Between Illusion and Reality, ‘Who's to Know’: Threshold Spaces in the Interwar Novels of Jean Rhys

Abstract

This article considers the concept of the threshold in the interwar novels of Jean Rhys and demonstrates how the attempts by Rhys's female characters to transform themselves both internally and externally are complicated by the threshold spaces in which they operate. Rhys's novels draw attention to the social and economic situation for women living alone in European cities and moving between the liminal spaces of cafés and hotel rooms. In addition to these physical thresholds, the threshold also becomes a precarious psychological space for Rhys's characters, where the boundaries between truth and illusion, reality and fantasy merge freely and identity is always provisional. By drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and theories of the threshold as a site for transition and transformation, this article argues that Rhys's characters’ attempts to create a stable identity can be read as an attempt to survive in the threshold space between the traditional public and private identities available for women in the interwar period.