Exceptionality and the unexceptional in Jean Rhys’s interwar fiction

Abstract

When it comes to modernist exceptions, Jean Rhys appears as a particularly striking case in point: her marginality as a white creole woman writer who shunned the literary circles in both Paris and London, her notably twisted editorial history, her disappearance for twenty-five years and the retrospective rediscovery, in the 1960s, of her interwar texts, have sparked an ongoing debate about the question of her place in the modernist canon. Her experimental poetics, which was acknowledged as exceptional by Ford Madox Ford as early as 1927, is characterized by a sense of jaded experience, the juxtaposition of indifferent and even interchangeable places and people, as well as a semantic and syntactic minimalism based on repetition. The aim of this article is to show how Jean Rhys’s exceptionality as a modernist writer relies as much on her canonical unplaceability as, paradoxically, on her aesthetics of the unexceptional.