Emery Mary Lou - Jean Rhys at Worlds end: novels of colonial and sexual exile

Jean Rhys at Worlds End

Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile

by Mary Lou Emery

University of Texas Press,
Austin

Copyright 1990 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

First Edition, 1990

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Emery, Mary Lou.

Jean Rhys at Worlds End : novels of colonial and sexual exile / by Mary Lou Emery. 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-292-71126-3

1. Rhys, JeanCriticism and interpretation. 2. West Indies in literature. 3. Colonies in literature. 4. Sex role in literature. 5. Exiles in literature. 6. Women in literature. I. Title.

PR6035.H96Z64 1990

823'.912dc20

90-31402
CIP

ISBN 978-0-292-75549-9 (library e-book)
ISBN 978-0-292-75623-6 (individual e-book)

doi 10.7560/711266

To Stephen Paul Wootton and Claire Elizabeth Emery-Wootton

Acknowledgments

For incomparable cooking and conversation that nourished my thinking throughout the writing of this book, I would like to thank my friends and colleagues of the Food for Thought Feminist/Critical Theory Reading Group. I am especially grateful to Adalaide Morris, whose thoughtful and attentive responses to sometimes several drafts of at least half of the books chapters helped me to clarify concepts, more purposefully direct arguments, and make this study much better than it might have been; to Katherine Hayles, whose responses to drafts of several chapters brought to my attention further implications of my arguments; and to Huston Diehl, whose suggestions allowed me to envision alternate ways of presenting and organizing material. I want to thank Peter Nazareth for carefully reading an early draft of Part One and, perhaps most important, for aiding my continuing education in Caribbean and Third World literatures.

Students are most often the ones who educate the educators, and I have had the good fortune of reading the writings of Jean Rhys and Wilson Harris with an especially thoughtful group of graduate students just as this book entered the copy-editing stage. I am grateful to all of the members of the Fall 1989 course Modernist Crosscurrents for allowing me to test my ideas in discussions with them and for questions and suggestions that helped me to refine particular points of my arguments.

Thanks to Laura Mumford for questions concerning an early draft of Part One, to Don Marshall for responses to manuscript. Lucio P. Ruotolo first encouraged my interest in Jean Rhys, and I am thankful for his continuing enthusiasm.

I am grateful to the University of Iowa for awarding me an Old Gold Award and a Developmental Assignment and to the Department of English for granting me a semesters leave of absence so that I might begin and continue work on this study. While on Developmental Assignment, I worked at University House on the University of Iowas Oakdale Campus, where the collegial atmosphere organized by Jay Semel and the computing facilities and other essentials of current scholarship managed by Lorna Olson aided in the manuscripts completion. The Office of the Dean of Arts and Letters at Stanford University provided funds for some initial research on Jean Rhys at the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa. I would like to thank Thomas F. Staley, David Farmer, and the staff of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of Tulsa for their helpful cooperation.

Portions of first appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction 5, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 145150.

Introduction

In silences and the spaces in between words, sounds, shapes, and colors, we have learned to find much of significance in twentieth-century art and literature. Such spaces can be social as well as aesthetic. In Jean Rhyss novels, silenced foreign and female voices, inhabiting marginalized and usually urban social spaces, speak and signify their lives in ways that have profoundly engaged and disturbed the novels readers. Outsiders among outsiders, characters such as Anna Morgan in Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Sasha Jansen in Good Morning, Midnight (1939) find expression in narratives that also remain marginal to even alternate modernist canons of womens and West Indian literature. Perhaps the best way to understand the powerful yet disconcerting effects of reading Rhyss fiction is to understand more fully the nature of the in-between spaces it explores.

They are the spaces, discovered by trespassing and then traversed repeatedly, of colonial and sexual exile: the streets of London in 1914 where a young Creole woman attempts to support herself after the death of her West Indian father, the bars of Paris in 1937 where a somewhat older woman of vague nationality attempts to improvise an identity, and the rooming houses in either city that both shelter and isolate most of Rhyss solitary protagonists. The dates and places are not insignificant. The fact that London was on the verge of war in 1914, that the Purity Crusades patrolled its streets suspicious of the activities of working-class women, that fascist bombs exploded in the streets in 1937 in Paris, and that thousands of Jews were made homeless as the Nazis marched through Europeall contribute to our understanding of the nature of the in-between spaces in Rhyss novels.

These marginalized spaces and the characters who make their lives in them find representation in narratives that are also difficult to place securely. From a feminist perspective, Rhyss protagonists can be read sympathetically as victims of the social structure or of patriarchal oppression. Nevertheless, their apparent complicity in their own oppression remains to disturb readers, and psychological diagnoses of passivity, masochism, and even schizophrenia have become a critical commonplace. Reading Rhyss fiction as West Indian literature suggests a cultural and historical context outside of the strictly European and offers possibilities for interpretation that go beyond the psychological. However, feminist and Third World perspectives rarely combine in readings of Rhyss work. When they do, the resulting analysis usually depends upon a structural analogy between colonial hierarchies and sexual oppression that still positions the protagonist as a victim who lacks agency and offers little or no resistance.

In this study, I am interested in the tension between the two spaces or contexts of Rhyss writingthe West Indian colonial context and the modernist Europeanas it is inscribed in terms of sex/gender relations in her novels. I wish to direct critical attention away from the mainly European aesthetic, moral, and psychological standards that I believe have operated to misread and, at times, to devalue Rhyss writing, writing that, in fact, challenges those standards. This move away from the European and toward Caribbean cultural values complicates feminist perspectives on Rhys that view her works in terms of sexual difference only. I argue that the Caribbean cultures that emerge fully in Wide Sargasso Sea shift the moral ground of critical judgment by presenting an alternative to European concepts of character and identity. From the vision of this alternative, evaluations of Rhyss protagonists as passive or masochistic victims no longer hold; instead, we can perceive their efforts at dialogue, plural identities, and community. We can also attempt to understand the reasons for the successes and failures of their efforts within a historical framework that takes into account the ideologies of a male-dominated colonial system and its decline in the early twentieth century.