Jean Rhys Research Articles

Jean Rhys’s ‘Temps Perdi’: Space, Disability, and the Second World War

Correspondences between key settings in Jean Rhys’s “Temps Perdi,” as suggested by analytics proffered by postmodern theories of space, suggest the Benjaminian notion of history as a perpetual state of emergency. Introduced in the three discrete sections of the story, these key settings are a house on the east coast of England during WWII, Vienna in the aftermath of WWI, and an unnamed Caribbean island (which the narrator visits between the wars). Further, the story’s key disabled characters, the narrator and a young Carib woman, point to Walter Benjamin’s notion of a revolutionary, “messianic” break with time, as suggested by analytics proffered by disability studies.

London's Burning: Structuralist Readings of the Urban Inferno in the 1950's British Literature of Multi-culturalism

This article examines a literary triangle treating a modern re-imagining of the Dantean Inferno in Caribbean migrant experience. Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners advanced a stylistic and intellectual revolution in post-World War II British literature, inspiring Colin MacInnes’ Absolute Beginners in the founding literary texts of contemporary British multi-cultural society. It followed the template of Jean Rhys Voyage in the Dark. We must read these complex texts to understand the conflicted multi-cultural society that Britain has become today: they deal with identity and solidarity, atomisation and commodification, Empire and capitalism, while throwing light on the most recent advances in historical and theoretical scholarship by pioneers such as Olivette Otele and Reni Eddo-Lodge. Moreover, these texts throw new light on unanswered Structuralist and Post-Structuralist debates from Emile Durkheim to Martin Heidegger. This article examines the intersectionality of class, gender and race within both the national British framework of post-war capitalism and the wider colonial heritage of slavery and forced labour, highlighting voices who articulated an ideal of multi-cultural humanism that remains crucial today.

Fraternelle mélancolie: Melville et Hawthorne, une passion

Fraternelle mélancolie: Melville et Hawthorne, une passion

Reading Polly Teale’s Dog Women in After Mrs Rochester and Brontë

ABSTRACT Playwright and director Polly Teale’s biodramas After Mrs Rochester (2003) and Brontë (2005) boldly feature dog women to embody the psychological shadows of Jean Rhys and Charlotte Brontë respectively. In developing the figures Teale draws inspiration most explicitly from artist Dame Paula Rego’s Dog Woman series (1994) and Charlotte Brontë’s blurring of the species boundary human/animal in her representation of Bertha Mason Rochester in Jane Eyre (1847). The intersections between the aesthetics of Teale and Rego provide, I show, a critical frame within which to read their dog women. To weigh Teale’s treatment of her biographical subjects, intimacy and the relation between sexuality and writing I also draw out the scope of her engagement with canine images in Rhys’s fiction and a letter Brontë wrote to Constantin Héger.

Transnational Narratives in Englishes of Exile

Transnational Narratives in Englishes of Exile

The Portrayal of the History of Angst in the Novels Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea by Charlotte Bronte and Jean Rhys

The Portrayal of the History of Angst in the Novels Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea by Charlotte Bronte and Jean Rhys

Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain, by Heather Fielding; Modernist Soundscapes: Auditory Technology and the Novel, by Angela Frattarola

Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain, by Heather Fielding; Modernist Soundscapes: Auditory Technology and the Novel, by Angela Frattarola

“Sketchy modernism”

ABSTRACT “Sketchy Modernism” argues for a definition of modernism that takes into account institutional failure and the precarity of academic labor. The adjective “sketchy,” defined as at once unfinished and foundational, serves here as a guide for rethinking our own scholarly commitments. I claim Jean Rhys as an exemplary “sketchy modernist,” considering how her novel Voyage in the Dark (1934) and her unpublished short story “The Imperial Road,” written in the early 1970s, offer insight into contemporary academic insecurity.

Other White

In this hybrid personal/critical essay, novelist Monique Roffey reflects on Kei Miller's article, ‘The White Women and the Language of Bees’ (2018) and its suggestions about the ability of white Caribbean women to capture the language and lives of the people of the Caribbean. Referring back to the clash between Peter Hulme and E K Brathwaite in the pages of Wasafiri in the mid-1990s, Roffey draws on the work of Jean Rhys, Alison Donnell and Evelyn O'Callaghan to argue that there is a long tradition of positioning white women outside the bounds of Caribbean identity, a positioning that fails to recognise their unique relation to the Caribbean, Britain and the USA. Claiming her own identity as ‘Other White’, and therefore uniquely uncategorisable in/through the dominant discourses of race in the USA and UK, Roffey demands a more inclusive, ‘caribglobal’ understanding of the Caribbean literary community.

"You'll Get Used to It": Alterity in Jean Rhys' Voyage in the Dark

Due to the complex intersecting parameters of identity, race, class, and history of Jean Rhys’ writing life, her works allow for interpretation from various disciplines. Rhys' writings reveal the realities of people caught in the complexity of such a web. Her 1934 novel Voyage in the Dark provides insights into the life of Anna Morgan, the heroine of this novel who moves from her home in Dominica to England to face the entire psychological and social struggle by her journey that ends her up with destruction caused by the challenges that seem to conspire to her tragic fate. In understanding the life of Anna Morgan, the woman who has been told that she will “get used” to her circumstances, the concept of alterity is a useful reading approach in unveiling the push and pull factors that drive her to her downfall. As a concept, alterity is explained in this paper through making overt the structure of the novel that exposes various factors that markedly contain facets of alterity such as alienation, assimilation, and separation. By appropriating this reading lens, we hope to show how multiple factors machinate to show the systematic ways in which Anna Morgan’s fate is sealed when the heroine herself and others around her cannot accept otherness and fusion. Keywords: Jean Rhys; alterity; gender; class; ethnicity

Jean Rhys's Phantom Manuscript: ‘December 4th., 1938. Mr. Howard's House. CREOLE.’

Genetic criticism often leads to serendipitous discoveries. ‘Mr. Howard's House. CREOLE’ is a case in point. This unpublished manuscript dated 4 December 1938, which is held in the Jean Rhys Archive at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, is a true palimpsest that testifies to ghostwriting in the literal sense of the word. For one thing, it retains spectral traces of a final draft of Good Morning, Midnight on the back of which it was written, containing nothing less than the only extant fragments from the manuscript of Jean Rhys's fourth novel. But it also holds the most primitive trace of Wide Sargasso Sea, namely Antoinette's dream at the end of Part I. Thus, it does expose the writer at a crossroads, trying to let go of Good Morning, Midnight while having the earliest intimations of the first Mrs. Rochester. And it also carries within itself the seeds of some of Rhys's later works. With the help of the avant-texte, we shall examine in what ways all these texts interact and overlap, and to what extent ‘Mr. Howard's House’ may act as a template for understanding Jean Rhys's creative process as a whole.

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

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.

The Voices of Others: Intertextuality and Authorial Presences in Jean Rhys's Short Fiction

My project here is to discuss the extent of Rhys's permeability to the voices of ‘others’, especially when it comes to quoting, inserting, using, or elaborating her own writing with a recourse to the literary authority of other writers. The postcolonial concept of ‘writing back’ obliterates the process of actual writing to the profit of the Western-constructed idea of an accusatory pattern in the literary agendas of authors from former Empires. As critical as Rhys might have been of European colonialism, a limitation of her work to a gesture of ‘writing back’ amounts to denying the polyphony orchestrated by the writer, thereby blurring any form of aesthetic purpose per se. Therefore, in an attempt to avoid a strictly postcolonial discourse, my article studies the wide scope of examples of intertextuality in Jean Rhys's short fiction (mainly in the short stories ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’, ‘Hunger’, ‘La Grosse Fifi’, ‘Invitation to the Dance’ and ‘Temps Perdi’), in relation to the very notions of authority—both the author's, and her peers’. What is more, ‘others’ are present in her writing under the form of absent voices piercing through the fabric of the text, which results in a failure to locate the main source of authority. I shall enquire into the notion of failure as writing and reading aesthetics, rather than a simple literary motif.

Writing Jean Rhys a Life: The Circumvolutions of Transmission Lines in the Memoirs and Biographies of Jean Rhys

Despite Rhys’s refusal to have a biography written about her, her own life has been the subject of quite a number of memoirs, biographies or portraits: from David Plante’s early, personal and subversive reminiscences of his time and work with her at the end of her life, to the perhaps more consensual Jean Rhys: Life and Work by Carole Angier in 1990, to the more recent memoirs by Alexis Lykiard, Jean Rhys Revisited (2000) and Jean Rhys: Afterwords (2006) or the latest, The Blue Hour by Lilian Pizzichini (2009). These biographies and memoirs may be considered as transmission lines, contributing to the aura of a writer no less than other pieces of criticism. Because Rhys’s fiction was considered as autobiographical, the point of writing biographies should precisely be to differentiate facts from fiction. I shall ponder in this article on the reasons why some biographies are considered as ‘good’ and others ‘bad’, what makes a biography a ‘worthy’ recording of a writer’s life and work. This overview of Rhys’s biographies will be an opportunity to reflect on the evolution of the genre itself and its ability to transmit personality truthfully in a post-modern era when the pitfalls and drawbacks of the genre have been extensively debated by biographical theoreticians and when truth and personality seem more than ever like two very complex and perhaps inimical notions.

