstances of the characters. In the case of Wide Sargasso Sea, in contrast, violence is the direct

­184     John J. Su result of the colonial system that places Rochester in a position in which he ultimately views his own wife as a representative of a threat that must be contained.

The Affects of Empire? Disorientation is not among the classic affects defined by psychologist Silvan Tomkins. Tomkins is often viewed as the seminal figure in current formulations of affect theory, and he posited (depending at which point in his career) nine basic sets of biological responses that underlie the vast array of experiences that are called emotions: enjoyment, interest, surprise, anger, disgust, dissmell, distress, fear, shame. Disorientation might be seen as a form of distress, which is defined as the result of too high a level of neural firing in the body. However, disorientation is characterised by a basic sense of being unable to recognise one’s place in the world; it is an experience of the body in relation to physical or social or ethical contexts that makes it so keenly felt. And this dimension of the body in relation to its surroundings is not captured in Tomkins’s formulations. Disorientation might more readily be viewed as a defining affect of the transnational literary modernisms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is apparent in the startling final words of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, the brilliant hypnotic voice that whispers ‘The horror! The horror!’ Disorientation figures centrally in the shellshocked veteran Septimus Warren Smith in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, wandering the streets of London terrified and exhilarated by flashbacks of his dead comrade Evans. The formal features of literary modernism make disorientation not only a central thematic concern but also a central feature of reading – the superabundance of allusions to popular culture, literary texts and religious traditions apparent in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The centrality of disorientation to literary modernisms emphasises a crucial point for intersections of literary studies, affect theories and postcolonial theories. Within the novel, affect is a representation of a phenomenon that, at least for many prominent theorists of affect, is putatively prelinguistic and precognitive. For Brian Massumi, affect is defined in terms of intensity. According to Massumi, emotion constitutes an affect captured within language: An emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion

The Empire of Affect     185 is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized.24

The rigid distinction Massumi draws between emotion and affect is controversial, and compelling critiques have been articulated by Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, Ruth Leys and others.25 Massumi is useful nonetheless in reminding scholars of why Rhys’s experiments with modernist literary forms were motivated by the specific historical conditions of the experiences she sought to describe. The mismatch between words and noncognitive bodily responses are, according to the argument I have been tracing in this essay, a central symptom of the ideological formations necessary for imperialist forms of capitalism to have flourished. Those moments when Rhys’s characters cannot voice what they are feeling indicate that bodily responses function to some degree outside of the values and norms that characters have been socialised to accept. The narrative disruptions and techniques designed to disorient reader interpretation in Rhys’s novels, then, draw attention to precisely those moments in which characters resist the process of ‘fixing’ their bodily responses into recognisable and socially sanctioned emotions. Massumi argues that non-ideological neural processes are a constant feature of every person’s life, and such processes could well be in tension with the feelings that individuals ascribe to themselves after rationally reflecting on them. The feelings of disorientation characteristic of Rhys’s fiction, to extend Massumi’s argument, could be characteristic of a body whose cognitive and non-cognitive neural processes are in misalignment with each other. Representations of such misalignments signal to readers the effects of ideology on the characters’ perceptions, attitudes and actions. The broader implications of the argument I am drawing are that constellations of various social, political and economic systems are likely to produce particular kinds of affects among the people who live within them. Rhys’s works suggest that a set of negative affects associated with disorientation are not idiosyncratic experiences of a few literary characters, but rather a more general byproduct of the emergence of British imperialism and the discourses of civilisation on which it depended. A particular bodily response that is repeatedly referenced among the characters in the writings of Jean Rhys, whether it is an affect or emotion or something else, would be cold. Characters from the beginning to the end of Rhys’s literary career experience cold – whether cold is a measure of internal body temperature or a response to a lack of intimacy or something else, it occurs frequently and predictably. At moments in which characters sense their alienation from their ­ immediate circumstances

­186     John J. Su and the people around them, they shiver. This is apparent in Rhys’s first novel: Marya’s hands turn damp and cold when she hears that her husband has been arrested (Quartet, 25). The pattern continues through Rhys’s final novel: in Wide Sargasso Sea, even Grace Poole cannot help but notice Antoinette shivering in the attic of Thornfield Hall (186). The experiences of shivering accompany cognitive recognitions of which the characters themselves are only partially aware: Antoinette is experiencing the lurking fear that even her beloved red dress has been taken from her and replaced by a duplicate; Marya shivers in the moment that she finally yields to Heidler’s incessant wooing, but she incorrectly interprets her own body signals. She tells herself that Heidler will bring her warmth: ‘All my life before I knew him was like being lost on a cold, dark night’ (Quartet, 83). This declaration not only contradicts her own earlier descriptions of her life but also radically misunderstands the nature of her liaison with Heidler, which will rapidly bring her misery. The connection between experiences of cold and misjudgements is also apparent in Voyage in the Dark: the same sentence indicating Anna Morgan’s sense of disorientation in an England whose North, South, East and West are indistinguishable also indicates that England is a country whose cold is something to which she could never have grown accustomed (179). Whatever else cold may be taken to signify, as an affective or emotional response it points to the role that colonialism plays in existential conceptions of alienation. Cold marks the distance that Rhys’s West Indian expatriates feel from the lands of their birth. It marks their inability to navigate confidently their position within English social circles. Ultimately, in the case of Wide Sargasso Sea it can be seen as a somatic marker that provides characters a means of overcoming their disorientation. As Rhys notes in her letters, the fire set by Bertha Mason in Thornfield Hall comes to define her, to function as the signal indication in Jane Eyre of her madness. Rhys is concerned to articulate the rationale for such a decision, to redefine the act of madness as an act of reclaiming her subjecthood. And as Rhys indicates, it is Antoinette’s feelings of cold that ultimately lead her to do so. Rhys writes: [Bertha Mason] must be at least plausible with a past, the reason why Mr Rochester treats her so abominably and feels justified, the reason why he thinks she is mad and of course why she goes mad, even the reason why she tries to set everything on fire, and eventually succeeds. (Personally, I think that one is simple. She is cold – and fire is the only warmth she knows in England.) 26

Cold as an affective experience is important because it enables the novel to register with readers a set of experiences that characters themselves

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cannot recognise on a rational level. The cold they feel has interpretive consequences for readers more so than for the characters themselves, who struggle to respond to the physical sensation. Rhys’s experiments with representing affect through modernist literary forms offer some suggestive possibilities for future research in postcolonial literary studies. The bifurcation of the field into what Laura Chrisman calls textualist/culturalist and historicist/materialist scholars has had the unfortunate tendency to suggest that close textual analyses are separated from concerns about the material conditions of majority populations across the formerly colonised world. Affective experiences in Rhys’s writings, however, concern the most basic material conditions of life. Her protagonists are not the comprador intellectuals or cosmopolitan expatriates that often figure in critiques of postcolonial scholarship; rather, her protagonists are concerned with very basic needs: food, stable shelter, health care. Crucially, such basic material concerns are best conveyed through a set of narrative techniques – stream of consciousness, shifting narrators, time shifts, intertextuality, among them – that are frequently associated with a rarefied ‘high modernism’. This essay has tried to contribute to the idea that these formalist techniques emerge out of and respond to particular political, social and cultural concerns. Rhys, in other words, found herself experimenting with literary forms not to evade such concerns but rather to engage with them.

Notes  1. The schizophrenic approach to Rhys can be found even in recent scholarship. The editors of Rhys Matters (2013), for example, note that their volume represents the first volume on Rhys’s work in more than twenty years; however, they consider the significant scholarly output on Wide Sargasso Sea to be grounds for excluding essays focusing on it.   2. Dirlik famously argued that the preoccupation with recovering voices and subjectivities from the margins indicated that postcolonial criticism was an ideological effect of late capitalism in ways that its scholars have been unwilling to acknowledge. For Dirlik, ‘Since postcolonial criticism has focused on the postcolonial subject to the exclusion of an account of the world outside of the subject, the global condition implied by postcoloniality appears at best as a projection onto the world of postcolonial subjectivity and epistemology’ (‘The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism’, Critical Inquiry, 20 [1994]: 336).   3. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly (eds), Jean Rhys: Letters 1931–1966 (New York: Penguin, 1985), p. 156.  4. Molly Hite, The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 3.

­188     John J. Su   5. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 321.  6. Spivak argues that Brontë ‘renders the human/animal frontier as acceptably indeterminate, so that a good greater than the letter of the Law can be broached’ (A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999], p. 121).   7. Veronica Marie Gregg, Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 114.  8. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 253.   9. The debate between Spivak and Parry has been explored in a number of sources including Chrisman, Jaising (2010) and Mardorossian (2005). Jaising’s analysis is helpful, though skewed heavily toward Spivak’s position. Jaising argues that Rhys’s novel ‘invokes and perpetuates a typology that simultaneously recognizes and constrains black personhood and that is therefore crucial to maintaining colonial control over black labor’ (817). Benita Parry, ‘Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse’, The Oxford Literary Review, 9.1–2 (1987): 27−58. 10. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 161. All other references are to this volume. 11. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, Critical Discourse, 12.1 (1985): 252. 12. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak responds to Parry, reframing their debate. Instead of the question whether a counterdiscourse articulated through Christophine is possible, Spivak casts the debate so that Parry’s argument is ‘to give voice to the native’ and Spivak’s is ‘to give warning of the attendant problem’ (191). 13. Laura Chrisman argues that Spivak’s ‘gestures towards historical particularity ambiguously affirm both a contingent materialism and an absolute idealism’ (57). For Chrisman, this leads to a situation in which Spivak cannot conceptualise any notion of progressive mediation, granting to imperialism a hegemonic status that seems all-encompassing. 14. Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (New York: Norton, 1986), p. 29. 15. For a more comprehensive exploration of shame, see the introduction to Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran’s edited volume The Female Face of Shame (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 16. On the first page of the novel, a neighbour commits suicide by swimming out to sea, after growing frustrated with waiting for post-Emancipation compensation that never comes. But Antoinette cannot quite register even her own potential feelings of regret or sorrow because she cannot fathom the logic of her neighbour’s desperate act. 17. Carine Mardorossian, ‘Shutting Up the Subaltern: Silences, Stereotypes, and Double-Entendre in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea’, Callaloo, 22.4 (1999): 1082. 18. Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (New York: Norton, 1982), p. 179. 19. Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. xv. 20. Patricia Moran, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1997), p. 7.

The Empire of Affect     189 21. Jean Rhys, Quartet (New York: Perennial Library, 1981), p. 105. 22. In terms of the trajectory I am tracing in Rhys’s work, After Leaving Mr McKenzie represents a very interesting transition in Rhys’s thinking. In this novel, the Rhys protagonist, Julia, inspires in a wealthy businessman an awareness of his own dissatisfaction with the status quo. In another instance of a character thinking what he cannot articulate, Mr Horsfield imagines a conversation he would have with Julia. Struck by the cold and hostile look she gave him when they met last, Mr Horsfield declares to himself: ‘I’m just as fed up as you are [. . .] I’m ready to chuck up everything and clear out. Lots of us are like that. Just the touch is wanted – something to set us off’ (Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie [New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 1990], p. 167. Because the novel portrays these thoughts in Mr Horsfield’s head rather than in the female protagonist’s (as was the case in Quartet), the reliability of the statement is more subject to suspicion. Indeed, after working himself up to seeing Julia ‘not as a representative of the insulted and injured, but as a solid human being’, Horsfield ultimately rationalises doing nothing for her (168). At the same time, Horsfield’s awareness of their unequal status in the social hierarchy and his recognition that his own misery is a direct result of his business suggests that After Leaving Mr McKenzie is shifting away from the notion that human misery is a general existential condition of modern life toward a more specific awareness of the ways in which economic conditions place Julia on the borders of destitution and Horsfield in a position of dissatisfied leisure. 23. For a more extended analysis of the alternative epistemologies in Wide Sargasso Sea, see my chapter ‘Nostalgia and Narrative Ethics in Caribbean Literature’, in Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 53−88. 24. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), p. 28. 25. Critics of Massumi have focused particularly on how his distinction between affect and emotion emerges from a series of lab experiments. For Ahmed, the artificial environment in which researchers were isolating affect does not accurately represent everyday experience, in which affect and emotion are continuous. See Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), p. 1, and Ruth Leys, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, Critical Inquiry, 37.3 (2001): 456, 460.

Chapter 9

‘The feelings are always mine’: Chronic Shame and Humiliated Rage in Jean Rhys’s Fiction Patricia Moran Shame is the affect of indignity, of defeat, of transgression, and of alienation. Though terror speaks to life and death and distress makes of the world a vale of tears, yet shame strikes deepest into the heart of man. Shame is felt as an inner torment, a sickness of the soul. It does not matter whether the humiliated one has been shamed by derisive laughter or whether he mocks himself. In either event he feels himself naked, defeated, alienated, lacking in dignity or worth. Silvan Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness (1963)1

In an interview with Mary Cantwell in 1974, Jean Rhys denied that her fiction was thinly veiled biography, although, she added, ‘the feelings are always mine’.2 In this chapter I posit that many of the feelings that Rhys explores in her fiction constellate around the shame affect, an affect that references not just feelings of embarrassment and humiliation, but more broadly feelings of being out of place, alienated and estranged, found contemptible and unworthy, at first by the very people from whom the protagonists had come to expect intimacy, love and respect, but then by the whole world.3 This chronic and pervasive state of shame engenders profound despair, leading the protagonists to wonder if they have any worth at all, or if others’ rejection, abandonment and betrayal of them somehow speaks to who or what they truly are. Sasha Jansen, protagonist of Rhys’s 1939 Good Morning, Midnight, exemplifies this internalisation of others’ contempt when she speaks of herself in the third person, asking herself, ‘What is she doing here, the stranger, the alien, the old one? . . . I quite agree too, quite. I have seen that in people’s eyes all my life. I am asking myself all the time what the devil I am doing here. All the time.’4 Even as such statements register the presence of chronic shame, however, that affect remains unnamed and unacknowledged by Rhys’s protagonists. Instead, shame underwrites the sadness and anger that function as emotional substitutes for the more totalising eradication of self that shame involves, thereby concealing the painful

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recognition of being shamed; sadness and anger in turn develop into the depression and humiliated rage that are hallmarks of Rhys’s older protagonists: Julia in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie and Sasha in Good Morning, Midnight. Rhys’s courageous exposure of the mechanisms by which chronic shaming underwrites the social transactions that have multiply and relentlessly disenfranchised her protagonists is one of her most brilliant and important contributions to modernist and postcolonial discourses: in forcing her readers to confront and grapple with what Silvan Tomkins terms the affect of indignity, defeat and alienation, Rhys not only works to counter shame’s destructive aspects by making creative use of ‘the feelings [that]are always mine’, she also asks her readers to learn, as Sasha does, to forego contempt and ‘despise another poor devil of a human being for the last time’ (190).5 Disenfranchised by gender, class and nationality, Rhys’s protagonists have invited a plethora of critical attempts to categorise and account for their personal and cultural difficulties: they have been described in terms of schizophrenia, trauma, postcolonial politics and the failure of the mother–daughter relationship.6 Because shame theory focuses on both the personal and the social/cultural dimensions of affective experience, it offers a way of bringing together the multiple factors involved in the Rhysian protagonist’s plight. Indeed, the dehumanising and paralysing shame that so often grips Rhys’s protagonists is all the more powerful for being an amalgamation of personal and social factors. As Gershen Kaufman observes of shame, ‘No other affect is more central to identity formation. Our sense of self, both particular and universal, is deeply embedded in our struggles with the alienating affect. Answers to the questions, ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Where do I belong?’ are forged in the crucible of shame.’7 These questions are central to the Rhys protagonist, who struggles with feeling unloved and unwanted at the personal level, and marginalised and despised at the social and cultural level. These two levels interact with, inform and amplify each other, and the shame affect, because chronic, prolonged and pervasive, becomes a global state of mind, encompassing all aspects of the protagonist’s life. Sasha, Rhys’s most detailed portrait of shame, speaks explicitly to the link between identity, belonging and shame in her lament that ‘I have no pride – no pride, no name, no face, no country. I don’t belong anywhere’ (44).8 Like Rhys’s other protagonists, Sasha does not identify shaming as the genesis of her sense of alienation and defeat. Where, then, do we locate shame in Rhys’s fiction? As Michael Lewis aptly notes, ‘Shame is like an atomic particle: we often know where it is only by the trace it leaves, by the effect it causes.’9 Such traces and effects pervade Rhys’s fiction, bleak testimonials to the phenomenological experience of shame.

