In silences and the spaces in between words, sounds, shapes, and colors, we have learned to find much of significance in twentieth-century art and literature. Such spaces can be social as well as aesthetic. In Jean Rhys’s novels, silenced “foreign” and female voices, inhabiting marginalized and usually urban social spaces, speak and signify their lives in ways that have profoundly engaged and disturbed the novels’ readers. Outsiders among outsiders, characters such as Anna Morgan in Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Sasha Jansen in Good Morning, Midnight (1939) find expression in narratives that also remain marginal to even alternate modernist canons of women’s and West Indian literature. Perhaps the best way to understand the powerful yet disconcerting effects of reading Rhys’s fiction is to understand more fully the nature of the in-between spaces it explores.
They are the spaces, discovered by trespassing and then traversed repeatedly, of colonial and sexual exile: the streets of London in 1914 where a young Creole woman attempts to support herself after the death of her West Indian father, the bars of Paris in 1937 where a somewhat older woman of vague nationality attempts to improvise an identity, and the rooming houses in either city that both shelter and isolate most of Rhys’s solitary protagonists. The dates and places are not insignificant. The fact that London was on the verge of war in 1914, that the Purity Crusades patrolled its streets suspicious of the activities of working-class women, that fascist bombs exploded in the streets in 1937 in Paris, and that thousands of Jews were made homeless as the Nazis marched through Europe—all contribute to our understanding of the nature of the in-between spaces in Rhys’s novels.
These marginalized spaces and the characters who make their lives in them find representation in narratives that are also difficult to place securely. From a feminist perspective, Rhys’s protagonists can be read sympathetically as victims of “the social structure” or of “patriarchal oppression.” Nevertheless, their apparent complicity in their own oppression remains to disturb readers, and psychological diagnoses of passivity, masochism, and even schizophrenia have become a critical commonplace. Reading Rhys’s fiction as West Indian literature suggests a cultural and historical context outside of the strictly European and offers possibilities for interpretation that go beyond the psychological. However, feminist and Third World perspectives rarely combine in readings of Rhys’s work. When they do, the resulting analysis usually depends upon a structural analogy between colonial hierarchies and sexual oppression that still positions the protagonist as a victim who lacks agency and offers little or no resistance.
In this study, I am interested in the tension between the two spaces or contexts of Rhys’s writing—the West Indian colonial context and the modernist European—as it is inscribed in terms of sex/gender relations in her novels. I wish to direct critical attention away from the mainly European aesthetic, moral, and psychological standards that I believe have operated to misread and, at times, to devalue Rhys’s writing, writing that, in fact, challenges those standards. This move away from the European and toward Caribbean cultural values complicates feminist perspectives on Rhys that view her works in terms of sexual difference only. I argue that the Caribbean cultures that emerge fully in Wide Sargasso Sea shift the moral ground of critical judgment by presenting an alternative to European concepts of character and identity. From the vision of this alternative, evaluations of Rhys’s protagonists as passive or masochistic victims no longer hold; instead, we can perceive their efforts at dialogue, plural identities, and community. We can also attempt to understand the reasons for the successes and failures of their efforts within a historical framework that takes into account the ideologies of a male-dominated colonial system and its decline in the early twentieth century.
Decolonization meant (and means still) the end of a world governed by empire. In the dismantling of empire, old identities based on cultural, racial, gender, and class hierarchies fracture; new identities and nations emerge. With these shifts, the very concepts of identity and patriarchal nationhood are challenged. In the title of this study, “World’s End” refers to this historical and conceptual rupture as the context of Jean Rhys’s writing. The endings referred to are not truly final; they open new ways of seeing the world, of constituting identity in the previously occluded, marginalized, or in-between social spaces inhabited by Jean Rhys’s protagonists.
As title, “World’s End” works in an overdetermined way since Rhys associated it with the London district where she first began to write, and medieval Europeans used it to describe the islands from which she came. It aptly describes what European “discovery” brought to the natives of those islands and also, in a historical turnabout, the ending of the world of empire, four hundred years later, that decolonization brought and that European modernism signified.
“World’s End” refers most particularly to the signs on the buses that Jean Rhys notes in her autobiography Smile Please. In the chapter titled “World’s End and a Beginning,” Rhys writes: “The room she got me was not in Chelsea but in Fulham. ‘World’s End’ was on the buses. The first morning I woke up there it seemed to me the furniture was so like that in the room I had just left that moving hardly made any difference” (Smile Please, p. 128). The move did make a difference, however. Rhys was suffering then from what felt to her like the end of the world in the humiliating aftereffects of a love affair terminated by her lover, an older and wealthy man who continued to send her money through his attorneys. Nevertheless, alone in a boardinghouse room on the margins of London, she began to write her first novel, which became Voyage in the Dark, her third novel to be published: “It was after supper that night—as usual a glass of milk and some bread and cheese—that it happened. My fingers tingled, and the palms of my hands. I pulled a chair up to the table, opened an exercise book, and wrote This is my Diary. But it wasn’t a diary. . . . I filled three exercise books and half another. . . .” (Smile Please, pp. 129 , 130). Presumably, the manuscript recounted “everything that had happened to me in the last year and a half . . . what he’d said, what I’d felt” (Smile Please, p. 129); but by the time it had been revised and published in 1934, it had become what critics would later recognize as “our first Negritude novel,” a remarkable and prototypical novel of a West Indian in exile.1
That a humiliating romance in which the older man speaks while the young woman can only feel2 can also shape and be shaped by the experience of colonial exile tells us much about Jean Rhys’s fiction and its place at the intersection of several kinds of modernism. One of these modernist crosscurrents is that of an emerging West Indian literature that develops from a strong sense of its own place in the Caribbean and of its plural histories and cultures. Hence, the title of this study refers also to the site at which Christopher Columbus disembarked in 1492 and on subsequent voyages, islands considered by European geographers to be “an unknown land” located where “a part of our habitable earth ends.”3
Columbus’s “discovery” of the West Indies, his inability to call them by their proper names, and the ensuing colonization with its accompanying slave trade and brutal exploitation of the lands and their peoples launched a renaissance for Europe and a catastrophe for the native peoples of the Caribbean. The “New Heaven and World” which Columbus claimed for Spain was truly the world’s end for its original inhabitants and for the African slaves brought there to labor. From within that catastrophe, however, developed historically the conditions for a new West Indies and the beginning of a new twentieth-century literature of which Jean Rhys is a major contributor, even originator.
