Abstract
If Jean Rhys's fiction is read in the context of the Americas and the plantation system, a global vision of modernity emerges, spanning the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. More specifically, this vision appears through colonialist stereotypes of idle and lazy West Indians displayed in dynamic interaction with scenes of actual toil and servitude that appear everywhere in Rhys's fiction. Her distinctly Caribbean modernist style links the labor politics of Dominica, where Rhys grew up, with the subjectivities of working women across centuries and extending from the Caribbean to England, Europe and the southern United States. This essay focuses on Voyage in the Dark (1934), the short story ‘Temps Perdi’ and Rhys's last novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), discovering a poetics of labor created from the apparent indolence of the Caribbean.
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