­192     Patricia Moran This experience involves a number of factors: a sudden and unexpected affront; the flooding of the subject with feelings of inadequacy and deficiency; the doubled experience of feeling contempt for self and feeling exposed to the other’s contempt for self; the desire to hide or disappear from view.10 Helen Block Lewis describes shame as ‘a wince or jolt, or a wordless shock in feeling, followed by an ideation about the self from the other’s viewpoint’: shame involves a ‘doubleness of experience’, in which the subject connects ‘identity imagery’ to ‘vivid imagery of the self in the other’s eyes [. . .] Shame is the vicarious experience of the other’s negative evaluation’.11 This doubled experience of self-in-theeyes-of-the-other speaks to the mechanisms by which shame originates in the regard of another and subsequently becomes installed in the core of the subject. Indeed, the shamed subject often reveals the presence of shame by trying to hide or conceal the face and by averting or dropping the eyes. Tomkins accounts for these involuntary reactions when he writes that ‘the self lives in the face, and within the face the self burns brightest in the eyes. Shame turns the attention of the self and others away from other objects to this most visible residence of self, increases its visibility, and thereby generates the torment of self-consciousness’.12 The Rhysian protagonist is painfully aware of contemptuous gazes, ranging from the sneers on the faces of landladies, waiters, servants and taxi drivers to the open contempt written on the faces of family members. The protagonists’ obsessive concern with clothing registers a common strategy of fending off contempt, as if clothing functioned as a form of camouflage: Julia speaks of her fur coat as a ‘protective colouring’13 and Sasha similarly images clothing as ‘protective armour’ (101). Such defensive strategies never succeed for long, however, and the Rhysian protagonist eventually adopts more extreme measures of escaping shame and contempt, ranging from lowering the head, to hiding in a room, to longing to disappear altogether or become a ghost or automaton. As Otto Fenichel observes, ‘“I feel ashamed” means “I do not want to be seen.” Therefore persons who feel ashamed hide themselves or at least avert their faces [. . .] they also close their eyes and refuse to look. This is a kind of magical gesture, arising from the magical belief that anyone who does not look cannot be looked at.’14 Both Julia and Sasha walk the streets of Paris with their heads down (45, 87), while Sasha’s nightmare of the Exhibition encapsulates her sense that the world is a performative arena in which her shameful difference is always apparent: ‘I walk along with my head bent, very ashamed, thinking: ‘“Just like me – always wanting to be different from other people”’(13). Rhys’s protagonists also hide in their rooms, where they feel protected from the world’s contempt.15 Hence Julia describes her room as ‘a good place to

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hide in [. . .] until the sore and cringing feeling, which was the legacy of Mr Mackenzie, had departed’ (11). Sasha similarly imagines her room as a place to ‘hide from the wolves outside’ (38). Léon Wurmser’s description of the withdrawal engendered by shaming accurately captures the Rhysian protagonist’s plight: ‘One feels ashamed for being exposed [. . .] To disappear into nothingness is the punishment for such failure.’16 Being seen by others becomes unbearable: ‘the eye is the organ of shame par excellence’, Wurmser writes.17 Rhys’s focus on the contemptuous gaze and her protagonists’ desire to hide from it are the clearest traces of shame in her fiction. But shame also makes its presence known through the depression and humiliated rage that they often experience and that develop out of chronic states of shame. Chronic shame differs from the singular shame experiences upon which it is built. The singular shame experience occurs suddenly, taking the subject by surprise. According to Tomkins, such an experience can function as a ‘governing scene’, one that fuses with subsequent shaming scenes and becomes the core of ‘a magnified set of scenes’ or ‘script’, a kind of personal database used to interpret, predict, control and respond to potential recurrences of shaming.18 Such scripts ‘can be neither mastered nor avoided, neither possessed nor renounced’; they ‘never stop seizing the individual’ and possess the power of ‘unlimited magnification’.19 Rhys’s older protagonists demonstrate this process of fusion and magnification: they reference earlier shaming scenes in formulating their reactions in the present; frequently they try to predict the possibility of potential shame and thereby control or avoid it. Julia remembers Mr Mackenzie’s face ‘wearing a cool and derisory smile’, and feels overcome by ‘a sensation of such dreary and abject humiliation [. . .] that she would have liked to put her arms on the table and her head on her arms and to sob aloud’ (20); later, at her mother’s funeral, and with the experience of repudiation by her family fresh in her mind, she does sob, ‘crying now because she remembered that her life had been a long succession of humiliations and mistakes and pains and ridiculous efforts’ (131). Haunted by memories of rejection, loss and abandonment, Sasha tries to become an automaton, immune to the threat of further humiliations; she imagines any future human involvement as opening her up to the possibility of drowning in a dark river of pain: ‘You jump in with no willing and eager friends around, and when you sink you sink to the accompaniment of loud laughter’ (10). To avoid the possibility of that derisive laughter she would rather not feel at all. Elaborating upon Tomkins’s script theory, Kaufman proposes two types of scripts, defending and identity, that develop from chronic states of shame. Defending scripts aim to avoid or escape future shaming.20

­194     Patricia Moran These include rage, which protects the self by keeping others away; withdrawal, where the subject hides, literally or figuratively, leaving only a superficial social mask for others; and humour, where the subject ‘gains command of the scene, making others laugh instead of being laughed at by others (mocked, ridiculed)’.21 Defending scripts police the boundary between the self and others in an attempt to control and predict future shaming possibilities. Identity scripts, by contrast, are internally directed, and reference past scenes of shame as well as future possibilities for shaming. These include self-blame, in which the subject repeatedly denounces the self for real or imagined lapses; comparison making, in which the subject identifies differences from others and finds the self lacking; and self-contempt, in which the subject splits into an offender on the one hand, and a judge and persecutor on the other.22 ‘[I]dentity scripts invade the self,’ Kaufman writes. ‘The enemy is now within. While defending scripts aim to avoid or escape from shame, identity scripts inevitably reproduce shame.’23 They are the ‘source of enduring self-hatred, pervasive inferiority, and consuming worthlessness’.24 Julia and Sasha develop both types of scripts. For each the defending script of the social mask operates only sporadically and often fails – clothing functions as such a mask – and while both employ the defending script of rage, Julia succumbs to this script explicitly in her encounters with others, whereas Sasha plays it out internally and in fantasies of retaliation. The defending script Sasha most frequently adopts is that of humour: her sardonic, mocking voice deflects shame and contempt and thus gives her control over shame’s toxicity. Defending scripts alternate with the self-blame, comparison-making and self-contempt of the identity scripts of shame. Yet despite the use of such terms as derision, humiliation, ridicule and even shame, shame as a chronic state of feeling goes unnamed in the novels. Instead, Rhys’s protagonists – and other characters – tend to name their pervasive patterns of feeling as sadness or, less typically, anger. The well-meaning question ‘Pour-quoi êtes-vous si triste?’ requires Sasha to deny sadness in a conventional dialogue she calls a ritual (45–6), but throughout the novel she repeatedly calls her mood ‘sad’ or some linguistic variant such as ‘tristesse’ or ‘gloom’. Michael Lewis notes that, in addition to cultural and social practices of disguising shame with euphemisms, sadness and anger are close in affect to shame, and allow the shamed subject to focus on the ‘social embeddedness’ of the emotion rather than on the painful feeling of shame itself. The shamed subject can feel sad that another has caused him or her harm, or the shamed subject can become angry with him/ herself or another, thereby focusing on the cause rather than the feeling

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of shame.25 Chronic shaming intensifies these secondary and substituting emotions of sadness and anger, becoming depression and humiliated rage. Researchers posit that the depression that women develop from chronic states of shame has its roots in women’s traditional responsibilities for maintaining interpersonal relationships. Women’s ‘pervasive affective attunement to the social environment’26 means that women ‘organize their personal sense of self around feelings of shame [. . .] around a sense of disappointment in failing to meet some proposed ideal, especially in the eyes of others’.27 Women who suffer chronic states of shame may also experience depression rather than rage because depression is more acceptable in women than rage.28 ‘Women and others who suffer from inequality in power are particularly prone to the humiliated rage that stems from unacknowledged shame, a rage turned on the self and transformed to guilt because one does not feel entitled to it.’29 ‘Humiliated fury has very little place to go except back down on the self [. . .] to become a component of one’s humiliation’, Helen Block Lewis remarks.30 After Leaving Mr Mackenzie is Rhys’s most complex exploration of shame and the growth of the rage that Helen Block Lewis terms ‘humiliated fury’. Rhys signals the direction of the narrative in a compelling image that opens the novel, in which the gloom of Julia’s shabby rented room in Paris ‘was touched with a fantasy accentuated by the pattern of the wallpaper. A large bird, sitting on the branch of a tree, faced, with open beak, a strange, wingless creature, half-bird, half-lizard, which also had its beak open and its neck stretched in a belligerent attitude’ (10). The pattern established here is one of affect: the half-bird, halflizard evokes the mythical hybrid creature the basilisk, whose venomous gaze is lethal, and its belligerent and open beak signals that the shamed subject in Rhys is now prepared to strike back against would-be aggressors (see Figure 9.1).31 (That this hybrid is an image for Julia herself becomes clear when Mr Horsfield, the man who tries hardest to understand Julia’s tortured emotional state, refers to her as a ‘strange creature’ in his thoughts [38].) The novel follows Julia as she returns to London to visit her family, in particular her dying mother, where she reunites with her sister, her Uncle Griffiths and her former lover Mr James: all of these encounters are marked by emotional confrontations in which Julia’s bid for pity and compassion is met by hostility, contempt and repudiation, or by a superficial kindness that disavows emotional complexity. In all instances, Julia feels shame when spurned and responds with a ‘sullen contempt’ that in turn provokes repudiation and often rage in the other. By the novel’s end, Julia has given herself over to the lethal qualities of her rage, a useless ‘flame’ that devastates all it touches; she has grown

­196     Patricia Moran

Figure 9.1  Wenceslaus Hollar, The basilisk and the weasel, University of Toronto Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection

callous and immune to the suffering of others: whereas earlier in her life the sight of a man ‘so thin that he was like a clothed skeleton’ and the cart horses ‘standing like statues of patient misery’ would have affected her ‘as if someone had put out a hand and touched her heart’, now she feels ‘indifferent and cold, like a stone’ (188). Indeed, Julia notes that ‘it was funny to end like that – where most people start, indifferent and without any pity at all’ (188). Like other of Rhys’s shamed protagonists, Julia often walks with her head down, avoids the people that she knows, hides in her room, uses make-up as a mask and relies on clothing for protection against the world’s condemnation. Unlike the other protagonists, however, Julia is increasingly consumed by rage and increasingly compelled to act out that rage. Rhys captures this quality of compulsive behaviour in the comment that Julia ‘was possessed with one of the fits of rage which were becoming part of her character’ (59); similarly, ‘She was obliged to walk up and down the room consumed with hatred of the world and everybody in it – and especially of Mr. Mackenzie’ (12). An image of Mr Mackenzie’s cold and mocking smile provokes ‘[a] heat [. . .] like the heat of rage’ to fill her whole body (20). Despite understanding on a rational level that she should avoid Mr Mackenzie, who has engaged a lawyer to get rid of her, Julia feels compelled to stalk him; when she does see him, her body registers her emotion through physiological

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signs: ‘Julia’s heart began to beat furiously and her legs trembled. She was excited to an almost unbearable degree, for, added to her other emotions, was the fact that she was very much afraid both of him and his lawyer’ (22). Julia’s conviction that Mr Mackenzie’s treatment of her is a ‘turning point’ in her life is borne out by the novel, and indeed by this encounter with Mr Mackenzie. For Julia causes a public scene in a restaurant, thereby turning the tables and shaming Mr Mackenzie. Although Mr Mackenzie ‘deliberately assumes an expression of disgust’, he is still mortified when Julia draws attention to the table and then slaps him with her glove. Throughout the passage Rhys emphasises Mr Mackenzie’s fear of Julia’s unpredictable anger: ‘Who knew to what wild lengths Julia would go?’ he wonders (32), before concluding that ‘A person who would walk in and make an uncalled-for scene like this was a dangerous person’ (33). The dynamic Rhys establishes in this initial confrontation is one that recurs in varying levels of intensity with the other important figures Julia encounters as the novel unfolds. Julia wishes to have her emotional state recognised and treated with respect and dignity, but in each successive encounter she feels spurned and rejected; she then reacts with rage, refusing to countenance the social decorum that requires the repression of all strong emotion. Hence when she meets her sister Norah for the first time after many years, ‘Her eagerness made her awkward. She had been longing for some show of affection, or at any rate of interest, but Norah kept looking at her as if she were something out of the zoo. She felt an answering indifference, and at the same time pain and a tightness of the throat’ (73). Julia correctly intuits Norah’s contempt, and because ‘something in her voice enraged Julia’ (75), Julia responds in an angry way, raising her voice and arguing incoherently. Julia similarly wants to please her uncle and ‘make him look kindly at her’ (81), but his interrogation about the breakdown of her marriage results in a reaction of hiding that suggests shame: ‘She felt as though her real self had taken cover, as though she had retired somewhere far off and was crouching warily, like an animal, watching her body in the arm-chair arguing with Uncle Griffiths about the man she had loved’ (82). Notably, Julia again reacts to the tone of Uncle Griffith’s remarks – that is, to the emotional dimension that conveys disrespect and contempt for her choices, and she herself becomes angry: ‘Suddenly because of the way he said that, Julia felt contemptuous of him [. . .] Because she felt contempt her nervousness left her’ (83). Her visit with her old lover Mr James, while less confrontational, is dissatisfactory because he refuses to establish an emotional connection by listening compassionately to her troubles; instead, he cuts her off, telling her he finds her account too harrowing to

­198     Patricia Moran hear out. Julia leaves in a state of emotional distress: ‘She wanted to cry as he went down the stairs with her. There was a lump in her throat. She thought: “That wasn’t what I wanted.” She had hoped that he would say something or look something that would make her feel less lonely’ (115–16). Julia’s deepest and most thwarted yearning is to feel a sense of belonging. Sandwiched between her meetings with Norah and Uncle Griffiths Rhys inserts a passage featuring two middle-aged women who sit and talk together, an image of human and familial rapport that Julia had tried and failed to establish with Norah: instead, ‘Julia sat outside the sacred circle of warmth’ (79). Similarly, when she visits her mother, Julia longs for inclusion and acceptance: ‘Supposing that her mother knew her or recognized her and with one word or glance put her outside the pale, as everybody else had done. She felt a sort of superstitious and irrational certainty that if that happened it would finish her; it would be an ultimate and final judgement’ (96). Tellingly, her meeting with her mother confirms this certainty: ‘she saw her mother’s black eyes open [. . .] and stare back into hers with recognition and surprise and anger. They said: “Is this why you have come back? Have you come back to laugh at me?”’ (100). Not only does this scene bear witness to the way in which unacknowledged shame and rage undermine the possibility of intimacy and acceptance, Julia’s status as the family member ‘outside the pale’ is confirmed when Norah tells her to go: ‘Sometimes anybody strange seems to upset her’ (100). Of all the encounters Rhys depicts in the novel, those between Julia and Norah inevitably escalate as each imagines the other’s contempt and responds with rage, which causes further shame (for giving way to rage) and further rage (in feeling more shame).32 Accusing Julia of finding her situation ‘sordid and ugly’ in a ‘voice that sounded defiant’, Norah tries to control the unbidden physiological markers of shame, the tightness in her throat and the welling up of tears, because ‘[s]he did not want to give herself away before Julia’ (102). Rage, on the other hand, provides stimulus: Norah ‘hated [Julia], but she felt more alive when her sister was with her [. . .] every time she looked at Julia she felt a fierce desire to hurt her or to see her hurt and humiliated’ (102, 106). In the confrontation between the two that follows their mother’s funeral, Julia tries to explain her breakdown during the service: ‘it was rage. Didn’t you understand that? Don’t you know the difference between sorrow and rage?’ (134). Norah responds by growing ‘cold’ and contemptuous and thinking to herself, ‘She’s my sister, and she’s disgusting [. . .] She enjoyed seeing her sister grow red and angry, and begin to talk in an incoherent voice’ (135). Markers of anger emerge: Norah feels giddy,

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feels the blood run to her face, feels tingling in her finger tips. And Julia responds in kind, ‘answering the yellow gleam of cruelty in Norah’s eyes’ (135): her voice grows ‘sullen [. . .] She clutched her hands and made a grimace’ (135). Even at this chaotic moment, Julia underscores the pain she experiences from her sister’s repudiation of her: ‘“I cried about you. Have you ever cried one tear for me? You’ve never once looked at me as if you cared whether I lived or died”’ (136). Rage here clearly develops out of the shame of feeling the other’s contempt: the family’s repudiation of Julia enhances the already painful experience of feeling herself a ghost, invisible, eradicated. Horsfield is the one character in the novel who attempts to understand Julia’s emotional pain, but his ability to empathise with her only sporadically overcomes his more conventional inclinations to flee from her shamed and shaming company. Late in the novel he imagines telling her, ‘Why should you look at me suspiciously, as if I were one of the others? I’m not one of the others; I’m on your side [. . .] I’m for you and people like you, and I’m against the others. Can’t you see that?’ (167). Horsfield grasps the emotional complexity that underwrites Julia’s rage. Hence when Julia denounces people for forcing others to grovel for help, becoming red in the face and speaking in an ‘angry voice’, Horsfield does not react to her rage but to the reasons for it, confirming and expanding her belief that people take a ‘subtle pleasure’ in debasing others by thinking ‘Subtle pleasure? Not at all. A very simple and primitive pleasure’ (90). Significantly, this unspoken moment of communion results in Julia looking happier and relieved (90). It is not surprising, then, that it is Horsfield to whom Julia makes her most extended effort to explain her emotional state. Responding to the ‘look in her eyes of someone who is longing to explain herself, to say: “This is how I am. This is how I feel”’, Horsfield sits down by her side: ‘“Tell me,” he said gently’ (48). Horsfield draws out Julia’s assessment that the events in her life do not add up coherently, but rather add up to a profound sense of unbeing: ‘“who am I then? Will you tell me that? Who am I, and how did I get here?”’ (53). Describing herself as a ghost, Julia tells Horsfield ‘“I was frightened, and yet I knew that if I could get to the end of what I was feeling it would be the truth about myself and about the world and about everything”’ (54). The ‘truth’ that Julia wants to discover is the truth that she discovers during her moment of breakdown at her mother’s funeral, the discovery that everyone’s life is ‘a long succession of humiliations and mistakes and pains and ridiculous efforts’, a discovery that releases in her ‘a defiant flame shooting upwards not to plead but to threaten’ (131). This discovery, which she labels ‘rage’ in her final encounter with her sister,

­200     Patricia Moran is not directed at Norah personally, as Norah mistakenly assumes (135), but at the social and cultural codes that create systems of oppression and exploitation but then disallow the shame and rage that they inevitably create. It is this discovery that Horsfield intuitively shares with Julia and the component of her personality with which he sympathises. Despite feeling ‘rage and disappointment’ that she has created a scene in her boarding house and embarrassed him profoundly, he wants to hold her hands and ‘tell everything that was in his heart’, an inversion of their initial conversation in which he intuits her desire to ‘explain herself’ (48). ‘“I hate things as much as you do,”’ he imagines telling her. ‘“I’m just as fed up as you are. You hate hotly like a child because you’ve been hurt. But I hate coldly and that’s worse”’ (167). He imagines himself abandoning the ‘uncongenial tasks’ that constitute his life to join her ‘and get something out of life before I’m too old to feel’ (167). Yet when he contacts her the next morning, her ‘heavy, dead indifference’ undercuts this plan, creating in him ‘a pain, deep down. Like the pain of a loss [. . .] as of a disappointed child’ (171). This final encounter between Horsfield and Julia spells the end of the possibility of their finding a way to a relationship based on their shared sense of emotional pain. Rhys threads this passage with the bodily markers of shame and rage that characterise previous passages in the novel: Julia responds to Horsfield’s ‘cold voice’ by growing red, by raising her voice, by speaking sullenly and by making grimaces. He, for his part, ‘averts his eyes’ – a common response to witnessing shame – and by feeling ‘horrified’ by her emotion: ‘He was sure that the people in the restaurant were beginning to stare at them’ (174). As his unwitting recreation of Mr Mackenzie’s embarrassment in the novel’s opening suggests, Horsfield retreats into the conventional decorum from which he had hoped to escape, an inadvertent retreat which he seemingly cannot control: ‘His voice was cold, but he could not help it. He could not put any warmth into it’ (174). When Julia tries to establish their earlier communion by apologising for her angry reactions, Horsfield cannot respond in kind: ‘For the life of him he was unable to think of anything more sympathetic; yet he could imagine everything she left unsaid. He understood her, but in a cold and theoretical way’ (174). The ‘cold and theoretical way’ of understanding a person’s emotion is a way marked by intellectual distance, not by shared feeling or empathy, as Rhys makes clear in an earlier passage about Horsfield, where the response of ‘poor devil’ to another’s suffering insulates one from that suffering: ‘the poor devil would remain a poor devil whom you theorized about but never tried to understand’ (89). His return to the ‘familiar world’ of his home, where he shuts the door behind him ‘as if he had altogether

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shut out the thought of Julia’, emphatically underscores his return to social and cultural codes disallowing emotion: ‘The atmosphere of his house enveloped him – quiet and not without dignity, part of a world of lowered voices, and of passions, like Japanese dwarf trees, suppressed for many generations’ (175). The failure of sustained rapport marks Julia as well. For Julia ends the novel in a state of feeling ‘indifferent and cold, like a stone’ (188), a state that reflects her sense that ‘something in her was cringing and broken, but she would not acknowledge it’ (182). The ‘defiant flame’ of rage that characterises her at the beginning of the novel and that so often disrupts her encounters with others has seemingly burned itself out. Indeed, it is possible that Horsfield’s final retreat from Julia grows out of his intuition that the defiant rage in her has dissipated, for the pain he images as that of a ‘disappointed child’ in the face of her ‘heavy, dead indifference’ recalls Julia’s childhood memory of capturing butterflies in a tobacco tin in the hopes of capturing their potential of flight, only to discover them crippled and broken when she opens the box. The butterflies mirror Julia’s own sense of childhood freedom, when ‘You ran as if you were flying, without feeling your feet’ (158). The crippled butterflies, with frayed wings and unable to fly, resonate with Julia’s belief that childhood ends when ‘suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul’ (158): Rhys relies here on the longstanding mythological use of the butterfly as an image of the soul. This explicit association between the battered butterflies and Julia points back to an earlier passage in the novel, when Julia remarks that the dark street ‘made walls round you, and shut you in so that you felt you could not breathe. You wanted to beat at the darkness and shriek to be let out. And after a while you got used to it [. . .] And then you stopped believing that there was anything else anywhere’ (85). As a child Julia held the tobacco tin to her ear, ‘listening to the sound of the beating of wings against it [. . .] a very fascinating sound. You wouldn’t have thought a butterfly could make such a row’ (159). In a sense, this fascinating sound is what draws Horsfield to Julia, and, like the disappointed Julia, who opens the tin to discover that what she had wanted to capture she has in fact destroyed, Horsfield cannot sustain interest in Julia once her defiance disappears. Julia, for her part, dismisses the injured butterflies in words that suggest she has internalised the script of shame in which self-blame and self-contempt predominate: ‘you knew that what you had hoped had been to keep the butterfly in a comfortable cardboard-box and to give it the things it liked to eat. And if the idiot broke its own wings, that wasn’t your fault, and the only thing to do was to chuck it away and try again’ (160). This

­202     Patricia Moran language gestures to the social and cultural codes that have constrained Julia and against which she has fought: her adoption of such language as her own – in contrast to the earlier passage in which the voice emanates from the imprisoned spirit denied her capacity for flight – indeed marks the loss of her wisdom and her soul, her final condemnation of herself as the idiot who has broken her own wings.33 Yet Julia’s rage signals an important turning point in Rhys’s thinking about her art and the feelings that ‘are always mine’. Despite its destructive potential, the rage that develops out of chronic shame does play a creative role in the novel, in that Julia’s refusal to abide by the easy conventions of social decorum exposes the cruelty such conventions are designed to conceal. The basilisk-patterned wallpaper that Rhys uses to open the novel and to announce its affective strategy, moreover, points to the creative uses rage can play in a larger sense. Although the basilisk typically figures as a venomous creature whose stare causes instantaneous death in those who meet its eyes, Percy Bysshe Shelley employs it in ‘Ode to Naples’ in a manner analogous to Rhys’s in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie. Shelley images the basilisk as an agent of liberty, a fierce and relentless foe of oppression whose refusal to be appeased drives oppression from the earth: Be thou like the imperial basilisk Killing thy foe with unapparent wounds! Gaze on oppression till at that dread risk Aghast she passes from the earth’s disk. Fear not, but gaze,– for free men mightier grow And slaves more feeble, gazing at their foe.34

Julia may end the novel in a state of cold indifference to suffering that signals her broken and cringing spirit, but the novel itself, in its relentless gaze at the oppressive codes that disallow shame and rage as valid responses to disenfranchisement, basilisk-like forces us to share its fierce and unmitigated desire to annihilate those who would enforce – because they benefit by – such codes. The ending of the novel points forward to Good Morning, Midnight in a manner that suggests Rhys’s commitment to the creative potential inherent in rage as a weapon against social and cultural shaming. Rhys indicates that continuity in several motifs common to the two novels. After Leaving Mr Mackenzie ends at the hour between dog and wolf, whereas Sasha now walks with an imaginary wolf by her side, emblematic of her repeated mantra that ‘man is a wolf to man’: Rhys here suggests a more primal state of being, one no longer hidden by a civilised veneer.35 And whereas Julia’s refusal to pity the skeletal man suggests

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the loss of her compassion, Sasha begins by repudiating the skeletal commis voyageur, but ends by taking him into her bed in a gesture that announces her refusal to ‘despise another poor devil of a human being’. Above all, Sasha’s world-view is more expansive than Julia’s, and thus Sasha connects her chronic sense of shame and the contemptuous gaze to social and cultural markers of belonging, markers she identifies in the interrogation she detects in people’s ‘cruel eyes’ (97): That’s the way they look when they are saying, ‘What is she doing here, the old one?’ That’s the way they look when they are saying, ‘What’s this story?’ Peering at you. Who are you, anyway? Who’s your father and have you got any money, and if not, why not? Are you one of us? Will you think what you’re told to think and say what you ought to say? Are you red, white or blue – jelly, suet pudding or ersatz caviar? (92)

Here Sasha explicitly connects the sense of belonging to family ties (father), economic wherewithal (money) and national identity (French jelly, English suet pudding, Russian caviar). Like Julia, Sasha cannot create a coherent and chronological account of her life story, since such a story cannot encompass her pervasive sense of unreality and depersonalisation. In contrast to Julia, however, Sasha scathingly dismisses the web of identificatory determinants – family, class and nationality – as a ‘story’ accepted by others because it shows that the subject has learned to ‘think what you’re told to think and say what you ought to say’ (92). Sasha’s canny sense of the social embeddedness of shame enables her to move beyond both the fury and the paralysis that grips After Leaving Mr Mackenzie’s Julia. Initially Sasha often gives way to rage, and the novel records multiple moments when her internal monologue registers her reaction of fury at others’ contempt, but her public voice says nothing. For example, when the girl in the restaurant humiliates Sasha by demanding ‘Et qu’est-ce qu’elle fout ici, maintenant?’ – a question that results in ‘everybody ha[ving] a good stare at me’ – Sasha succumbs helplessly to the physiological markers of shame: her throat ‘shuts up’, her eyes sting, she feels herself giving way to tears (50–1). Wishing she could say ‘one word’ or even ‘stare coldly’ at the girl, Sasha notes ‘I can’t speak to her, I can’t even look at her’, while her internal voice records intense and murderous hostility and rage: ‘I’ll take a hammer from the folds of my dark cloak and crack your little skull like an egg-shell. Crack it will go, the egg-shell; out they will stream, the blood, the brains [. . .] One day the fierce wolf that walks by my side will spring on you and rip your abominable guts out’ (52). Such incidents bear out Sasha’s repeated mantra that ‘homo homini lupus’ (24), man is a wolf to man. The ending of Good Morning, Midnight suggests that Sasha has

­204     Patricia Moran adopted an alternative strategy of coping with chronic shame that represents a departure from this reaction of humiliated fury. In taking into her bed the skeletal commis voyageur, a man she has hitherto repudiated, Sasha deliberately eschews the desire to visit upon another the humiliation which has been visited upon her. Instead, Sasha looks ‘straight into’ the commis’s eyes in a manner that departs from the relational grammar of shame that features the gaze of contempt and the lowered gaze of shame and thereby, as Tamar Heller notes, ‘makes the significant choice of seeing the despised Other as human’.36 Without side-stepping the violent and disturbing implications of this scene – which suggests that Sasha is embracing her own death, as I have argued elsewhere37 – Heller notes that ‘daring to share the shame of the afflicted [. . .] we can, however temporarily, break down the barriers that condemn the oppressed to suffer in isolation with their own self-hatred’.38 Sasha’s embrace of the commis voyageur marks one of Rhys’s important revisionings of humiliated fury. A second important revisioning concerns the nature of artistry itself. For rage in Good Morning, Midnight fuels the creative vision that would basilisk-like stare down structures of oppression and exploitation. Not only does Sasha’s fragmented narrative in the novel function as a testimony to how ‘man is a wolf to man’, the artistry she consistently calls upon to gloss her perceptions constitutes an aesthetic (wo)manifesto of sorts. Above all, Sasha’s response to the Russian painter Serge’s depictions of grotesque and marginalised outcasts suggests that they function for her as transformational encounters, for they momentarily release her from her tormented selfimprisoning consciousness: ‘I am surrounded by the pictures. It is astonishing how vivid they are in this dim light [. . .] Now the room expands and the iron band round my heart loosens. The miracle has happened. I am happy’ (99). She will imagine the paintings walking with her after she leaves Serge’s studio, as if they are companions on her life’s journey (101); the one she buys – ‘the man standing in the gutter, playing his banjo’ – ‘stares’ at her, a gaze of mutual recognition that anticipates her looking straight into the commis’s eyes. ‘I stare back at him’, Sasha notes, ‘and think about being hungry, being cold, being hurt, being ridiculed’ (109): the aesthetic encounter makes possible the recognition that shame, debasement, humiliation, can forge a profoundly human connection.39 The biographical source for this encounter – Rhys’s acquisition of Simon Segal’s painting of ‘Man with Banjo’ – adds weight to reading Sasha’s response to Serge’s paintings as marking out an aesthetic philosophy for the novel, for Segal’s letter to Rhys about the painting and about the artistic endeavour itself speaks to Sasha’s response to the paintings as a transformative aesthetic encounter with ‘good anger’:

Chronic Shame and Humiliated Rage     205 J’espère que vous aimerez mon petit bonhomme jouant du banjo. Il est miserable, digne et résigné comme le sont les sages, les artistes et les fous. Peut-être vous donnera-t-il du courage. Ne désespérez pas. Je sais que la douleur ‘est la noblesse unique’ a dit Baudelaire. Et c’est du fond de notre détresse terrible que jaillit enfin l’étincelle et le torrent créateur. Moi aussi je souffre souvent – toujours, beaucoup – croyez-moi. Mais je l’aime, cette souffrance, car elle seule ne me trahit jamais, me donne courage et la belle colère.40

The suffering and pain that release and illuminate the creative torrent, that never betrays, and that gives courage and the ‘good anger’ to the artistic expression of human beings’ inhumanity to each other support a reading of Good Morning, Midnight as a narrative expression of the woman artist’s ‘humiliated fury’ concerning her chronic states of shame.41 Rhys would bring this creative rage to bear in writing her last novel, the 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea, in which her complex vision of shaming finds its most balanced narrative form. In her initial efforts, Rhys concentrated on Bertha’s story: ‘That unfortunate death of a Creole! I’m fighting mad to tell her story’, she commented in a letter.42 But the novel only came together for her when she was able to bring in Rochester’s narrative, a narrative which shares with Antoinette’s the deep shame of not belonging – not to family, not to country, not to class. In bringing Bertha to life and representing her on the verge of torching Thornfield Hall, moreover, Rhys famously brought her creative rage to bear on the canonical English literature that excluded, pathologised and marginalised the lives and stories of colonials like herself. But that vision develops out of the complex explorations of shame, rage and creativity developed in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie and Good Morning, Midnight. As Rhys explained to Mary Cantwell, her rage had changed its focus from her early writing, when it was ‘mostly aimed at men’: ‘on the whole I’m rather sorry for everybody’, she observed.43 For Rhys, basilisks, like tigers, would remain better looking.

Notes  1. Silvan Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, 4 vols (New York: Springer, 1962–92), vol. 2, p. 118.   2. Mary Cantwell, ‘A Conversation with Jean Rhys’, in Pierette Frickey (ed.), Critical Perspectives on Jean Rhys (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1990), p. 24.  3. Tamar Heller discusses shame in Good Morning, Midnight in relation to Simone Weil’s concept of affliction in ‘Affliction in Jean Rhys and Simone Weil’, in Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran (eds), The Female Face of

­206     Patricia Moran Shame (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), pp. 166–76. See also Erica L. Johnson, ‘Haunted: Affective Memory in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight’, in Affirmations: Of the Modern 2, 1 (2014): pp. 15–38.  4. Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1986), p. 54. All further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.  5. In Rhys, Stead, Lessing and the Politics of Empathy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), Judith Kegan Gardiner argues that women writers seek ‘empathic attunement’ with their readers and encourage their readers to feel empathy for their characters in return (166). Gardiner’s assertion that Rhys attempts to break down the barriers of inclusion and exclusion that structure her protagonists’ worlds (24) is compatible with my analysis of Rhys’s representations of shame. See also Veronica Marie Gregg, Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Gregg, like Gardiner, focuses on the role of empathy in Rhys’s writing. Heller notes that ‘the very power of the empathic attunement that Rhys fosters between reader and character that can make her an uncomfortable writer to read [. . .] what is threatening about the way Rhys situates us in the consciousness of an afflicted mind is the potential threat this poses to our own sense of self’ (171). For discussions of the creative and positive aspects of shame, see Joseph Adamson’s and Hilary Clark’s introduction to Scenes of Shame: Psychoanalysis, Shame, and Writing (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), p. 29; and Erica L. Johnson’s and Patricia Moran’s introduction to The Female Face of Shame, pp. 9–10.   6. See the introduction to this volume for an overview of psychoanalytic and affective analyses of Rhys’s work.  7. Gershen Kaufman, The Psychology of Shame: Theory and Treatment of Shame-Based Syndromes, 2nd edn (New York: Springer, 1989), p. 5.  8. In his chapter on Rhys (‘The Voyages of Jean Rhys’, Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism [Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003, 2009], pp. 192–219), Andrew Thacker discusses the ways in which Rhys’s protagonists travel ‘between spaces [. . .] never able to convert these spaces into places of belonging [. . .] the travel is enforced, always between sites and with no return home’ (194). For discussions of Rhys’s protagonists as a type of flâneuse, see Rachel Bowlby, ‘“The Impasse”: Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight’, in Rachel Bowlby, Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 34–58; and Deborah Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 132–48. For discussions of the relationship between shame and belonging, see Laura Martocci, ‘Girl World and Bullying: Intersubjective Shame in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye’ and Anna Rocca, ‘Shame and Belonging in Postcolonial Algeria’, both in The Female Face of Shame, pp. 149–65 and pp. 229–41 respectively.   9. Michael Lewis, Shame: The Exposed Self (New York: Macmillan, 1982), p. 119. 10. Shame theorists with differing frameworks agree on these basic aspects of the shame affect. For overviews of shame theory, see Joseph Adamson’s

Chronic Shame and Humiliated Rage     207 and Hilary Clark’s introduction to Scenes of Shame, pp. 1–34; J. Brooks Bouson’s introduction to Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writing (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2009), pp. 1–15; Liz Constable, ‘Introduction – States of Shame’, L’Esprit Créateur, 39.4 (Winter 1999): 3–12; and Erica L. Johnson’s and Patricia Moran’s introduction to The Female Face of Shame, pp. 1–19. 11. Helen Block Lewis, ‘Shame and the Narcissistic Personality’, in Donald L. Nathanson (ed.), The Many Faces of Shame (New York: Guilford Press, 1987), pp. 107–8. 12. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (eds), Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 136. 13. Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), p. 80. All further references are to this edition and will be included parenthetically in the text. 14. Cited in Léon Wurmser, ‘Shame: The Veiled Companion of Narcissism’, in Nathanson, The Many Faces of Shame, p. 67. 15. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik discuss the metaphorical role of rooms in Rhys’s fiction in Landscapes of Desire: Metaphor in Modern Women’s Fiction (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1990), pp. 133–66. 16. Wurmser, ‘Shame’, p. 67. 17. Ibid. 18. Joseph Adamson and Hilary Clark, ‘Introduction’, in Adamson and Clark, Scenes of Shame, p. 27. 19. Tomkins, Affect 3, p. 96. 20. Kaufman, The Psychology of Shame, p. 96. 21. Ibid., pp. 97–100. 22. Ibid., pp. 103–5. 23. Ibid., p. 102. 24. Ibid., p. 105. 25. M. Lewis, Shame, p. 125. 26. Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 85. 27. Jennifer C. Manion, ‘Girls Blush, Sometimes: Gender, Moral Agency, and the Problem of Shame’, Hypatia, 18.3 (Fall 2003): 24. 28. For discussions of the link between women, shame and depression, see Helen Block Lewis, ‘The Role of Shame in Depression over the Life Span’, in Helen Block Lewis (ed.), The Role of Shame in Symptom Formation (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum), pp. 29–50; and Michael Lewis, Shame, pp. 144–5. For an analysis of the relationship between shame, female depression and social/cultural disenfranchisement, see Kelly Oliver’s discussion of social melancholy and psychic space in The Colonization of Psychic Space (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), pp. 83–124. 29. Joseph Adamson and Hilary Clark, ‘Introduction’, p. 80. 30. Helen Block Lewis, ‘Shame and the Narcissistic Personality’, p. 100. 31. A number of other scholars have commented on this wallpaper. Helen E. Nebeker reads the hybrid bird/lizard as Rhys’s ‘vision of woman, the strange wingless creature undergoing metamorphosis, threatened by man,

­208     Patricia Moran the large bird [. . .] with open beak’: (‘The Artist Emerging’, in Pierette L. Frickey (ed.), Critical Perspectives on Jean Rhys [Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1999], p. 149). 32. Thomas J. Scheff and Suzanne M. Retzinger have labelled this dynamic ‘the shame-rage spiral’, in Emotions and Violence: Shame and Rage in Destructive Conflict (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1991). 33. Kaufman speaks of the way in which the ‘blaming, comparison making, or contemptuous parent’ becomes an ‘alien “internalized other”’ within the self: ‘The internal image of the parent typically manifests as an inner voice, and so is mistaken as a purely cognitive phenomenon [. . .] That inner voice once belonged to another, and to a particular face. Since only the voice has remained conscious, it appears that these voices reflect strictly cognitive self-talk or inner dialogue’ (The Psychology of Shame, p. 105). 34. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Ode to Naples’, http://www.online-literature.com/ shelley­_percy/complete-works-of-shelley/120/ 35. In using this phrase Rhys may have had Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents in mind. In that 1929 text, Freud employs the phrase ‘homo homini lupus’ in a passage in which he writes explicitly about aggression as a primal instinct. 36. Heller, ‘Affliction in Jean Rhys and Simone Weil’, p. 175. 37. In Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma (2007), I explore in detail how the ending of Good Morning, Midnight recreates the well-known trope of Death and the Maiden (pp. 145–6). 38. Heller, ‘Affliction in Jean Rhys and Simone Weil’, p. 176. 39. In ‘“No Pride, No Name, No Face, No Country”: Jewishness and National Identity in Good Morning, Midnight’, in Mary L. Wilson and Kerry L. Johnson (eds), Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 111–29), Jess Issacharoff analyses Serge as a model of an ‘alternate form of belonging’ (p. 119): he is both ‘fundamentally isolated and yet uniquely able to offer Sasha some form of belonging’ (p. 123). She goes on to note that the painting Sasha purchases ‘allow(s) her to tap into her traumatic past as an entrance point into a connection based on alienation’ (p. 126). 40. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly (eds), The Letters of Jean Rhys (New York: Viking, 1984), pp. 137–8. 41. Maren Tova Linett reads Sasha’s response to Serge’s painting as a ‘recognition of her sense of loss and exposure’; she notes that Segal’s letter to Rhys encourages Rhys ‘to use her pain in the service of her art’ (‘“New Words, New Everything”: Fragmentation and Trauma in Jean Rhys’, TwentiethCentury Literature, 51.4 [Winter 2005]: 453–4). 42. Wyndham and Melly, The Letters of Jean Rhys, p. 157. 43. Cantwell, ‘A Conversation with Jean Rhys’, p. 25.