Keeping in mind the locations represented in the several connotations of “World’s End”—urban spaces marginalized by the appearance of solitary women in public, the Caribbean islands invaded and possessed by Europeans, and the islands and urban Europe upset in the process of decolonization—we can read the fiction categorized as Rhys’s early “continental novels”4 as, instead, beginning experiments in female and Third World modernism written in dialogue with European modernism. In the early novels, for example, the characters’ attempts at resistance and community falter for specific social reasons and result in a narrative style of female irony that registers both the attempt and the failure, the expectation and the disillusionment. This irony, companion of an isolated and alienated female protagonist, vies in Voyage in the Dark with a more communal satirical laughter that derives from the Caribbean carnival. The tension between the two intonations, muted in the three other early novels, partakes also of an exploration of subjectivity that seeks an alternative to that of the European novel.
With the term “modernism,” I include the process of social modernization, and my discussions of the novels move from close readings of particular passages to broader delineations of the social spaces in between cultures and in between what the Victorians perceived as public (masculine) and private (feminine) spheres. Within European discourse, these two different kinds of in-between spaces are linked through codings of mass culture as feminine, associations of the feminine with the “primitive,” and perceptions of the colonial native as always part of a mass or crowd. Rhys’s fiction responds to the constitution of the colonial woman as overdetermined Other through experimental narrative styles that question colonial and sexual ideologies and explore the political implications of modernism.
The following chronology marks major events in Rhys’s life; it should also aid the reader in identifying and dating the various published and unpublished versions of Rhys’s novels and in discerning the periods in which they were composed.5
1890
Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams born in Roseau Dominica.
1907
Leaves Dominica for England, where she attends Perse School for girls in Cambridge.
1908
Leaves Perse School for the Academy of Dramatic Art (now Royal Academy of Dramatic Art); her father dies; she joins traveling chorus troupe.
1909
Has love affair with wealthy older man who leaves her after eighteen months.
1911–1913(?)
Writes manuscript that later becomes Voyage in the Dark.
1917
Meets Jean Lenglet, a.k.a. Edward de Nève.
1919
Travels to Holland to marry Lenglet.
1920
Gives birth in Paris to son William, who dies three weeks later.
1922
Gives birth to daughter Maryvonne in Brussels. Assembles some stories or sketches titled “Triple Sec” (which later appear in The Left Bank [1927]) at the request of Pearl Adam, who introduces Rhys to Ford Madox Ford.
1923
Jean Lenglet is arrested for illegally entering France, sentenced to prison, and afterward extradited to Holland.
1924
Lives with Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen in Paris. Becomes Ford’s mistress and protégée.
1927
Publication of The Left Bank and Other Stories.
1928
Publication of Rhys’s first novel, Postures (originally titled Masquerade by Rhys, titled Postures by Chatto and Windus, then retitled and published in 1928 in England and 1929 in the United States as Quartet), which draws on her experiences with Ford and Bowen. Appearance of her translation of Francis Carco’s Perversity under Ford Madox Ford’s name.
1929–1932
Lives in England with Leslie Tilden Smith; visits Paris several times, while composing After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie and after, until outbreak of World War II in Europe.
1930
Publication of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie.
1932
Divorces Jean Lenglet and marries Leslie Tilden Smith. Publication of her translation of Edward de Nève’s Barred (based on events that also appear in Quartet).
1934
Publication of Voyage in the Dark following revision of the concluding scenes at the publisher’s request. The original version is published in Nancy Hemond Brown, “Jean Rhys and Voyage in the Dark,” London Magazine 25, nos. 1 and 2.
1936
Spends four months in the West Indies, where she begins work on Good Morning, Midnight.
1939
Publication of Good Morning, Midnight.
1945
Works on early version of Wide Sargasso Sea. Death of Leslie Tilden Smith.
1947
Marries Smith’s cousin, Max Hamer, and lives with him in London.
1952
Max Hamer imprisoned for six months for misappropriating check forms from his company.
1953
Moves with Hamer to Cornwall.
1956
Moves to Cheriton FitzPaine in Devon.
1957
BBC production of radio play based on Good Morning, Midnight. An ad is placed asking for Rhys’s whereabouts; she answers and is “rediscovered” after years of obscurity. She announces she is working on a novel, which becomes Wide Sargasso Sea.
1964
Max Hamer dies; Rhys suffers a heart attack.
1966
Publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, which wins the W. H. Smith Award, the Arts Council of Great Britain Award for Writers, and the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature.
1968
Publication of Tigers Are Better-Looking.
1975
Publication of My Day.
1976
Publication of Sleep It Off, Lady.
1978
Receives the Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her contributions to literature.
1979
Dies on May 14. Posthumous publication of Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography.