European or Caribbean: Jean Rhys and the Language of Exile

Abstract

The question of identity in Jean Rhys's life and fiction is inextricably bound to condition of exile that shaped her perceptions and those of her characters. Rhys was truly a woman without a country. England, where she lived for most of her adult life, was a cold, unreceptive place for writer. Recognition came too late to compensate for a lifetime of loneliness and financial difficulty. The question of Rhys's West Indian roots is even more problematic. The daughter of a Welsh father and a white Creole mother, Rhys felt exiled even before she moved to England because she was cut off from black community in Dominica.1 Thus Rhys suffered from what Amon Saba Saakana describes as the mental condition of double alienation.2 Doubly dispossessed, Jean Rhys differs from black West Indian exiles who, as George Lamming points out, could never have felt experience of being in a minority.3 Jean Rhys is both Prospero and Caliban, a descendant of white colonizers but also, as a woman, colonized and excluded by patriarch's language. Carib Indian and African slave, both seen as wild fruits of Nature, share equally that spirit of revolt which Prospero by sword or language is determined to conquer.4 In her own way, Rhys also shares that revolutionary spirit: she wrests Prospero's language from him, inverts and subverts it in her fiction, and turns empty space between two worlds into a privileged place, exile's domain, by means of what Edward Said calls a contrapuntal