Chapter 10

‘Upholstered Ghosts’: Jean Rhys’s Posthuman Imaginary Erica L. Johnson

Jean Rhys evinces a scepticism about human beings throughout her work in the sense that her protagonists regard others­– ­and Europeans in particular­– ­as lacking compassion at best and as predatory at worst. Each of her novels written during the modernist period presents a world in which her female protagonists are besieged by poverty, exile, loneliness, and abasement at the hands of men and women who consistently treat them with contempt. She describes human beings as spiteful, cold, and at one point as ‘upholstered ghosts’; her take on the human condition is that it is a brutal one that her protagonists do well to survive (when they do); as Sasha says in Good Morning, Midnight, ‘“I think most human beings have cruel eyes.” That rosy, wooden, innocent cruelty’ (404).1 In the face of such antipathy, Rhys’s heroines demonstrate a pronounced identification with non­-human agencies such as ghosts, animals, and objects, as though to escape or at least extend their subjectivities beyond the limits of their own imperilled bodies, and to enter into an affective state that Rhys repeatedly refers to as ‘indifference’. This outsourcing of identity to machines, mirrors, mannequins, dolls, kittens, horses, zombies, and so forth, may be in part a defence mechanism against the oppressive conditions under which they live, but one effect of Rhys’s portraiture is that she pushes the boundaries of the body and of the subject in directions only recently explored by theories of the posthuman condition and affect. Beginning with Deleuze and Guattari’s theorisation of embodied existence as ‘deterritorialized flows of desire’ and as a ‘desiring machine that escapes [Oedipal] codes as lines of escape leading elsewhere’, the notion of the posthuman reconfigures subjectivity as a rhizomatic interaction between desires, affects, and their objects­– ­which in this scenario then cease to be objects and become coextensive with the desiring machine.2 Building on more recent theories of the posthuman, this chapter examines the enmeshment of Rhys’s protagonists with material

­210     Erica L. Johnson and spectral elements in order to understand her distinct representation of the affective flows of modern subjectivity. As Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston point out in Posthuman Bodies, ‘the posthuman marks a solidarity between disenchanted liberal subjects and those who were always­-already disenchanted’;3 Rhys’s protagonists fall into the latter group and are therefore possessed of a powerful critical vision even as they seek to escape or in some way exceed the concept of the liberal subject in their everyday lives. The only other critic to have identified Rhys’s work as posthumanist, Delia Konzett, gestures toward the postcolonial dimension of Rhys’s critique. Konzett ascribes Rhys’s perspective to the politics of exile and marginalisation central to what she terms ‘ethnic modernism’. Konzett’s final analysis is that the Jewish, Caribbean, and African American modernists that form the basis of her study challenge the very categories of humanism taken to be universal and, by referring to these strategies as posthumanist, Konzett demonstrates how a politically circumscribed literary phenomenon­– ­ ethnic modernism­– r­econfigures ontology, as is evident in Rhys’s representations of what she calls ‘exteriorized consciousness’ and even ‘voided humanity’.4 She sees in Rhys’s work a ‘dismantling of European culture [that] proceeds from two ends, stressing on the one hand the fate of a white, outmoded nineteenth­-century Europe and, on the other hand, the increasing dehumanization to which all modern culture is subject’.5 Although Konzett’s book came out before more recent works on posthumanism that have redefined the field, she provides important political explanations of posthumanism as an expression of disruption, exile, and a modernist rejection of the ‘bourgeois subject’. Reading Rhys’s rejection of ‘white mythologies’ as a posthumanist move, in that Western liberal humanism rests on the false naturalisation of whiteness as non­-racial, Konzett’s point that ‘Rhys remains ahead of our time, in which ethnic insecurity and the burden of representation are still mainly assigned to ethnic minorities, ignoring that white majority cultures are themselves constructed and far from self­-evident’­– i­s well taken.6 From a postcolonial angle, then, Rhys’s critique of ‘white majority cultures’ stems from her consciousness of her own fraught racial identity within a colonial rubric that defined her as white, but as ‘not English’; as a British subject but one whose ethnic belonging was equally problematised by her Creole and Celtic heritages.7 More recently, Mary Lou Emery has developed the Caribbean underpinnings of Rhysian subjectivity in her analysis of a ‘poetics of labor, emerging from the Caribbean’.8 Rhys’s characters teeter on a tipping point between inhumanity, on the one hand, and dehumanisation, on the other­– ­a dynamic powered

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by the plantation aesthetics that Emery, following Edouard Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse, identifies in Rhys’s work. Emery points out Faulknerian scenes in Voyage in the Dark in which Anna ‘recognizes that her whiteness as a “fifth generation West Indian” and her position as leisured planter’s daughter were produced by the labor of slaves and servants of African descent’.9 While the narratives I will address in this essay are less directly predicated on the history of the Caribbean in terms of their characters and narratives than those in Voyage in the Dark, Rhys’s overall aesthetic is. It is important to acknowledge that her posthuman view has its origins in her personal experiences of adversity but also in her awareness of the history of humans’ exploitation and enslavement of each other; for example, in one of her earliest manuscript versions of Voyage in the Dark, Anna’s family openly debates the legacy of slavery as they watch a Carnivale procession from closed windows: ‘Slavery was a wicked thing Aunt Jane said and God Almighty frowned on it and so it had to stop you can’t treat human beings as if they were bits of wood it had to stop.’10 Emery claims that, ‘inseparable from plantation history, Rhys’s Caribbean modernism emerges from the local labor politics of Dominica but also from the larger plantation system in its regional and even global dimensions’,11 and what she terms ‘cries of the plantation’ also ring throughout Rhys’s posthumanism.12 Although my readings will not focus on the colonial underpinnings of Rhys’s modernist aesthetics as such, Konzett and Emery offer indispensable observations about the historical sources of her posthuman imaginary.13 In a subtle contrast with postcolonial approaches that focus on a critique of liberal humanism that amounts to a form of post­-humanism, recent posthumanist theory has shifted terms slightly to imagine the workings of posthuman­-ism, and it is the latter that I emphasize in this chapter. Rhys’s posthumanism is both an effective postcolonial critique of liberal humanism and an original portrait of the porousness and rhizomatic nature of the amorphous figure of the human. That is, her characters express abhorrence at historical and modern human relations, and herein lies the critique; what is more, they seek recourse to it by enmeshing with non­-human elements of the world. They desire to be mannequins, they imagine themselves to be animals; they feel that to be a machine is preferable to being a woman. The European men and women with whom her protagonists interact represent a more conventional form of identity, and Rhys uses them to build a profound differential between her protagonists’ ontic status and that of those who surround them; to wit, a happy moment for Julia in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1934) occurs when, walking along the Seine, ‘Her limbs moved smoothly; the damp, soft air was pleasant against her face. She felt complete in herself,

­212     Erica L. Johnson detached, independent from humanity’ (242). Rhys describes Julia as a desiring machine who, in the same stroll, passes shop windows ‘exhibiting casts of deformed feet, stuffed dogs and foxes, or photographs of the moon’ (242). Not only does Julia become absorbed in objects of human prostheses and animals in this passage, but her attention to the items in the windows culminates in her long pause before ‘a picture representing a male figure encircled by what appeared to be a huge mauve corkscrew’ (242). Just as the human and mechanical figures are intertwined in the picture, Julia feels herself to be ‘detached ­. . . from humanity’ because she has the experience of wholly immersing herself into these images and objects. She becomes, by extension, a prosthetic form in that she feels as much­– i­f not more­– ­a part of the jumble of objects in shop windows as with the people surrounding her on the street. This distance from others drives the narratives of Rhys’s earlier novels, each of which arc toward a posthuman state of inanimation. In her first published novel, Quartet (1929), Rhys offers such observations by way of her protagonist Marya Zelli as, ‘I think life is cruel. I think people are cruel’ (148), and ‘How terrifying human beings were’ (160). These, and many similar accounts of human cruelty, arise in a story ostensibly about kindness, for the novel recounts a wealthy British couple’s patronage of a destitute young woman. Stranded in Paris with no money when her husband is imprisoned for a year, Marya is taken in by the Heidlers; however, their patronage turns to sexual exploitation as the vulnerable Marya falls prey to Mr Heidler’s desires. In response to his first pass at her, Marya thinks, ‘Sob stuff, sex stuff. That’s the way men talk. And they look at you with hard, greedy eyes. I hate their greedy eyes’ (161). This is not to say that men claim exclusive rights to the mistreatment of women, for Lois Heidler turns out to be complicit in her husband’s abuse of Marya as well as cruel in her own right; Marya’s observation of her is that she is ‘insensitive to the point of stupidity­– ­or was it insensitive to the point of cruelty? [.] But that, of course, always is the question’ (154). Of the Heidlers as a couple, she thinks, ‘there they were: inscrutable people, invulnerable people, and she simply hadn’t a chance against them, naïve sinner that she was’ (179). Similarly, in Good Morning, Midnight, Sasha is haunted by a family that taunts her with: ‘we consider you as dead. Why didn’t you make a hole in the water? Why didn’t you drown yourself in the Seine?’ (368), and by the ‘ghost on the landing’, the hateful man in her hotel who hurls such insults at her as ‘sale vache’ [dirty cow], as though to give voice to the cringe­inducing glares and stares she encounters throughout the novel. Humans are equally brutal in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, a novel structured around Julia’s repeated experience of rejection by family members and

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lovers alike. She thinks, ‘It’s childish to imagine that anybody cares what happens to anybody else’ (281), and she theorises that only ‘one in a million’ even appear to be ‘not cruel, but kind and soft’ (339). Rhys depicts a world in which her protagonists are socially, economically, and sexually disenfranchised yet, as fully as she fleshes out the workings of power through such themes, her portraiture rests on an even deeper layer of despair over the very nature of human relations. This critique of human nature runs throughout Rhys’s work, and inspires her characters to eschew or fundamentally alter such mystifying concepts as hope, happiness, or social mobility for the more realistic possibilities of temporary escape, numbness, and indifference.14 Her protagonists seek out affective states of ‘neutrality’ through drinking, by immersing themselves in fashion or art, or, most importantly for this essay, by identifying so strongly with non­-human elements that they escape the human condition, as though to remove themselves from the status of ‘human’ that figures so negatively in others. Creating a virtual dialogue between humans and her characters, each of whom exists at an angle to the model of European subjectivity with which they interact, Rhys models them as complex intersubjective and interstitial beings. This differential is fundamental to her portraits of women who, as Anne B. Simpson observes, ‘demonstrably lack ontic status’.15 Similarly, Patricia Moran says of Rhys’s aesthetic that it ‘suggests a suicidal withdrawal that in effect returns Rhys to the primal world of infancy and a state of non­-differentiation, a state that ­. . . conflates womb and tomb’.16 Moran also identifies ‘a gradual movement from feeling to non­-feeling’ in Rhys’s aesthetic.17 This disassembly of the self, this death drive, is in process for each of Rhys’s protagonists in one way or another. There is, more broadly put, a drive toward inanimation­– w ­ hether this state is understood as death, pure ontological neutrality, or non­-differentiation from the world.18 Rhys thus troubles humanist conceptions of sovereign subjects whose identities emerge from their interactions with one another by expanding the sphere of her characters’ interactions with non­ -human agencies. This representation also resonates with Halberstam and Livingston’s claim that the posthuman does not necessitate the obsolescence of the human; it does not represent an evolution or devolution of the human. Rather it participates in re­-distributions of difference and identity. The human functions to domesticate and hierarchize difference within the human (whether according to race, class, gender) and to absolutize difference between the human and non­-human. The posthuman does not reduce difference­-from­-others to difference­-from­-self, but rather emerges in patterns of resonance and interference between the two.19

­214     Erica L. Johnson To say, then, that Rhys’s protagonists exist at an angle to ‘humans’ in her novels echoes the dialogue at play in posthuman theory between human and non­-human elements of the world that binds them into a shared ontology. Like Halberstam and Livingston, most theorists approach posthumanism not as a condition into which we have entered ‘after’ liberal humanism, but rather as just such a dialogue between multiple concepts of humanity and the material and affective flows that exceed such concepts. Some see the posthuman condition in our relations with technology or in our ever­-expansive affective networks and affiliations. N. Katherine Hayles explains, ‘the presumption that there is an agency, desire, or will belonging to the self and clearly distinguished from the “wills of others” is undercut in the posthuman, for the posthuman’s collective heterogeneous quality implies a distributed cognition located in disparate parts that may be in only tenuous communication with one another’.20 Whereas for years critics classified Rhys’s heroines, accusingly, of being weak or lacking agency, and whereas more recent criticism has recouped the psychological complexity of her ‘victims,’ a posthuman approach offers the insight that agency is itself a ‘heterogeneous quality’ that cannot be attributed to nor divested from a ‘self’. This view is particularly helpful to Rhys criticism since it has long been troubled by her characters’ reliance on the kindness of strangers to the point of quasi­-prostitution­– ­that is to say, by their chronic states of utter dependence. From Anna’s disastrous affair in Voyage in the Dark to Marya’s ménage­-a­-trois in Quartet to Julia’s humiliation upon her lover’s rejection of her in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, sexual relations are indistinguishable from financial relations for Rhys’s heroines. Thus attempts to sort these relations into the narratives of will and agency that rely on the notion that individuals either do or do not possess such properties, stop short of understanding Rhys’s larger portrait of how such affective attachments build upon and produce a model of subjectivity in which her heroines are enmeshed within the world in which they dwell, and amongst the subjects and objects alike of which that world is made. In Rhys’s hands, the concept of dependence, for example, could more accurately be understood as enmeshment with economic and sexual power structures that encircle Rhys’s heroines even as they both navigate and challenge such structures. In so doing she achieves Cary Wolfe’s definition of posthumanism as ‘a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore’.21 Wolfe may be referring to a much more recent ‘historical moment’ than that of Rhys’s early novels, but Rhys was already presenting such imbricated subjectivities.

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While the tropes of animals, machines, and ghosts appear in each of the novels, Rhys gives particular attention to Marya’s affiliation with animals as well as her status as a pet in the Heidler household. Julia and Sasha are more haunted characters and in addition to their encounters with ghosts, they are themselves spectral as they merge into the cold indifference of Paris and London. In her last of these three novels, Good Morning, Midnight, Rhys assembles a particularly rhizomatic form of subjectivity that incorporates animals and ghosts, and that is articulated by machines in the shadow of the encroaching second world war. In the face of human cruelty, her characters not only resist the very boundaries of the human; they also discover inanimation within themselves.

‘A strayed animal’: Being a pet in Quartet In Rhys’s first published novel, Quartet, Marya senses that she is an altogether different creature from the wealthy H.J. or Lois Heidler­– a­ view shared by the Heidlers as well. To call their living arrangement a ménage­-a­-trois is actually misleading, given how little say in the matter Marya has and how fully the dynamics of the arrangement preserve the Heidlers’ power as a couple and Marya’s vulnerability as an interloper who has temporarily been taken in by them. As a rare confidante observes to Marya of her hosts, there is ‘something unreal about most English people. “They touch life with gloves on”’ (120). What is striking about this observation is that Marya is herself English, as her Polish husband reminds her when he encourages her to accept the hospitality of her ‘countrymen’; however, the English people in this passage clearly include the Heidlers and their fellow expatriates in Paris while the group excludes Marya. It is one thing not to identify with one’s country of birth but quite another to lose all sense of ever having belonged there in the first place as Marya does. That Rhys delineates her difference from the wealthy Britons around her in terms of the ‘unreal’ and the different way in which they ‘touch life’, speaks to a profound conviction that they simply exist differently as citizens and as people. This sense of estrangement from the English develops further in the same scene when, during a dinner party at which she is present, ‘They discussed eating, cooking, England and, finally, Marya, whom they spoke of in the third person as if she were a strange animal or at any rate a strayed animal­– ­one not quite of the fold’ (123). The sense that Marya is a second­-class citizen among the English is fully mutual in this scene, in which England exists as a detached noun rather than in an adjectival and inclusive form, and critics have attended to Marya’s sense of alienation. However, her

­216     Erica L. Johnson alienation goes beyond basic categories of critical discourse, the properties of which Kathleen Stewart helpfully describes as based upon an ‘analytic object that can be laid out on a single, static plane of analysis’ that can be subjected to ‘a perfect, three­-tiered parallelism between analytic subject, concept, and world’, and this is what is so important about Rhys’s presentation of subjectivity.22 Marya’s status in this scene as an object of discussion and as ‘a strayed animal’ reflects others’ effective dehumanisation of her, a position from which she interrogates others’ humanist values and prompts new critical categories of interpretation. She is, in fact, more of a pet in the Heidler household than a full partner in anything, and Rhys pursues the trope of her animalism throughout the novel with the effect of dispensing with the concept of agency. Whether she can interact advantageously with the world is a secondary question in light of her contingency as an actor in the first place. That she feels herself to be an ‘animal’ to be discussed by English people reveals not only her failed citizenship, but also her profoundly different state of being in the world. Animals form a significant part of posthuman studies, and many argue that animals have been falsely positioned as an Other to humans. Donna Haraway, in The Companion Species Manifesto, problematises the very concept of the pet, arguing that ‘the status of pet puts a[n animal] at special risk ­. . . the risk of abandonment when human affection wanes, when people’s convenience takes precedence, or when the [pet] fails to deliver on the fantasy of unconditional love’.23 Although the ‘companion species’ about which Haraway writes is dogs, her argument that it is unethical to keep an animal as a pet is startling in its application to relations between human animals in Quartet. Marya is taken in when the Heidlers feel affection and attraction for her and then abandoned when she becomes inconvenient and unloveable. The power differential is such that Marya’s identification with other animals belies her own status. As a strayed animal herself, Marya recognises her affinity with other such creatures: ‘It was a beautiful street. The street of homeless cats, she often thought. She never came into it without seeing several of them, prowling, thin vagabonds, furtive, aloof, but strangely proud. Sympathetic creatures, after all’ (157). The clear sympathy she feels toward the homeless cats is built on a system of affiliation amongst, as opposed to binary difference with, animals. This poignant moment on the street occurs because Marya is so estranged from human community that her sympathy with the cats stands in stark contrast to the antipathy that exists between herself and other people. In another such scene, she finds herself packed off to Provence by the Heidlers once they begin to tire of their increasingly demanding pet.

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There, she suggests a visit to the zoo, of all places, to her chaperone: ‘there was a young fox in a cage at the end of the zoo­– ­a cage perhaps three yards long. Up and down it ran, up and down, and Marya imagined that each time it turned it did so with a certain hopefulness, as if it thought that escape was possible. Then, of course, there were the bars. It would strike its nose turn and run again. Up and down, up and down, ceaselessly. A horrible sight, really’ (217). This scene is symbolic indeed of the snares and cages in which Marya finds herself. Unlike the fox, however, she does not put much store in the notion of hope, or of escape, and the passage foreshadows the novel’s conclusion, which leaves her in a coffin­-like hotel room. The conclusion completes Marya’s arc toward inanimation, toward death. A terrible fight between Marya and Stephan finishes with him throwing her across the room: ‘He caught her by the shoulders and swung her sideways with all his force. As she fell she struck her forehead against the edge of the table, crumpled up and lay still. “Voilà pour toi”, said Stephan’ (233). The narrative perspective then shifts to Stephan as he stealthily exits the scene of the crime, a rhetorical foreclosure of her subjectivity that indicates he has in fact killed her.24 He feels ‘dazed and at the same time extraordinarily relieved’ (233), and Rhys attributes the novel’s closing thought to Stephan: ‘women seemed to him loathsome, horrible­– s­oft and disgusting weights suspended round the necks of men, dragging them downwards’ (234). Having cast off the dead weight of Marya, Stephan flees with another woman whom he considers to be ‘Encore une grue’ [Yet another slut] (234), his misogyny only reified as he veers from violent to amorous relations with women. Like four of Rhys’s five novels, then, the conclusion at least implies the heroine’s death: Anna dies of a botched abortion in the original version of Voyage in the Dark before Rhys’s editor forced her to change the ending; Sasha embraces the hateful and malevolent commis voyageur at the end of Good Morning, Midnight; Antoinette sets forth to burn down Thornfield in Wide Sargasso Sea and presumably meets Bertha Mason’s fate. The only character to survive in any clear sense is Julia in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, stranded as she is, in another alliance with animals, in ‘the hour between the dog and the wolf’ (343). This arc toward death, toward a state of destruction, is one that Rhys maps out in Quartet through her representation of Marya’s tenuous humanity from her pet­-like status in the Heidler household to the fight with Stephan, in which she engages ‘wildly, with frenzy’ (233) while he refers to her as a ‘beast’ (231). Rhys does important posthuman work here in that, as Wolfe argues, the shared finitude of humans and non­-human animals is one of several areas in which the line between

­218     Erica L. Johnson them becomes indistinct. Citing Derrida, Wolfe explains that ‘both humans and non­-human animals are subject in a trace structure that ­. . . exceeds and encompasses the human­/animal difference and indeed the “life­/death relations” itself. For this reason we cannot master and “erase” .­ . . our radical passivity in a way that would once again separate us, definitively and ontologically, from non­-human animals.’25 As she writes in Good Morning, Midnight, ‘homo homini lupus’, or ‘man is a wolf to man’; in Quartet, Marya experiences not only this primal struggle, but also a state of ontological indeterminacy that throws into relief the false boundaries between wolves and humans altogether. Marya, along with the cats, the fox, and the ‘big spider motionless on the dirty white wall’ (229) who is the only witness to Marya’s fate, exists not as a sovereign subject but in radical contingency with others.

Haunted in Mr Mackenzie As is the case in Quartet, the protagonist of After Leaving Mr Mackenzie has a deep and abiding dread of ‘organized society, in which she had no place and against which she had not a dog’s chance’ (245). Julia, who haunts the streets of Paris and London, confides to one of her many male patrons, ‘I hate people. I’m afraid of people’ (258). This sense of disconnection from others, and of excommunication from ‘organized society’, defines Julia’s outlook on the world and underlies her failed relationships. Like Marya, Julia’s regard of the human condition is underscored by affiliations with animals, as when she says to her sister, ‘“Animals are better than we are, aren’t they? They’re not all the time pretending and lying and sneering, like loathsome human beings”’ (311). Yet animals in Mackenzie are not only kindred spirits; they are closely linked with death, a link that stems from the fact that humans and non­-human animals are bound together precisely by their shared condition of ‘flesh and finitude’, as Wolfe puts it: ‘our relation to flesh and blood is fatefully constituted by a technicity with which it is prosthetically entwined, a diacritical, semiotic machine of language in the broadest sense that exceeds any and all presence, including our own’.26 Rhys presses the limits of the human in Mackenzie in that, while animals serve as prosthetic entwinements that underscore the trope of embodied finitude, she explores as well a state of spectrality that exceeds presence. Death drives the narrative in that it recounts Julia’s return to her mother’s death bed in London after many years of living in Paris, but it is also a prominent affect of Julia, who frequently appears as a ghost or lapses into states of

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inanimation and thereby reconfigures critical discourse as does Marya in her liminal state of humanity. The figure of Julia’s dying mother lies at the centre of the novel, and in her Rhys weaves together her themes of animal finitude and death with colonial alterity. Originally from South America, Julia’s mother embodies both her daughter’s sense of estrangement and her inertia. For the most part, she is an inanimate invalid, ‘paralysed, dead to all intents and purposes’ (274). In a later passage, Julia observes of her mother, ‘And yet the strange thing was that she was still beautiful, as an animal would be in old age’ (289). As she nears death, Julia’s mother recedes into an animal state, as we see in the one passage in which she and Julia do have something of an interaction: ‘The sick woman looked steadily at her daughter. Then it was like seeing a spark go out and the eyes were again bloodshot, animal eyes. Nothing was there’ (290). Rhys further associates death with an animal state when Julia is finally forced to confront her mother’s death throes and ‘something in her brain was saying coldly and clearly: “Hurry, monkey, hurry. This is death. Death doesn’t wait. Hurry, monkey, hurry”’ (302). Her identification with the uncannily human­-like animal of the monkey at the moment of her mother’s death occurs at a threshold between human and non­-human animals in their shared mortality. Julia’s posthuman attributes tend toward not only animal affinities, but beyond such shared finitude and presence, to death and the ghosts that breach the difference between presence and absence. In one scene in which both animal and ghostly modes of being are in play, Julia pays a visit to her Uncle Griffiths­– w ­ ho upon hearing of her arrival muses, ‘”A lady?” [. . .] in a voice which sounded alarmed and annoyed, as he might have said: “A zebra? A giraffe?”’ (278). He thinks of her not only as an animal but as specifically African and thus foreign creatures. By entwining her with the adjacent signifiers of ‘zebra’ and ‘giraffe’, he perceives her as alien to his own ontic status, a perception that is palpable to Julia in the course of their guarded conversation during which Rhys yokes together animal and spectral imagery in a powerful invocation of Julia’s posthuman status. While Uncle Griffiths and Julia obviously share ‘flesh and finitude’, Julia experiences a split from her own presence, in his: ‘She felt as though her real self had taken cover, as though she had retired somewhere far off and was crouching warily, like an animal, watching her body in the arm­-chair arguing with Uncle Griffiths’ (280). Here, she is both animal and ghost. Her ‘body in the armchair’ becomes co­-extensive with that of a wary animal in such a way that it melds into the otherness that her uncle projects upon her; what is more, she is what Derrida calls ‘spectralised’ in this passage.

­220     Erica L. Johnson Derrida says, ‘What has, I dare say, constantly haunted me in this logic of the specter is that it regularly exceeds all the oppositions between the visible and invisible, sensible and insensible. A specter is both visible and invisible, both phenomenal and nonphenomenal, a trace that marks the present with its absence in advance.’27 Julia exceeds her own presence in both her uncle’s perception of her as an alien figure, and in her own sudden absence from the body in the arm­-chair. This scene is all the more important because it so graphically represents the continual process in the novel through which Julia empties herself of her own presence, arcing as she does toward an affective state of ‘indifference’. Her arc toward ‘indifference’ and inanimation is defined by a certain spectrality, a moving beyond the boundaries of the body and often of the reality that encompasses it. Rhys uses the term in a unique way so that it registers a death­-like status, as when Julia departs London after her mother’s death and her failed affair with Mr Horsfield. As she bids him goodbye, ‘she stared at him, not sadly, but with a heavy dead indifference’ (332). Indeed, it is Mr Horsfield who observes her tendency to void herself of emotion entirely, from their first encounter in which he asks to join her at a table and she responds, ‘”Of course, why not?”. . . in an indifferent voice’ (256). Later in the same conversation, ‘She shrugged one shoulder a little and, without answering him, again relapsed into silence and indifference’ (257). Julia’s indifference goes far beyond a lack of caring; it is a state into which she enters frequently, a liminal state between presence and absence in which she finds relative comfort. She thinks of her long­-term ‘indifference to her fate, which in Paris had sustained her for so long’ (277). There is a source for Julia’s feeling of indifference, and this is the same source of the novel’s death theme: her mother. In a rare flashback, Rhys revisits the scene in which Julia’s mother rejects her after the birth of her younger sister; from being ‘the warm centre of the world’, her mother becomes a ‘dark austere’ woman who slaps and insults Julia. In sorting out her emotions, Julia recalls her initial feelings of fear and hatred toward her mother, but these powerful feelings then collapse into an emotional void in which ‘you stopped being afraid or disliking. You simply became indifferent’ (295). In an echo of the memory of maternal rejection, Julia revisits these thoughts about indifference in the traumatic memory of her own maternal failure, ‘When you’ve just had a baby, and it dies for the simple reason that you haven’t enough only to keep it alive, it leaves you with a sort of hunger. Not sentimental­– ­oh no. Just a funny feeling, like hunger. And then, of course, you’re indifferent­– b ­ ecause the whole damned thing is too stupid to be anything else but indifferent about’ (297). Indifference is

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thus to death close allied, whether because Julia traces it back to her dying mother or to the death of her own child. Indifference, or a lack of interest in life, takes on even more gravity in light of Silvan Tomkins’ identification of interest as an affect essential to vitality. In Shame and Its Sisters, Tomkins suggests, first, that interest is an affect­– w ­ hich means that it spans and therefore has implications for the body, intellect, and emotions alike. More specifically, though, Tomkins argues that interest is fundamental to the functions of cognition and memory, as well as to the drives that sustain life itself. In the course of explaining how the shame affect, at its most deadly, shuts down one’s capacity for interest, Tomkins writes, ‘the interrelationships between the affect of interest and the functions of thought and memory are so extensive that absence of the affective support of interest would jeopardize intellectual development no less than destruction of brain tissue’.28 Julia’s indifference amounts to an entropic state of being, in which she crumbles intellectually, emotionally, and even physically as we see when she lies alone in her room in the dark, or fantasizes about doing so in a scene in which ‘she felt nothing, except that she was tired and that she wished to be left alone to rest there, quietly, in the darkened room. It seemed to her that she had been there forever and that she always would be there, and that getting up, moving, would be impossible. But they must leave her alone. Then even that thought left her. She floated ­. . . floated ­. . . And shut her eyes’ (313). Her profound lack of interest in others, or in the world around her, is paralysing in the sense that she turns inward only to find the same emptiness that she feels around her. As Tomkins puts it, ‘there is no human competence which can be achieved in the absence of a sustaining interest, and the development of cognitive competence is peculiarly vulnerable to anomie’.29 Understood thus, anomie­– ­from which Julia clearly suffers­– ­undermines her ability to think as well as her ability to feel or even function, and it fuels the inner self­ -destruction that causes Mr Mackenzie to perceive her as, essentially, ‘a female without the instinct of self­-preservation’ (248). The arc toward neutrality, inanimation, and death is legible as a death drive in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie even more so than it is in Quartet. Although Marya likely does die at the end of her story and Julia endures, Rhys’s emphasis on Julia’s indifference as an affective and at times ontological state underscores her protagonist’s lack of vitality. In Death­ -Drives: Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art, Robert Rowland Smith defines the death­-drive as ‘the inertia that comes with the wish’s fulfilment that we covet, the emptying out of energies that brings a serene calm’.30 What I have been referring to as an arc toward inanimation in Rhys’s characters can also be read as a death drive in

­222     Erica L. Johnson that, ‘this yearning for a return to simplicity belongs to the human species as a species. Freud notes the inanimate world that precedes that of the animate. . . and does so as part of his case­-building: the death drive­– ­that desire to return to a state of inertia, that wish on the part of the organic to become inorganic­– ­tunes in to the evolution of the species and attempts to reverse it’.31 This psychic undertow is clearly at work in Julia, whom we see ‘driving at a zero­-state’.32 That said, Rhys folds this drive toward neutrality into a more complex, because posthuman, aesthetic. While Julia clearly exhibits characteristics of the death drive, she goes against Smith’s opening argument that suicide proves primary evidence of the death drive. Rhys takes on this issue in the final pages of the novel, in which Julia returns to Paris and is seen by a police officer as a potential suicide about to jump off a bridge. Although she assures him, ‘in a cold voice: “I haven’t the slightest intention of committing suicide”’, the passage that leads up to his intervention describes the shadows in the Seine as they ‘danced, but without joy. They danced, they twisted, they thrust out long, curved, snake­-like arms and beckoned’ (339). It is significant that Rhys invokes suicide only to defy it. Instead of following through on Julia’s drive toward indifference and inertia as a desire to cease being, Rhys suggests that Julia enters into a posthuman ontological state of spectrality. As she writes in Wide Sargasso Sea, ‘there are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about’ (536); Julia recedes into a death­like state as a lifetime of rejections piles on top of her mother’s rejection of her as a child, instilling within her a deep sense of worthlessness and failure. Julia absorbs the affect of indifference into herself in such a way that she encrypts herself in it. In several of her descriptions of Julia’s indifference, Rhys clearly invokes death, as when she alludes to Julia’s entombment: ‘It was the darkness that got you. It was heavy darkness, greasy and compelling. It made walls round you, and shut you in so that you felt you could not breathe. You wanted to beat at the darkness and shriek to be let out. And after a while you got used to it. Of course. And then you stopped believing that there was anything else anywhere’ (232). Building upon her repeated use of the term ‘indifference’ here, Rhys places her protagonist in a figurative crypt, a move that underlies her many references to Julia as a ghost. Indeed, she appears as spectral in her interactions with Mr Mackenzie, whom ‘she haunted [. . .] as an ungenerous action does haunt one’ (249). In one of their two encounters, he sees her enter a café, ‘pale as a ghost’ (249) and even later, when they are sitting together, he thinks, ‘when she had walked in silent and ghost­-like, he had been really afraid of her. Now he only felt that he

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disliked her intensely’ (250). Julia materializes, from his point of view, from a haunting absence to an abject presence and she feels this within herself as well. As she explains to him, ‘something had gone kaput in her, and she would never be any good any more­– n ­ ever, any more’ (251). This internal collapse is manifest as a hollowed­-out affect, as though what has gone ‘kaput’ is Julia’s very will to live. Similarly, her return to London after an absence of ten years makes Julia feel that she is a ghost. Walking through the city’s proverbial mist, she sees ‘the ghost of herself coming out of the fog to meet her. The ghost was thin and eager [. . .] It drifted up to her and passed her in the fog. And she had the feeling that, like the old man, it looked at her coldly, without recognizing her’ (272). This encounter with her own ghost powerfully conveys the depth of Julia’s estrangement from her humanity; that her own ghost finds her unworthy of recognition signals her essential despair and anomie. In the scene in which Julia explains to Mr Horsfield that Mackenzie ‘sort of smashed me up’ (262), she alludes again to her sense that she is a spectral presence among those cruel others who have wreaked such devastation within her. In the scene in which she tells him what he regards as her tiresome ‘life story’, she recalls working as a painter’s model for a woman in Paris, and even then she describes herself as ‘there, like a ghost’ (265). In a memory that echoes her identification with animals and spectres in her meeting with Uncle Griffiths, Julia tells Mr Horsfield about sitting in the painter’s studio and looking at a Modigliani print on the wall of a woman with ‘a sort of proud body, like an utterly lovely proud animal. And a face like a mask [. . .] The eyes were blank, like a mask, but when you had looked at it a bit, it was as if you were looking at a real woman, a live woman’ and, more to the point, Julia feels ‘as if the woman in the picture were laughing at me and saying: “I am more real than you”’ (264). The mask­-like visage and animal body form a prosthetic reality that transcends that of Julia and triggers within her the uncanny sense that ‘all my life and all myself were floating away from me like smoke and there was nothing to lay hold of­– n ­ othing’ (265). Julia’s repeated expressions of annihilation, of voided presence, underscore her state of mortification­– i­n the sense that she frequently feels shame and humiliation, and in the sense that she feels deadened.33 In a final scene of humiliation, for example, she is followed by a would­-be seducer who, upon seeing her aging face under the street lights, rejects her with an ‘“Oh, la la. . . Ah, non, alors”’, to which Julia responds with bitter laughter ‘on the surface of her consciousness’ but with the inner wound of ‘such deadly and impartial criticism’ (341). Julia’s posthumanism, manifest as it is in her spectrality in particular, serves up a powerful critique about the limits of liberal humanism

­224     Erica L. Johnson in that Rhys makes it impossible to read Julia through such lenses as agency, oppression, or resistance. Each of these concepts is predicated on the notion that individual subjects can assert agency over others or have their own agency undermined by others. Julia is, rather, networked into the inanimate world in such a way that her status as an individual subject fades into a more rhizomatic mode of being in which her own consciousness often escapes her, leaving her empty, indifferent, spectral­ – ­in short, as a co­-extensive element of the inanimate and post­-animate world of death.

