Farewell, Socialist Gwen: Poverty and the Politics of Injury in Jean Rhys’s Interwar Fiction

Abstract

This essay studies how Jean Rhys’s interwar fiction represents the poverty of its protagonists as penury (‘no money’) and a physically degrading fall into ‘ugliness’ and uncleanliness, rendering an embodied experience of precarity at the nexus of social identity and psychological injury. The autobiographical ‘Essay on England,’ in which Rhys names an adolescent persona, Socialist Gwen, illustrates how the fall into poverty entailed a heightened attachment to bourgeois standards of white femininity, standards that are loudly protested by various protagonists in the interwar fiction, and that additionally naturalize black poverty in the Caribbean and ‘ugliness’ in French working-class women, marked for their social particularity. It is an admixture of critique and untoward complaint that characterizes Jean Rhys’s literary imagination, one shaped by a sense that socio-economic precarity hurts white, middle-class women more than it does others.