The Politics of Form: Jean Rhys's Social Vision in Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea

Abstract

Jean Rhys's novels portray marginal women, exiled both culturally and sexually. Displaced from their native Caribbean, outsiders to women's traditional domestic world, and trespassers on masculine public territory, they walk the streets, not quite prostitutes, yet living on the edges of respectability, sanity, and dignity. Their fragmented perceptions and disjointed voices present the modern experience of exile and the decentered self. Like many modernist works, Rhys's novels seem to present an intensely personal rather than social vision; however, these precisely wrought narratives dissect the ways and means of power, money, and sex. Rhys's strategies and style resemble those of experimental writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, or Dorothy Richardson in their portrayal of individual consciousness and perception. Her treatment of words resembles the linguistic doubling of Gertrude Stein's poetry, often depending on sound and syntax for their meaning. The social isolation, faced by Rhys's characters, seems to further emphasize private, even schizophrenic, vision.1 She developed her own unique forms of interior monologue and of fragmented style that, to borrow Wallace Stevens' words, created a violent order (in) disorder. But Rhys's writing goes beyond these more formal similarities to modernism to expose the violence that informs them. Violence smol-