Postscript: The Cyborg The last of Rhys’s novels of the modernist period, Good Morning, Midnight, includes multiple iterations of posthuman subjectivity in its portrait of Sasha Jansen. Like Marya and Julia, Sasha is a stranger to belonging; her national identity is persistently deferred and she shares with the other two the plight of economic dependency and rejection by family and lovers. The novel begins with her memory of having nearly drowned herself out of despair, only to survive to be ‘saved, rescued, fished­-up, half­-drowned, out of the deep, dark river, dry clothes, hair shampooed and set .­ . . I’m a bit of an automaton, but sane, surely­– ­dry, cold, and sane’ (348). Sasha’s reference to herself as an automaton repeats frequently in the novel through diversified expressions of the extent to which she identifies with inanimate objects, and it foreshadows her nightmare in the final pages of a vast machine built of female body parts and steel: ‘all that is left in the world is an enormous machine, made of white steel. It has innumerable flexible arms, made of steel. Long, thin arms. At the end of each arm is an eye, the eyelashes stiff with mascara’ (460). While some have read this machine as an automaton, it also expands upon the automaton in its organic bodily components and is also a cyborg.34 Rhys’s anticipation of the postmodern figure of the cyborg is arresting indeed, and her machine illustrates Hayles’s point that the cyborg presents the apotheosis of ‘the posthuman view [which] thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born’.35 Like Rhys’s other protagonists, Sasha identifies with mannequins, masks, and other fabricated versions of the human form including literal bodily prostheses (as does Julia). The condition of the prosthetic body is such that its parts can become manifest as a seemingly organic whole that has the uncanny ability to dissemble­– a­ terrifying condition that underlies the arc of the

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novel from Sasha’s failed suicide attempt to the manifestation of her death wish at its end. The machine made of steel, eyes, and arms embodies Sasha’s drive toward unknowable oblivion, toward her escape from a humanity that cannot sustain itself, and this consumptive view of human nature is one Rhys traces throughout her writing in such a way that she criticises the smug metropolitan cruelties of her characters’ persecutors and presents a deeply coherent world view of human vulnerability and radical contingency.

Notes   1. Jean Rhys, Jean Rhys: The Complete Novels (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1985). All subsequent quotes from Rhys’s novels are taken from this volume.   2. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti­-Oedipus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. xvii. Emphasis in the original.  3. Judith M. Halberstam and Ira Livingston (eds), Posthuman Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 9.   4. Delia Caparoso Konzett, Ethnic Modernisms: Anzia Yezierska, Jean Rhys, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Aesthetics of Dislocation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 166.   5. Ibid., 130.   6. Ibid., 127.   7. See Ania Spyra’s reading of Rhys’s Welshness in ‘Language and Belonging in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark’, Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Mary Wilson and Kerry L. Johnson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 67­-86.   8. Mary Lou Emery, ‘The Poetics of Labor in Jean Rhys’s Global Modernism’, Philological Quarterly (90.2­-3), 2011, p. 180.   9. Ibid., 173. Although Rhys is a leading critic of imperialism among her contemporaries, her understanding of slavery and its legacy is both progressive and problematic, as several critics have argued, beginning with Gayatri Spivak’s influential ‘Three Women’s Texts: A Critique of Imperialism’ and followed, most recently, by Shakti Jaising’s identification of the black characters in Wide Sargasso Sea as possessed of ‘circumscribed humanity’(829) in her article, ‘Who is Christophine? The Good Black Servant and the Contradictions of (Racial) Liberalism’, Modern Fiction Studies 56.4: pp. 815­-36. 10. This passage was edited out of the published version of Voyage in the Dark when Rhys’s editor stipulated that she must write a more optimistic ending to the novel than the one she had submitted. I thank the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa for access to this manuscript. 11. Ibid., 190. 12. Mary Lou Emery, ‘Caribbean Modernism: Plantation to Planetary’, Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 56.

­226     Erica L. Johnson 13. Sandra Drake was also one of the first critics to identify Rhys’s troping of Afro­-Caribbean history in her work in ‘All That Foolishness­/That All Foolishness: Race and Caribbean Culture as Thematics of Liberation in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea’, Critica 2.2 (1990), pp. 97­-112. 14. In an insightful reading of the meaning of happiness in Rhys, Paul Ardoin draws on Sara Ahmed’s theorisation of happiness as an equation of social compliance with inner goodness. Ardoin argues that Rhys rejects this formulation and that she rejects happiness in an effort to pursue a potential, if unrealized, freedom from social constraints. ‘The Un­-happy Short Story Cycle: Jean Rhys’s Sleep It Off, Lady’, Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Mary Wilson and Kerry L. Johnson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 233­-48. 15. Anne B. Simpson, Territories of the Psyche: The Fictions of Jean Rhys (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 14. 16. Patricia Moran, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 101. 17. Ibid., p. 100. 18. Laura Frost identifies another site of affective neutrality in Rhys in her analysis of ‘the problem of pleasure’: she argues that Rhys presents ‘anhedonia, an extinction of pleasure entirely’ (164), and observes that Rhys does not ‘perform a simple inversion. That is, [she does] not simply substitute pain for pleasure, but rather alter[s] the value of each’ (Frost 165); I would follow up on this point to say that she nullifies the value of each. See Laura Frost, The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 19. Ibid., 10. 20. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 3­-4. 21. Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), p. xv. 22. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 4. 23. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, Humans, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), p. 38. 24. Rhys’s husband, Jean Lenglet, presents a similarly murderous account of this encounter in Sous le verrous, which Rhys translated into English as Barred. Like Quartet, Barred is a fictionalised version of Rhys’s affair with Ford Madox Ford. Lenglet, writing as Edouard de Nève, describes the couple’s fight thus: ‘I walked up to her with my fists clenched. I had lost every scrap of my self­-control. I hit her as hard as I could. Her face went dead­-white. She leapt at me like a panther and bit me on the chest. I shook her off and hit her again. She fell down. I picked up my hat and coat, opened the door and rushed down the stairs and out into the street like a madman’ (248). De Nève thus preserves both the animal imagery and the possibility that the husband impulsively kills his estranged wife in his expression of her face going ‘dead­-white’. Barred (London: Desmond Harmsworth, 1932). 25. Wolfe, p. xviii. 26. Wolfe, p. 92.

‘Upholstered Ghosts’: Jean Rhys’s Posthuman Imaginary      227 27. In Wolfe, p. 92. 28. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, eds, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 77. 29. Sedgwick and Frank, p. 77. 30. Robert Rowland Smith, Death Drives: Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 4. 31. Ibid., p. 4. 32. Ibid., p. 4. 33. For more on the dynamic of shame in Rhys, see Erica L. Johnson, ‘Haunted: Affective Memory in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight’, Affirmations: Of the Modern 1.2 (2014), pp. 15­-38. 34. Nicole Flynn reads this figure as an automaton in ‘Clockwork Women: Temporality and Form in Jean Rhys’s Interwar Novels’, Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Mary Wilson and Kerry L. Johnson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 41­-66. 35. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 3.

Bibliography

Primary Texts Rhys, Jean (1927), The Left Bank and Other Stories, London: Jonathan Cape. –– [1929] (1997), Quartet, New York and London: Norton. –– [1931] (1997), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, New York and London: Norton. –– [1934] (1982), Voyage in the Dark, New York and London: Norton. –– [1938] (1986), Good Morning, Midnight, New York and London: Norton. –– [1966] (1999), Wide Sargasso Sea, Judith L. Raiskin (ed.), New York and London: Norton. –– [1968] (1991), Tigers are Better Looking, London: Penguin. –– [1976] (1988), Sleep It Off, Lady, London: Penguin. –– (1982), The Letters of Jean Rhys, Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly (eds), New York: Viking Press. –– [1979] (1983), Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company. –– (1987), The Collected Short Stories, New York and London: Norton. –– (1995), Let Them Call It Jazz and Other Stories, London: Penguin, 1995.

Book-Length Studies Carr, Helen [1996] (2012), Jean Rhys, Tavistock: Northcote House, in assoc. with the British Council. This updated version of Carr’s 1996 study draws upon recent feminist and postcolonial theory as well as the growing critical body of work on Rhys, and reads Rhys in both modernist and postmodernist contexts. Davidson, Arnold (1985), Jean Rhys: Life and Literature, New York: Frederick Unger. This early study provides information on Rhys’s life in conjunction with an overview of her major novels and their themes. Dell’Amico, Carol (2005), Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys, New York: Routledge. Dell’Amico establishes a postcolonial continuum in Rhys’s work, concentrating in particular on the ways in which Rhys’s modernist writing evidences the same preoccupations with homelessness, migration and exile characteristic of Wide Sargasso Sea.

Bibliography     229 Emery, Mary Lou (1990), Jean Rhys at ‘World’s End’: Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile, Austin: University of Texas Press. The foundational text in the field of Rhys studies, Emery’s work establishes Rhys as a major figure in the multiple and overlapping contexts of gender, modernism and postcolonialism. Gregg, Veronica Marie (1995), Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole, Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. Gregg’s study focuses on how history itself functions as a site where different narratives intersect: to that end, she examines how Rhys rewrites both West Indian and European histories in her literary explorations of identity as a mix of racial, gendered and colonial narratives. Harrison, Nancy R. (1988), Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Harrison’s study works to establish the conditions of women’s communication through a detailed examination of Rhys’s writing practice, and has a focus on Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea. While the theoretical apparatus seems somewhat outdated, Harrison’s analysis of Wide Sargasso Sea is rich and compelling, as she reads the novel intertextually with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette and Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and his case study of Dora. Howell, Coral Ann (1991), Jean Rhys, New York: St Martin’s Press. This early study examines Rhys as a woman writer, a modernist writer and a colonial writer, and has a focus on the theme of alienation. James, Louis (1978), Jean Rhys, London: Longman. James’s analysis is one of the earliest to examine Rhys as a Caribbean writer. Le Gallez, Paula (1990), The Rhys Woman, New York: St Martin’s Press. Le Gallez challenges the notorious notion of the ‘Rhys woman’, the conviction that all of Rhys’s protagonists are just the same woman at different moments in her life. Instead, through readings of two of the short stories and all five of the novels, Le Gallez argues for the complexity and individuality of Rhys’s characters. Malcolm, Cheryl Alexander and David Malcolm (1996), Jean Rhys: A Study of Her Short Fiction, New York: Twayne Publishers; London: Prentice Hall International. The first full-length treatment of Rhys’s short fiction, this study focuses in particular on the figure of the outsider. The authors also provide a detailed analysis of the technical aspects of Rhys’s short fiction, examining her treatment of narrative voice, plot, action, setting and style. Maslen, Cathleen (2009), Ferocious Things: Jean Rhys and the Politics of Women’s Melancholia, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. This study engages with psychoanalytic, feminist and postcolonial theory, focusing in particular on the theoretical body of work on melancholia. Maslen establishes links between melancholic performance and the degradations of race, class and gender, arguing that the traumatic representations Rhys creates constitute a demand that the reader witness female suffering. Maurel, Sylvie (1998), Jean Rhys, New York: St Martin’s Press. Maurel develops detailed close readings of the novels and a number of the short stories through the frames of feminist and literary theory. She argues that Rhys’s narrative techniques – her resistance to closure, her use of irony and parody, and her revisioning of Jane Eyre – constitute an ethics of subversion. Mellown, Elgin W. (1984), Jean Rhys: A Descriptive and Annotated Bibliography

­230     Bibliography of Works and Criticism, New York: Garland. This early bibliography gives an overview of early critical work on Rhys. Nebeker, Helen [1981] (2009), Jean Rhys: Woman in Passage, Gilbert, AZ: Acacia Publishing. Nebeker explores Rhys’s work in terms of Jungian archetypes, seeing the work as Rhys’s journey into the abyss. The second edition is substantially the same as the first, and Nebeker does not take recent critical work on Rhys into account in this new edition. O’Connor, Teresa F. (1986), Jean Rhys: The West Indian Novels, New York: New York University Press. O’Connor’s important study is one of the first to establish the relevance of place in Rhys’s work. The study draws upon unpublished manuscripts and biographical sources in order to identify the cultural, historical and familial influences at work in Rhys’s writing. O’Connor is also one of the first critics to establish the importance of the unpublished Black Exercise Book. Savory, Elaine (2009), The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This useful overview is divided into life, contexts, published work and critical reception. Savory shows how different critical approaches generate radically divergent readings of Rhys’s work. She also maps Rhys’s use of the actual geographies of Paris, London and the Caribbean to establish the importance of metropolitan and colonial sites in Rhys’s work. –– (1998), Jean Rhys, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This important study argues that a Caribbean-centred approach is crucial in reading Rhys: to that end, Savory teases out the ways in which Rhys’s Caribbean identity translates into textuality. Savory also argues for the importance of reading Rhys in terms of poetic and dramatic genres: she notes that Rhys’s work is ‘connected by a series of images and technical devices which function as sustained codes, as is common in the work of major poets’; similarly, she connects Rhys’s writing, particularly autobiographical writing, to Rhys’s lifelong love of the theatre, arguing that ‘writing became a substitute milieu for the stage’. Simpson, Anne B. (2005), Territories of the Psyche: The Fiction of Jean Rhys, New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Simpson develops a sensitive and insightful reading of Rhys’s novels through the lens of object relations psychoanalytic theory. Staley, Thomas (1979), Jean Rhys: A Critical Study, Austin: University of Texas Press. Staley’s is one of the first serious studies of Rhys’s work, and is still useful for its analysis of Rhys’s relationship with Ford, the development of her early career and her distinction from other modernist women writers. Thomas, Sue (1999), The Worlding of Jean Rhys, Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press. Thomas’s meticulously researched work impressively documents the historical and cultural contexts of Rhys’s writing. Wolfe, Peter (1980), Jean Rhys, Boston, MA: Twayne. Another early study that argues for the stylistic and formal control of Rhys’s writing.

Essay Collections/Special Issues Frickey, Pierette (ed.) (1990), Critical Perspectives on Jean Rhys, Washington, DC: Three Continents Press. Contributors include both critics and creative

Bibliography     231 writers, and the collection includes a short autobiographical sketch by Rhys herself as well as an interview with Mary Cantwell. Also of note is Jan van Houts, ‘The Hole in the Curtain’, a companion piece to Rhys’s short story ‘What’s Up in the Attic’. In addition to these, the collection includes essays by Martien Kappers-den Hollander; V. S. Naipaul; Elaine Campbell; Lucy Wilson; Todd Bender; Colette Lindroth; A. C. Morrell; Elgin Mellown; Louis James; Thomas Staley; Helen E. Nebeker; Veronica Gregg; Anthony Luengo; Michael Thorpe; John Hearne; Kenneth Ramchand and John Updike. Journal of Caribbean Literature, 3.3 (Summer 2003). Special Jean Rhys Issue. Edited by Mary Lou Emery, the issue includes contributions from Maurice A. Lee, Joseph Clarke, Elaine Savory, Jordan Stouck, Erica L. Johnson, Kerry Johnson, Delia Konzett, Sue Thomas, Genevieve Abravanel, John Gruesser, Sharon Wilson, Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Carine Mardorossian, Kathleen Renk and Caribbean poets and novelists Wilson Harris, Michelle Cliff, Paula Morgan, Lorna Goodson, Louis James, Olive Senior and Gyllian Phillips. The Jean Rhys Review. This journal, dedicated entirely to Rhys, published international scholarship on her work from 1986 to 1999. The Review of Contemporary Literature, 5.2 (Summer 1985). Special Jean Rhys Issue. Includes articles by Mary Lou Emery, Keith Abbot, Gertrude Berger, Wilson Harris and Colette Lindroth, Wilson, Mary and Kerry L. Johnson (eds) (2013), Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives, Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Contributors include Andrea Zemgulys, Nicole Flynn, Ania Spyra, Steve Pinkerton, Jess Issacharoff, Regina Martin, Melanie Otto, David Armstrong, Jennifer Mitchell, Andrew Kalaidijan and Paul Ardoin. Women: A Cultural Review. 23.4 (2012). Special Jean Rhys Issue, ed. Jeanette Baxter, Anna Snaith and Tory Young. Essays by Mary Lou Emery, Maroula Joannou, Terri Mullholland, Victoria Walker and Andrew Thacker. Diana Athill provides an account of her experiences of editing Rhys.

Biographical Studies Angier, Carole (1990), Jean Rhys: Life and Work, London: Andre Deutsch. Angier’s is the standard biography, exhaustively researched and convincing in her interpretations. Bowen, Stella (1984), Drawn from Life, London: Virago. A version of the Rhys−Ford−Bowen ménage-à-trois by one of the participants. Gilson, Annette (2004), ‘Internalizing Mastery: Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, and the Fiction of Autobiography’, Modern Fiction Studies, 50.3: 632–56. Johnson, Erica L. (2006), ‘Auto-Ghostwriting Jean Rhys’s Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography’, Biography, 29.4: 563–83. A study of Rhys’s posthumous autobiography which analyses in particular the contexts of its production and the role played by David Plante, hired to assist Rhys. Lykiard, Alexis, (2000), Jean Rhys Revisited, Exeter: Stride Publications. Especially interesting for his discussions of Rhys’s reading and their shared interest in ghost stories. –– (2006), Jean Rhys Afterwords, New York: Shoestring Press. A meditation on creative writing and how the author’s relationship with Rhys continues

­232     Bibliography to influence his approach to his own work. Contains a number of previously unpublished photographs. Moran, Patricia (2010), ‘Aesthetics of Being: The Unfinished Memoirs of Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys’, Mamsie: Studies in the Maternal 1 and 2. Special Issue on M(O)ther Trouble. www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk Moran reads Rhys’s autobiographical writings and posthumous memoir through the lens of relational psychoanalysis to demonstrate how Rhys’s aesthetic corresponds to Christopher Bollas’s theorisation of a ‘negative maternal aesthetic’. Pizzichini, Lilian (2009), The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys, New York: W. W. Norton. While Pizzichini’s biography does not supersede Angier’s, a number of reviewers praised it for its psychological acuity. Plante, David (1983), Difficult Women: A Memoir of Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, and Germaine Greer, Worthing: Littlehampton Book Services Ltd. An ungenerous and self-serving account of the author’s work with Rhys on her unfinished autobiography.

