A Feminist Compact: Jean Rhys's Smile Please and Life Writing Theory

Abstract

As notorious as Jean Rhys was for her 90 years of hard drinking and hard living, her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please (1979), has yet to receive sustained critical attention. Rhys's autobiographical project comprises transforming the supposed trappings of femininity into a writer's tool of creativity. I build my analysis around one passage in Smile Please, in which the masculine gaze, femininity, and imperial wealth converge in a single object: Rhys's powder compact, exposed while she is on a date in London. As Rhys describes the accessory, “Most of the gilt had worn off and the black underneath showed” (93). Her humble tool of self-regard and making-up exposed, Rhys feels not just shabby but racialized, inherently “black underneath” the London leisure that gilds her colonial, Creole origins. A tool of feminine decoration as well as colonial objectification in Rhys's text, the compact reveals the compatibility of the decorative and the creative, as well as of femininity and feminist autobiography. Beneath its gilded cover, the compact demonstrates a method of countering the objectification of a surface reading of gender and colonial identity. Through the snapshot-like vignettes of Smile Please, Rhys performs a fragmented female subjectivity that writes against two forces that intersect in her work: imperial power and the male gaze. Both fix her and judge her, in metropole and colony, from a girlhood at the British Empire's margins to a marginal adulthood at its center. Rhys utilizes the mirrors and makeup of self-construction to subvert definitions of femininity as a masquerade and race as a darkness to hide beneath the Empire's gilt.