Jean Rhys's Postmodern Narrative Authority: Selina's Patois in "Let Them Call It Jazz"

Abstract

In her 1962 short story, "Let Them Call It Jazz," Jean Rhys responds to literary modernism's linguistic dilemmas with a first-person mulatta narrator, Selina Davis, a Martiniquaise immigrant to London in the 1950—a departure in characterization for Rhys and a new narrative response to patriarchal assaults upon women and the poor. Born of Rhys's own intersecting cultural and linguistic experience, Selina's patois bridges modernism's narrative gap between white masquerade—the "black vernacular" adapted by white high modernists—and authentic black dialect—a source of controversy during the Harlem Renaissance. Selina's patois presents a complex new voice, one that challenges conventional sexual, racial, and class paradigms in its determination not to be silenced. Derived from the white Creole heroines of Rhys's modernist novels, Selina, telling her story in patois, encapsulates a postmodern narrative sensibility, transforming the previously marginalized female voice into one of greater authority.