Comparative Studies Emery, Mary Lou (2007), Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fest, Kerstin (2009), And All Women Mere Players? Performance and Identity in Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys, and Radclyffe Hall, Vienna: Braumüller. Frost, Laura (2013), The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and its Discontents, New York: Columbia University Press. Gardiner, Judith Kegan (1989), ‘The Exhilaration of Exile: Rhys, Stead, and Lessing’, in Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram (eds), Women’s Writing in Exile, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 133–50. –– (1989), Rhys, Stead, Lessing and the Politics of Empathy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gardiner’s often-overlooked and underappreciated study of empathy in Rhys’s short fiction and Wide Sargasso Sea anticipates the emergence of affect theory; Gardiner argues that Rhys uses ‘empathic attunement’ to break down the barriers of inclusion and exclusion that structure the societies she depicts, a narrative strategy Gardiner reads as political. GoGwilt, Christopher (2011), The Passage of Literature: Genealogies of Modernism in Conrad, Rhys and Pramoedya, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hite, Molly (1989), The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Horner, Avril and Sue Zlosnik (1990), Landscapes of Desire: Metaphor in Modern Women’s Fiction, New York: Prentice-Hall. Ingman, Heather (1998), Women’s Fiction Between the Wars: Mothers, Daughters, and Writing, New York: St Martin’s Press. Reads the fiction written by women in Britain between the two world wars intertextually with contemporaneous psychoanalytic theories about mothers and child development. Johnson, Erica L. (2003), Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of Location in Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell’Oro, Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Bibliography     233 Karl, Alissa G. (2009), Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein, and Nella Larsen, New York: Routledge. Kloepfer, Deborah Kelly (1989), The Unspeakable Mother: Forbidden Discourse in Jean Rhys and H.D., Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Konzett, Delia Caparoso (2002), Ethnic Modernisms: Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Dislocation, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Linett, Maren Tova (2007), Modernism, Women, and Jewishness, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reads Rhys with Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Djuna Barnes and Dorothy Richardson. Mardorossian, Carine M. (2005), Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism, Charlottesville, VA and London: University of Virginia Press. Mickalites, Carey James (2007), Modernism and Market Fantasy: British Fictions of Capital, 1910–1939, Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Reads Rhys’s relationship to the modernist market in tandem with analyses of fellow modernists Ford, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf and Wyndham Lewis. Moran, Patricia (2007), Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma, Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Parsons, Deborah L. (2000), Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Raiskin, Judith L. (1996), Snow on the Cane Fields: Women’s Writing and Creole Subjectivity, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Rosenberg, Leah (2004), ‘Caribbean Models for Modernism in the Work of Claude McKay and Jean Rhys’, Modernism/modernity, 11.2: 219–38. Sage, Lorna (1992), Women in the House of Fiction: Post-War Women Novelists, Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sage discusses Rhys (47–54) as an example of the ‘displaced person’: ‘Jean Rhys is the post-war writer as ghost [. . .] She became in the last two decades of her life [. . .] a voice from the other side – not only from the past, but from all sorts of other sides’ (47). Snaith, Anna (2014), Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890–1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Analyses Rhys’s relationship to London alongside other colonial women writers such as Olive Schreiner, Katherine Mansfield, Una Marson and Christina Stead. Taylor-Batty, Juliette (2013), Multilingualism in Modernist Fiction, Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Argues that multilingualism is a fundamental aspect of modernist writing, and has a focus on D. H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Rhys. Looks at Rhys’s complex relationship to both French and English; her work as a translator; and her Paris fiction, particularly The Left Bank and Good Morning, Midnight. Thacker, Andrew (2003), Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Walia, Rajni (2001), Women and Self: Fictions of Jean Rhys, Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner, New Delhi: Book Plus. Wilson, Lucy (2008), In Due Season: Essays on Novels of Development by Caribbean Women Writers, New York: University Press of America.

­234     Bibliography Essays, Chapters, Entries Abel, Elizabeth (1979), ‘Women and Schizophrenia: The Fiction of Jean Rhys’, Contemporary Literature, 20: 155–77. Alvarez, A. (1974), ‘The Best Living English Novelist’, The New York Times Book Review, 18 June, p. 353. Bowlby, Rachel (1992), ‘The Impasse: Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight’, in Rachel Bowlby, Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 34–58. Brathwaite, Kamau (1995), ‘A Post-Cautionary Tale of the Helen of Our Wars’, Wasafiri, 11.22: 69–78. Brathwaite’s assessment of a long-running debate between Peter Hulme and himself about Rhys’s status as a Caribbean writer. Britzolakis, Christina (2007), ‘“This Way to the Exhibition . . .”: Genealogies of Urban Spectacle in Jean Rhys’s Fiction’, Textual Practice, 21.3: 457–82. Brown, Nancy Hemond (1985), ‘Jean Rhys and Voyage in the Dark’, London Magazine, 25.1–2: 40–59. Byrne, Jack (1985), ‘Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight: The Boulevard of Broken Dreams’, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 5.2: 151–9. Camarasana, Linda (2009), ‘Exhibitions and Repetitions: Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight and the World of Paris, 1937’, in Robin Hackett, Freda S. Hauser and Gay Wachman (eds), At Home and Abroad in the Empire: British Women Write the 1930s, Newark: University of Delaware Press, pp. 51–70. Campbell, Elaine (1979), ‘Jean Rhys, Alec Waugh and the Imperial Road’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 14: 58–63. –– (1980), ‘Apropos of Jean Rhys’, Kunapipi 2: 152–57. –– (1982), ‘Reflections of Obeah in Jean Rhys’s Fiction’, Kunapipi, 4.2: 42–50. Carr, Helen (2003a), ‘“Intemperate and Unchaste’: Jean Rhys and Caribbean Creole Identity’, Women: A Cultural Review, 14.1: 38–60. –– (2003b), ‘Jean Rhys: West Indian Intellectual’, in Bill Schwarz (ed.), West Indian Intellectuals in Britain, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 93–113. Castro, Joy (2000), ‘Jean Rhys’, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 20.2: 8–45. Czarnecki, Kristin (2005), ‘“Altered and Cut to an Echo”: Marriage and Modernism in Jean Rhys’s After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie’, CEA Critic, 67.2: 29–42. –– (2008), ‘Jean Rhys’s Postmodern Narrative Authority: Selina’s Patois in “Let Them Call It Jazz”’, College Literature, 35.2: 20–37. –– (2009), ‘Kristevan Depression in Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight’, Journal of Modern Literature, 32.3: 63–82. Davis, Cynthia (2005), ‘Jamette Carnival and Afro-Caribbean Influences on the Work of Jean Rhys’, Anthurium, 3.2: 22 paragraphs. Web. D’Costa, Jean (1986), ‘Jean Rhys’, in Daryl Cumber Dance (ed.), Fifty Caribbean Writers, Westport: Greenwood Press, pp. 390–404. Drake, Sandra (1990), ‘All That Foolishness/That All Foolishness: Race and Caribbean Culture as Thematics of Liberation in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea’, Critica, 2.2: 97–112. Erwin, Lee (1989), ‘“Like in a Looking Glass”: History and Narration in Wide Sargasso Sea’, Novel, 22.2: 143–58. Flora, Luisa Maria Rodriguez (1990), ‘“Drunk and Disorderly”: Jean Rhys ou

Bibliography     235 a recusa de uma escrita bem comportada’, RUNA (Revista Portuguesa de Etudos Germanisticos), 13/14: 393–403. –– (1996), ‘Jean Rhys: Composition in Shadows and Surfaces’, in Patrick J. Quinn (ed.), Recharting the Thirties, Cranbury, NJ, London and Ontario: Associated University Presses, pp. 265–78. Gardiner, Judith Kegan (1982–3), ‘Good Morning, Midnight; Good Night, Modernism’, Boundary 2.11: 1–2, 233–51. An early and still useful analysis of Rhys’s relationship to canonical modernists such as Woolf and Joyce. Especially interesting is Gardiner’s reading of Good Morning, Midnight as a revision of Molly Bloom’s concluding monologue in Ulysses. Gildersleeve, Jessica (2010), ‘Muddy Death: Fate, Femininity and Mourning in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight’, in Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo and Gina Wisker (eds), Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women’s Writing, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 227–44. Harris, Wilson (1980), ‘Carnival of the Psyche: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea’, Kunapipi, 2.2: 142–50. Heller, Tamar (2013), ‘Affliction in Jean Rhys and Simone Weil’, in Erica L. Johnson and Patricia Moran (eds), The Female Face of Shame, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 166–76. A comparative reading that argues for the hope that can be generated by identification with the afflicted and abject. Humm, Maggie (1994), ‘Jean Rhys: Race, Gender and History’, in Gina Wisker, ed., It’s My Party: Reading Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing, London and Boulder, CO: Pluto Press, pp. 44–79. Jaising, Shakti (2010),‘Who is Christophine? The Good Black Servant and the Contradictions of (Racial) Liberalism’, Modern Fiction Studies, 56.4: 815–36. Johnson, Erica L. (2014), ‘Haunted: Affective Memory in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight’, Affirmations: Of the Modern (Special issue on Modernism, Intimacy, and Emotion), 2.1: 15–38. Kalliney, Peter (2013), ‘Jean Rhys: Left Bank Modernist as Postcolonial Intellectual’, in Mark Wollaeger (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 413–32. Lee, Thomas (1991), ‘Patterns of the Zombie in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea’, World Literature Written in English, 31.1: 34–42. Leigh, Nancy J. (1985), ‘Mirror, Mirror: The Development of Female Identity in Jean Rhys’s Fiction’, World Literature Written in English, 25.2: 270–85. Linett, Maren Tova (2005), ‘“New Words, New Everything”: Fragmentation and Trauma in Jean Rhys’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 51.4: 437–66. Lonsdale, Thorunn (2001), ‘Literary Foremother: Jean Rhys’s “Sleep It Off Lady” and Two Jamaican Poems’, in Jacqueline Bardolph (ed.), Telling Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction in English, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 145–54. Look Lai, Wally (1968), ‘The Road to Thornfield Hall’, New World Quarterly, 4: 17–27. Madox Ford, Ford (1927), ‘Preface’ to Jean Rhys, The Left Bank and Other Stories, New York and London: Harper and Brothers, pp. 7−27. Mezei, Kathy (1987), ‘“And It Kept Its Secret”: Narration, Memory, and Madness in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Literature, 28: 195–209. Morrison, Derrilyn E. (2004), ‘Reading the Zombi in Jean Rhys’s Wide

­236     Bibliography Sargasso Sea’, MaComère: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, 6: 63–9. Muneuchi, Ayako (2006), ‘The Hotel in Fiction: The Woman in Public in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight’, Studies in English Literature, 47: 127–42. Murdoch, H. Adlai (2003), ‘Rhys’s Pieces: Unhomeliness as Arbiter of Caribbean Colonization’, Callaloo: A Journal of African-American and African Arts and Letters, 26.1: 252–72. Nardin, Jane (2006), ‘“As Soon As I Sober Up I Start Again”: Alcohol and the Will in Jean Rhys’s Pre-War Novels’, Papers on Language and Literature, 42.1: 46–72. Nunez-Harrell, Elizabeth (1985), ‘Paradoxes of Belonging: The White West Indian Woman in Fiction’, Modern Fiction Studies, 31.2: 281–93. Port, Cynthia (2001), ‘“Money, for the Night is Coming”: Jean Rhys and Gendered Economies of Ageing’, Women: A Cultural Review, 12.2: 204–17. Porter, Dennis (1976), ‘Of Heroes and Victims: Jean Rhys and Jane Eyre’, Massachusetts Review, 17: 540–52. Ramchand, Kenneth (2004), The West Indian Novel and its Background, Kingston, Jamaica and Miami, FL: Ian Randle Publishers. Roe, Sue (1987), ‘“The Shadow of Light”: The Symbolic Underworld of Jean Rhys’, in Sue Roe (ed.), Women Reading Women Writers, Brighton: Harvester, pp. 229–64. Russell, Keith A., II (2007), ‘“Now Every Word She Said Was Echoed, Echoed Loudly In My Head”: Christophine’s Language and Refractive Space in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea’, Journal of Narrative Theory, 37.1: 87–103. Savory, Elaine (1999), ‘“Another Poor Devil of a Human Being . . .”: Jean Rhys and the Novel as Obeah’, in Margarite Fernandez Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Genbert (eds), Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santeria, Obeah, and the Caribbean, New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, pp. 216–30. Scharfman, Ronnie (1981), ‘Mirroring and Mothering in Simone SchwarzBart’s Pluie et Vent sur Telumée Miracle and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea’, Yale French Studies, 62: 88–106. Scott, Bonnie Kime (1990), Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Reprints the original ending of Voyage in the Dark. Seshagiri, Urmila (2006), ‘Modernist Ashes, Postcolonial Phoenix: Jean Rhys and the Evolution of the English Novel in the Twentieth Century’, Modernism/ modernity, 13.3: 487–505. Smilowitz, Erika (1986), ‘Childlike Women and Paternal Men: Colonialism in Jean Rhys’s Fiction’, Ariel, 17.4: 93–103. Smith, Robert McClure (1996), ‘“I Don’t Dream About It Anymore”: The Textual Unconscious of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea’, The Journal of Narrative Technique, 26.2: 113–36. Snaith, Anna (2005), ‘“A Savage from the Cannibal Islands”: Jean Rhys and London’, in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds), Geographies of Modernism, Oxford and New York: Routledge, pp. 76−85. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1985), ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, Critical Inquiry, 12.1: 235–61. A seminal essay that reads Wide Sargasso Sea as postcolonial critique.

Bibliography     237 Streip, Katharine (1994), ‘“Just a Cerebrale’: Jean Rhys, Women’s Humour, and Ressentiment’, Representations, 45: 117–44. Thorpe, Michael (1977), ‘The Other Side: Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre’, Ariel, 8: 99–110. Tiffin, Helen (1978), ‘Mirror and Mask: Colonial Motifs in the Novels of Jean Rhys’, World Literature Written in English, 17:1: 328–41. Wilson, Lucy (1990), ‘European or Caribbean: Jean Rhys and the Language of Exile’, in David Bevan (ed.), Literature and Exile, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 77–89. –– (1986), ‘“Women Must Have Spunks”: Jean Rhys’s West Indian Outcasts’, Modern Fiction Studies, 32.3: 439–48. Zeikowitz, Richard E. (2005), ‘Writing a Feminine Paris in Jean Rhys’s Quartet’, Journal of Modern Literature, 28.2: 1–17. Zimring, Rishona (2000), ‘The Make-Up of Jean Rhys’s Fiction’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 33.2: 212–34.

Index

Index

Reference to notes is indicated by n. Fictional characters are filed by their first names and in inverted commas. A rebours (Huysmans), 32 abandonment, 181–2 abortion, 32, 149, 217 Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner), 71 Adam, H. Pearl, 27 aesthetics, 11, 42 affect theory, 3, 4, 8, 13, 14, 184–5, 187, 221 Afro-Caribbeans, 11, 72, 73, 75, 164–5, 173–4 After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, 13, 189n22, 211–13 and ghosts, 218–20, 222–4 and nature, 92, 94–5, 96–7, 98–9, 100–1, 102 and rage, 196–202 and shame, 191, 193, 195–6 ‘Again the Antilles’, 62, 68 Ahmed, Sara, 185 ajoupa, 68–9, 70 alcohol, 34, 35–6, 61 All That Jazz (Larkin), 44 Allfrey, Phyllis Shand, 90 Amis, Kingsley, 43, 44 André Deutsch, 76 anger, 194–5, 205; see also rage Angier, Carole, 2, 93, 132, 138 animals, 14, 101–3, 209, 211, 215, 216–18, 219 ‘Anna Morgan’ (Voyage in the Dark), 13, 22, 62, 149 and creoleness, 150–6, 157–8 and decadence, 28, 29, 30, 33 and disorientation, 180 and enclosure, 30–1

and ghostliness, 7, 8 and nature, 99–100, 101 and race, 34, 35 ‘Annette’ (Wide Sargasso Sea), 67–8, 131 anti-modernism, 43–4 Antigua, 89–90 ‘Antoinette Cosway’ (Wide Sargasso Sea), 13, 65–6, 76 and creoleness, 159–64 and disorientation, 180–1 and dress, 124, 127–8, 129–30, 132–3, 135–8, 138–40, 141–2, 143 and flowers, 94, 95–6, 98 and ghostliness, 7, 8 and nature, 113, 115–18 and trees, 100, 101 and the veranda, 68, 69–70 and voice, 174, 176–7, 178, 179 see also ‘Bertha Mason’ architecture, 12, 63–5; see also verandas Ardoin, Paul, 9 art, 71–2 artifice, 48–9 Athill, Diana, 125 authorship, 107 automatons, 181, 192, 193, 224 Baker, Ida, 23, 24 Bancroft, Alison, 136 Barnes, Djuna, 6 battlements, 77 Beardsley, Aubrey, 28, 29

Index     239 Bechet, Sidney, 71 Bennett, Arnold, 33–4 Berlant, Lauren, 185 ‘Bertha Mason’ (Jane Eyre), 7, 140, 141 and creoleness, 159, 162–4 and voice, 173, 174 Bhabha, Homi, 136, 152, 161, 162, 163–4, 172 biblical references, 114, 115, 117 birds, 103 ‘Bites of the Apple’ (Mansfield), 23 Black Jacobins, The (James), 71 black power, 70–1, 72, 73 body, the, 123, 127 botanical gardens, 89, 90–1, 94, 105n17, 105n21 Bowden, George, 21, 23, 24 Braithwaite, Edward, 147 Brazil, 64 Britain see Great Britain British Empire, 6, 12, 21, 126 Brontë, Charlotte, 70, 75; see also Jane Eyre Brophy, Brigid, 40, 41, 42, 54–6 Brown, Nancy Hemond, 148 Butler, Judith, 5, 119 butterflies, 201–2 Cantwell, Mary, 190, 205 capitalism, 172, 182, 183, 185 Caribbean, the, 2, 4, 5, 28, 63, 125 and carnival, 154 and colonialism, 147, 151–2 and dress, 13 and landscape, 12 and natives, 155–7, 158 and nature, 111–12, 113–15, 116, 118 and race, 165 and verandas, 64 see also Dominica; Haiti; Jamaica; Martinique ‘Carl Redman’ (Voyage in the Dark), 30, 33, 35 carnival, 154, 211 Carpentier, Alejo, 71 Carr, Helen, 28, 126 Casey, Edward S., 180 Cavallaro, Dani, 131 Cereus Blooms at Night (Mootoo), 115, 116 Chrisman, Laura, 187 Christophe, Henri, 71, 73, 75–6