Inaudible Voices in Sleep It Off Lady

The article deals with crises of transmission in some of Jean Rhys's stories included in Sleep It Off Lady (1976), more specifically ‘Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers’, ‘Fishy Waters’, ‘Good-bye Marcus, Good-bye Rose’ and ‘Sleep It Off Lady’. Their voiceless characters are discussed through the lens of precariousness, the argument relying on Guillaume Le Blanc's and Judith Butler's essays on precarious lives (Guillaume Le Blanc, Vies ordinaires, vies précaires, 2007; Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, 2004). I shed light on the correlations between social precariousness, invisibility and linguistic vulnerability which make the transmission of the experience of dispossession precarious itself. The stories stage ghostly, invisible characters who cannot give an account of themselves but who, on the other hand, are held accountable by society. This oppressive type of accountability based on punishment or revenge contributes something to the crisis of transmission to which Jean Rhys's fiction obsessively returns. Caught within this coercive system of accountability, the precarious self remains untransmissible, while the stories bear witness to the processes which obstruct voice, and tell tales of precariousness.

Post-scripted Transmissions in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark

Epistles fill Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark. The most prominent is Vincent’s letter, which ends Anna’s relationship with Walter and erases her at the level of the written word. In the letter, Vincent replaces Anna’s experiences with maudlin sentiments and includes a postscript requesting her return of Walter’s letters. This article focuses on Anna’s relegation to the postscript of Vincent’s letter, and by extension, to the subtext of her society’s dominant discourses. Examining the narrative’s structure (in particular, the disproportionate quartering of its sections and its circularity), and considering Anna’s relation to subaltern figures, I address Rhys’s strategy of writing Anna’s story both against dominant discourses and within the subtext to which those discourses relegate her. I argue that the novel, read as a ‘post-scripted’ transmission, establishes a communicative impasse that problematizes the recovery of lost voices.

Introduction: Jean Rhys: Writing Precariously

England was terribly cold when I first came there. There was no central heating. There were fires, but they were always blocked by people trying to get warm. And I’d never get into the sacred circl...

‘Outside the Machine’: Stasis and Conflict in the work of Jean Rhys

Responding to longstanding critical discomfort around feminist readings of Jean Rhys’s fiction, this essay analyses her depiction of female conflict and feminine abjection. In engaging with her writing towards and against other women, it argues that the narrative of conflict is essential to Rhys’s portrayal of gender and agency. Situated in a women’s hospital, as depicted in Rhys’s short story, This essay analyses the patterns of structured inertia and the entangling yet alienating interaction between patients in a women's hospital, as depicted in Rhys's short story, ‘Outside the Machine’. Ultimately, this essay argues for Rhys’s transgressive feminism by embracing the very difficulty of reading her seemingly misogynist passages.

Becoming Jane Eyre

This article explores the parallels drawn between the characters of Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason in Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre, using Jean Rhys’ 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea to further this comparison. I use Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s argument that Bertha is Jane’s double, or other self, to argue that Jane and Bertha both possess a form of androgyny within their characters, Jane’s due to her class and Bertha’s due to her race. I suggest that these forms of androgyny prevent Jane, in particular, from becoming spiritually equal with Mr. Rochester, proposing that, due to their connection as doubles, Jane must be rid of both her own, as well as Bertha’s androgynous shadow, in order to enter into marriage with Rochester as his equal.

ЖИН РАЙСНИНГ “КЕНГ САРГАССО ДЕНГИЗИ” РОМАНИ ҚАҲРАМОНЛАРИ РУҲИЯТИГА ЁЛҒИЗЛИКНИНГ ТАЪСИРИ

In the current situation the problem of loneliness, which is becoming a global issue among the people of the world, the fact that the motif of "loneliness" has risen to the level of a separate motif of literature attracts the attention of literary critics. In this regard, it is important to reveal the socio-psychological basis of the factors of human loneliness. This article discusses the psychological underpinnings of loneliness motif inEnglish author Jean Rhys’s novel “The Wide Sargasso Sea”. The impact of loneliness on the psyche of the protagonists and the resulting tragedy of the protagonist, who became insane and put an end to her life, is analyzed