‘This way to the exhibition’: genealogies of urban spectacle in Jean Rhys's interwar fiction

Abstract

Both Jean Rhys's relationship to modernism and her representation of urban space need to be understood as engaging with a tangled history of exhibitory practices informing metropolitan spatiality. I trace this engagement through the interwar fiction, to Good Morning, Midnight (1939). Through her insertion into the latter text of the 1937 Paris World's Fair, Rhys presents the 'exhibition' as exemplary for a regime of metropolitan representation based on an imperial legacy of ethnographic-cumcommodity display. Her exploration of urban space, through the related sites of the hotel, the exhibition and the street, draws on the Surrealist aesthetics of dream and automatism, which offer crucial, if highly ambiguous, strategies for uncovering the interdependence between metropolitan and colonial spaces within daily life, notably the use of ethnography as a critical and diagnostic tool to be employed both within and against the institutional spaces of art. Rhys's relationship to modernism thus turns on the status of ethnographic display within metropolitan perception, and on its role as a hidden link between capitalist and fascist modernities.