‘Christophine’ (Wide Sargasso Sea), 116, 117, 174–6 and dress, 127–8, 129, 130, 131 Cinderella, 138 cities, 86, 92, 109 Clark, Timothy, 88–9 class, 43, 85, 127 Cliff, Michelle, 5 cold, 185–7 colonialism, 1, 4, 12, 59 and Creoles, 146–8, 152 and nature, 89, 94, 113, 114 see also postcolonialism Condé, Maryse, 114 Conrad, Joseph, 6, 30, 184 consumer culture, 42, 48–9, 50–1 cosmetics, 127 Creoles, 4, 13, 64, 68–70, 77, 117 and definition, 146–8, 150, 151 and displacement, 152–5, 156, 157–8, 159–61, 163–5 and gender, 161–2 Cronon, William, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113 cyborgs, 224 Czarnecki, Kristin, 8 ‘d’Adhemar’ (Voyage in the Dark), 29–30 ‘Dance, The’ (Larkin), 45–6 Davies, Carole Boyce, 150 ‘Day They Burned the Books, The’, 91 death, 217, 218–22 decadence, 23–4, 28–30, 31–2, 36 defending scripts, 194 Deloughrey, Elizabeth, 87 depression, 8, 27, 193, 195 depth psychology, 41 Derrida, Jacques, 140, 218, 219–20 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 73 disorientation, 13, 178–81, 184, 185 dolls, 14, 182, 209 Dominica, 2, 4, 21, 30, 60 and history, 155–6, 157, 158 and nature, 86, 89, 93, 99–100 Drayton, Richard, 89 dreaming, 60, 61, 62, 77, 99–100, 124, 132–3 dress, 12–13, 50, 59, 123–4, 126 and eroticism, 132–3, 134–5, 136–7 and identity, 141–3 and the past, 137–9, 140 and protection, 192, 194 and race, 127–32, 133–4

­240     Index ecocriticism, 4, 14, 87–8, 108–9, 110, 112, 119 economics, 160 ‘Edward Rochester’ (Wide Sargasso Sea), 68, 69–70, 75 and colonialism, 161, 174, 175 ‘Edward Rochester’ (cont.) and creoleness, 162–3, 164 and dress, 140, 141 and nature, 100, 101, 113, 117 and voice, 177, 178, 179 Edward VII, King, 33 Edwards, Jay, 63, 64, 69 Eliot, T. S., 6, 28, 44, 45, 46, 184 Emancipation, 67, 70, 115, 131, 160 Emery, Mary Lou, 2, 3, 11–12, 125, 149, 210–11 and race, 155–6, 158, 163, 164 empathy, 9, 206n5 Emperor of Haiti (Hughes), 71 England, 4, 21, 30–1, 62, 126–7, 215 and nature, 92–3 and postwar, 40–1, 42, 47, 49 Entwhistle, Joanne, 127 environment, the, 86–9, 103, 108–10, 111, 113–14; see also nature ethnic modernism, 210 Europe, 13, 63–4, 93 exploitation, 12 Fanon, Frantz, 89 fascism, 62, 89 fashion, 12–13 Faulkner, William, 6, 71 Federal Theatre Project, 72, 73 female intimacy, 55, 56 Fenichel, Otto, 192 flowers, 12, 30, 93–8 Ford, Ford Madox, 4, 6, 7, 27, 34, 49, 226n24 Forster, E. M., 6 Foucault, Michel, 12, 107–8, 112 fragrance, 139–40 France, 4, 129 Freud, Sigmund, 9–10, 88, 107, 222 ‘From a French Prison’, 102 Frost, Laura, 9 Garden of Eden, 90, 93, 95, 98, 113, 115, 117 gardens, 12, 30, 67, 87, 89–90; see also flowers Gardiner, Judith Kegan, 9, 29

gender, 1, 85, 87, 88, 127; see also women ghosts, 2, 4, 5, 6–8, 209, 215, 218–20, 222–4 Gideon, Melville, 33 Gilroy, Paul, 162, 163 glacis, 63, 65–6, 67–8, 70, 71, 73, 75, 77 Glissant, Edouard, 111, 211 Good Morning, Midnight, 1, 8, 47 and artifice, 48–9 and decadence, 29 and disorientation, 181 and dreaming, 77 and dress, 131, 138, 139 and human condition, 212 and nature, 92, 97, 100 and posthumanism, 224–5 and shame, 9, 13, 190, 191, 202–4, 205 and the veranda, 61, 62–3 and voice, 176 ‘Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose’, 90 Goodson, Lorna, 5 Great Britain, 13, 41; see also British Empire; England Gregg, Veronica Marie, 2, 91, 129 and Creoles, 160, 161, 162, 163, 173–4 Grindea, Miron, 23 hair, 132 Haiti, 12, 60 and Revolution, 70–3, 75–6 Halberstam, Judith, 210, 213, 214 Hall, Stuart, 151, 156–7, 165 hammocks, 60, 62 Handley, George B., 87 Hanna, Mary, 148 Haraway, Dorothy, 108, 110, 111, 216 Harris, Wilson, 86–7, 88, 125 haunting, 4, 8 Hawthorne, Evelyn, 150, 154 Hayles, N. Katherine, 214 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 30, 184 ‘Heat’, 91 Heidegger, Martin, 88–9 Heller, Tamar, 9, 204 Hill, Edwin, 159–60 Hite, Molly, 96, 173 Hollander, Anne, 141, 142 Holloway Prison, 50

Index     241 ‘Horsfield’ (After Leaving Mr Mackenzie), 98–9, 189n22, 195, 199, 200–1 hostility, 51–3 Hughes, Langston, 71 Hulme, Peter, 151 human condition, 14, 110–11, 112–13, 118, 119, 209, 212–13 Hurston, Zora Neale, 71 ‘I Spy a Stranger’, 95 ‘I Used to Live Here Once’, 7 identity, 62, 89, 127 and dress, 140, 141–2 and scripts, 194 ‘Illusion’, 123 immigration, 41, 125 ‘Imperial Road, The’, 88, 91 imperialism, 59, 174–5, 183, 185 In Transit (Brophy), 42 India, 64–5 indifference, 220–1, 222 inner monologue, 41 ‘Insect World, The’, 98, 102 Jamaica, 4, 69, 125 James, C. L. R., 71 Jane Eyre (Brontë), 13, 65, 68, 70, 75, 115 and creoleness, 159, 164 and dress, 140, 141, 143 and postcolonialism, 171 and Rhys, 125 and voice, 173 jazz, 11, 40, 41, 42, 43–6, 47, 50–1, 54 ‘Jean Rhys’ (Walcott), 5, 59 Joannou, Maroula, 3, 12 ‘Joe Adler’ (Voyage in the Dark), 30, 33 Johnson, Erica L., 14, 31 Joyce, James, 6, 10 ‘Julia Martin’ (After Leaving Mr Mackenzie), 13 and ghostliness, 7, 218–20, 221, 222–4 and posthumanism, 211–13 and rage, 196–202 and shame, 192–3, 194, 195–6 Kalaidjian, Andrew, 9 Kaufman, Gershen, 191, 193, 194 Kavan, Anna, 10 Kettner’s restaurant, 33 Khanna, Ranjana, 5 ‘Kikimora’, 91, 102

Kincaid, Jamaica, 89–90, 94 King of a Rainy Country, The (Brophy), 42, 54–6 Kingdom of the World, The (Carpentier), 71, 76 Kirkaldy, Peggy, 6 Konzett, Delia, 210, 211 Koppen, R. S., 129, 138 ‘La Grosse Fifi’, 102 Lamming, George, 125 landscape-function, 108, 112–13, 114, 116, 118, 119 Langtry, Lillie, 33 Larkin, Philip, 40, 41, 42, 43–6, 51, 56 Larsen, Nella, 6 ‘Laurie’ (Voyage in the Dark), 29–30, 33 Lawrence, Jacob, 71–2 Left Bank and Other Stories, The, 47–8, 49, 123, 142 ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’, 11, 40, 41, 50–1 Lewis, Helen Block, 192, 195 Lewis, Michael, 191, 194 Leys, Ruth, 185 Linett, Maren, 133 ‘Little Episode, A’ (Mansfield), 21, 23, 24–7, 36 Livingston, Ira, 210, 213, 214 London, 2, 42, 47, 49–54 ‘Lullaby for Jean Rhys’ (Goodson), 5 Lykiard, Alexis, 7 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 71, 72, 73, 75–6 machines, 209, 211, 215, 224, 225 McKay, Claude, 6 mannequins, 14, 182–3, 211 Mannoni, Octave, 89 Mansfield, Katherine, 6, 11, 21, 22, 23–7, 34, 36 Mardorossian, Carine, 3, 12, 177–8 Maroons, 69 marriage laws, 69–70 Marshall, Paule, 114 Martinique, 128, 129, 135–6 Marx, Karl, 107 ‘Marya Zelli’ (Quartet), 182, 183, 212, 215–16 and animals, 216–17 and the cold, 186 and ghostliness, 7 Massumi, Brian, 184–5

­242     Index ‘Meditation on Red’ (Senior), 5 memory, 22, 28 Middle Passage, 12, 59 migration, 126–7, 128 militarisation, 67, 68, 70 mind, the, 1, 10 mirrors, 2, 14, 136 Mitchell, Jennifer, 9 mixed cultures, 61, 63, 65 ‘Mixing Cocktails’, 60–1, 62–3, 77, 91, 94, 118–19 modernism, 3–4, 6, 11–12, 171–2, 210 and music, 34, 40, 41, 42 see also anti-modernism moon, the, 61, 69 Mootoo, Shani, 115, 116 moral panic, 28, 36 Moran, Patricia, 13–14, 133, 181, 213 Morton, Timothy, 88, 108–9, 110, 111 mother–daughter relationship, 8, 191, 198 Mourant, Chris, 23 Mrs Dalloway (Woolf), 184 multilingualism, 77 Murdoch, H. Adlai, 3, 13 Murry, John Middleton, 23 music, 11, 30, 32–4, 40–6, 55–6 and Haiti, 71 and Rhys, 46–7, 49–54 Nabokov, Vladimir, 10 Naipaul, V. S., 125 Nana (Zola), 31, 32, 35 Nash, Paul, 7 nationalism, 62 nature, 85–93, 110, 111, 119 and the Caribbean, 113–15, 116, 117–18 see also flowers; gardens; trees New Zealand, 21, 24 non-human entities, 110–11, 209, 211, 213 O’Connor, Teresa, 2 Oliver, Kelly, 5 opium, 24, 30, 34–5 ‘Outside the Machine’, 95, 98 outsiders, 4, 30, 61 paranoid reading, 9 Paravisini-Gebert, Lisa, 98 Paris, 2, 47–8, 49 Parry, Benita, 174, 175 past, the, 21–3, 27–8, 36

Phillips, Caryl, 117 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde), 11, 21–3, 26, 30, 31, 32, 34–5 ‘Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers’, 62, 64, 91 plantations, 12, 35, 59, 60–1, 211 and architecture, 63, 65 and the environment, 113 and race, 151 plants, 94, 113 postcolonialism, 2–6, 12–13, 125, 171, 172–3, 174 posthumanism, 4, 14, 209–12, 213–15, 217–19, 224–5 private acoustic space, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 51 property rights, 70 prosthetics, 212, 218, 223, 224–5 prostitution, 28, 29 Proust, Marcel, 10 psychoanalysis, 5, 8, 9–10 Quartet, 13, 92, 97–8, 103, 212 and animals, 216–18 and the cold, 186 and Englishness, 215–16 and women, 182 race, 1, 12, 13, 85, 104n2, 116, 210–11 and disorientation, 178, 181 and dress, 127–32, 133–4 and hierarchy, 151 and music, 33–4, 41 and stereotype, 68 see also Creoles rage, 13–14, 193, 194, 195, 196–202, 203, 204, 205 ragtime, 28, 30, 32–4 Raiskin, Judith, 89, 164–5 Ramchand, Kenneth, 70 rats, 102, 106n40 realism, 43 ‘Reasons for Attendance’ (Larkin), 45, 46 religion, 85 reparative reading, 9 Rhys, Jean, 21, 124–5, 127, 146, 148–9 and abuse, 90–1 and dress, 123–4, 126, 142–3 and family, 66–7, 94 and Haiti, 72, 76 and literary criticism, 2–3, 5, 8–9 and modernism, 171–2 and music, 33, 40–3, 46–7, 49–54

Index     243 and Paris, 47–8 and psychoanalysis, 9–10 and race, 164–5 and rediscovery, 6–7 and Wilde, 28–9 and writing, 1, 3, 27 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 153 rock-’n’-roll, 43 Rodriguez, Ileana, 87 Romanticism, 114 roses, 93, 94–5, 97, 106n33 rum, 35 Rushdie, Salman, 171 sadness, 194–5 Said, Edward, 157, 172 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 89 ‘Sasha Jansen’ (Good Morning, Midnight), 13, 29 and abandonment, 181–2 and dress, 131, 138 and ghostliness, 7, 8 and posthumanism, 224–5 and shame, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 202–4 and voice, 176 Savory, Elaine, 2, 3, 4–5, 12, 126, 159 schizophrenia, 8, 191 Schwartz-Bart, Simone, 114 Scott, Evelyn, 22, 72 sea, the, 104n1 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 8–9, 22 Segal, Simon, 204–5 Selvon, Samuel, 125 Senior, Olive, 5 sexual abuse, 90–1 sexual relationships, 21, 22, 23–4, 26, 28, 32, 214 and dress, 132–3, 134–5, 137 shame, 9, 13–14, 190–6, 198, 202–4, 205, 221 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 202 Simpson, Anne B., 213 Sinfield, Alan, 41, 43, 44, 54 Sitwell, Osbert, 34 slavery, 12, 160, 211 and architecture, 65, 69 and the environment, 113 and Haitian Revolution, 71 see also Emancipation ‘Sleep It Off Lady’, 102 Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, 14n1, 27, 33, 89, 128

Smith, Lancelot Grey Hugh, 21, 27, 148–9 Smith, Robert Rowland, 221, 222 smoking, 24, 25, 30 ‘Solid House, A’, 97 ‘Sound of the River, The’, 98, 102, 103 Spivak, Gayatri Chakrabarty, 4, 141, 172, 173, 174–5 Spyra, Ania, 150–1, 153 Stewart, Kathleen, 216 stream of consciousness, 41, 153–4 Su, John J., 3, 13 symbolism, 41, 44, 47 ‘Temps Perdi’, 61–2, 86, 92–3, 98 Thacker, Andrew, 29 theatricality, 48 Thomas, Sue, 2, 3, 11, 90 ‘Tia’ (Wide Sargasso Sea), 13, 176–7 and dress, 129–30, 131–2 Tiffin, Helen, 90 Tigers Are Better Looking, 41, 47, 49–50, 51–4, 101–2 ‘Till September Petronella’, 62, 92 time, 8, 22, 179 Tomkins, Silvan, 184, 191, 192, 193, 221 Toomer, Jean, 6 Toussaint L’Ouverture (James), 71 trees, 98–101 triple sec, 35 ‘Triple Sec’, 21, 27–8 Trouillot, Michel-Rolphe, 72 Trowell, Garnet, 21, 23, 24 ‘Uncle Ramsay’ (Voyage in the Dark), 34 unconcious, the, 41 United States of America, 12, 43, 71 urban space, 47, 87, 92, 96, 109, 124 Vaz Diaz, Selma, 7 verandas, 12, 59–65, 68–9, 76–8; see also glacis ‘Vienne’, 21, 98, 100, 103 violence, 61, 62–3, 67–8, 183–4 Vlach, John, 64 voice, 172–4, 175–8, 179, 185 voodoo, 73, 75 Voyage in the Dark, 3, 8, 10, 11, 21–2, 148 and autobiography, 149

­244     Index Voyage in the Dark (cont.) and the cold, 186 and creoleness, 150–6, 157–8 and decadence, 28–32, 36 and disorientation, 180 and dreaming, 77 and dress, 130–1 and nature, 91, 92, 97, 98, 99–100, 101, 102 Voyage in the Dark (cont.) and race, 13, 34, 35, 211 and ragtime, 32–3 and the veranda, 61, 62, 63 Walcott, Derek, 5, 59, 60 walls, 30, 31 ‘Walter Jeffries’ (Voyage in the Dark), 28, 31, 34, 35 Warwick, Alexandra, 131 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 45, 184 wealth, 12 Weil, Simone, 9 Welles, Orson, 71, 72, 73, 75 West Africa, 64, 65, 68 Whistler, James MacNeill, 59 ‘Whistling Bird, The’, 103 white majority culture, 210 Wide Sargasso Sea, 3, 4, 10, 47, 115–17 and the cold, 186 and colonialism, 125 and creoleness, 158–64 and disorientation, 178–81

and dress, 12–13, 124, 126, 127–8, 129–30, 131–5, 138–9 and Haiti, 70–1, 72, 73, 75–6 and landscape, 12 and militarisation, 67 and nature, 86, 89, 91, 92, 93, 98, 100, 102, 112–13, 117–18 and postcolonialism, 171–2 and race, 13 and shame, 205 and the veranda, 60, 61, 63, 65–6, 67–9 and violence, 183–4 and voice, 173–4, 175–8 see also ‘Antoinette Cosway’ Wilde, Oscar, 11, 21, 23–4, 27, 28–9, 31, 32, 33, 34–5 Windrush Generation, 41, 125 Wolfe, Cary, 214, 218 women, 10, 119, 214 and dehumanisation, 181–3 and dress, 123, 128–9, 131 and shame, 195 Woolf, Virginia, 6, 10, 28, 184 World War II, 47, 125 Wurmser, Léon, 193 Wyndham, Francis, 10 Young, Iris Marion, 123 Zimring, Rishona, 3, 11, 127 Zola, Emile, 28, 31–2 zombies, 14, 96, 209