Quartet
“Postures,” Possession, and Point of View
Among all of Jean Rhys’s novels, only Quartet, her first novel to be published, presents a character whose identity is clearly European. Marya Zelli is English, married to a Pole and living in Paris during the 1920s. Nevertheless, Caribbean themes and images structure the novel’s plot and narrative style and become central to the dispossession of “character” developed as narrative technique. Instigated by an act of exile and exchange, in which Marya is transferred from her imprisoned husband to a wealthy lover, conflicts of possession and obsession transform a happy female vagabond into a “captive attached to somebody’s chariot wheels.” The “possession” of Marya becomes meaningful, however, in the context of bohemian Paris; lacking a West Indian past through which to interpret her present life, her sole defense consists of a female modernist irony that criticizes but does not effectively transform the “chariot” to which she is bound or even the meaning of her bondage. Critics who become annoyed at the passivity of Rhys’s protagonists, and even those sympathetic to their weaknesses, tend to attribute to her first “heroine” a condition of pathological masochism.1
It is important to examine this concept of female masochism, to place it in its context of psychoanalytic thought, and to ask what interests it serves as an evaluation of character. By tracing the Caribbean allusions in Quartet and interrogating the concept of masochism, we can see how colonial conflicts of power model the sexual conflicts of even this most European of all Rhys’s novels. In its concern with point of view, as both theme and narrative problem, the novel explores relations of sadomasochism in a modernist experiment that questions our North American and European assumptions about personality and character.
But as soon as she put the light out, the fear was with her again—and now it was like a long street where she walked endlessly. A redly lit street, the houses on either side tall, grey and closely shuttered, the only sound the clip-clop of horse’s hoofs behind her, out of sight.2
Marya Zelli’s fear stems from the abrupt change brought about in her life following the imprisonment of her husband Stephan for theft. The images convey the blind, imposing authority of married and family life from which Marya is now excluded. The street’s red light suggests the status of a woman shuttered out of houses and left to walk alone in the public streets. It foreshadows Stephan’s final condemnation of her as une grue—“loose woman.” With Stephan, she had felt vaguely content: “For she was reckless, lazy, a vagabond by nature, and for the first time in her life, she was very near to being happy” (Quartet, p. 14). But now, “loosened” from her marriage, Marya returns to the same situation she faced when she and Stephan met: “No money. Nothing at all. . . . My father and mother are both dead. . . . I owe for the dress I have on” (Quartet, p. 19). The long, winding Parisian streets that had previously promised adventure now reveal to Marya her sexual vulnerability and represent the social preconditions to her dispossession of character.
Her perceptions of everyday life alter quickly, along with the style of narration and the images that convey these perceptions. Previously the narrator has addressed the reader: “Marya, you must understand, had not been suddenly and ruthlessly transplanted from solid comfort to the hazards of Montmartre. Nothing like that. Truth to say, she was used to a lack of solidity and fixed backgrounds” (Quartet, p. 15). The distance maintained here between the narrative stance and the character described implies that, although Marya’s past has not been solidly fixed, her identity as a character, distinct from the voice of the narrator, rests secure. This security dissolves with Stephan’s confinement. A new and more direct style now confuses the narrator’s voice and Marya’s, posing a question of identity.
When Marya receives a letter from Stephan confirming his imprisonment, the narrative voice describes the breakdown of Marya’s sense of security and contentment in a style that exhibits a similar and related breakdown:
It was a vague and shadowy fear of something cruel and stupid that had caught her and would never let her go. She had always known that it was there—hidden under the more or less pleasant surface of things. Always. Ever since she was a child.
You could argue about hunger or cold or loneliness, but with that fear you couldn’t argue. It went too deep. You were too mysteriously sure of its terror. You could only walk very fast and try to leave it behind you. (Quartet, p. 33)
Here the vacillation from one identity to another, less sure and terrifying one, takes place. First the narrator’s voice speaks Marya’s thoughts indirectly. Then a general meditative “you,” spoken to no particular person, refers self-reflexively back to the speaker; yet readers cannot be sure if this speaker is Marya or the narrator or all of us in this more direct expression of Marya’s fear. The ambiguous “you” contrasts especially with the previous direct address, “Marya, you must understand . . .”
Critics have noted the vacillation in narrative stance exemplified in this passage and attributed it to an autobiographical confusion of author with character less controlled in this novel since it was Rhys’s first.3 Most critics read the novel as a recounting of Rhys’s affair with Ford Madox Ford (Heuffer) and her experience living with him and his common-law wife Stella Bowen.4 Certainly the affair with Ford gave Rhys material for her fiction; however, it is a mistake to reduce narrative experiment to an autobiographical fallacy. The passage quoted above does not so much identify author with character as invite the reader to take Marya’s point of view. Or rather, accounting for the various possible references for “you,” it diffuses the point or place from which she perceives, speaks, acts; readers may position themselves in one or more of those places.
The dissolution of distinctions between character, narrator, reader, and—possibly—author poses the question of identity formally while the various voices state its theme: “In the morning she went back to the Quai des Orfèvres and was given a permit to visit the Santé Prison. Marya Zelli, aged twenty-eight years, British by birth, Polish by marriage. . . . And so on, and so on” (Quartet, p. 35). As Marya’s social dislocation increases, fewer transitional passages appear; scene, episode, and image are sharply juxtaposed. The text shifts from traditional third-person narrative to narrated interior monologue and back again. Increasingly, the style develops into the deliberate fragmentation that characterizes Rhys’s later novels. In Quartet we see the coincidence of this style’s emergence with creation of an outcast, displaced figure.
As I have argued in previous chapters, the detachment of voice and identity from speaker, the question of place or position, shapes Rhys’s writing in her later novels, and I would argue that it does so here as well. The positioning (or posturing) of voices and bodies, taking up or inhabited by various points of view, is precisely what concerns Rhys’s narrative technique in Quartet. Rhys first published the novel in 1928 under the title Postures. She also considered the title Masquerade, suggesting, along with deception, the metamorphoses of power enacted through masks and alluding to colonial hierarchies of sex, race, and power.5 In Quartet point of view may disguise, deceive, possess, or dispossess the speaker.
Other allusions to Caribbean culture mark the posturing of Quartet’s characters. When Marya first realizes the implications for her of Stephan’s imprisonment, she thinks of the Parisian streets with fear; however, when the Heidlers, wealthy patrons of the arts, offer her a place to stay, the streets become the sites of more ambiguous carnival scenes. Sitting in a cafe, “she thought of [the streets] without fear, rather with a strange excitement” (Quartet, p. 47), and outside the cafe, she stands on the street, “looking at the Lion de Belfort fair—the booths, swings, the crowds of people jostling each other in a white glare of light to the gay, metallic music of the merry-go-rounds” (Quartet, p. 47). Here the fair suggests excitement, possibly sexual excitement associated with its working-class origins and traditional license, but the images of “people jostling,” the “white glare,” and “metallic music” render the fair a harsh and possibly false scene of joy. Marya has met H. J. and Lois Heidler only a few times and noted a solid, almost brutish sturdiness about him, a deadened and suspicious look to her. She receives their offer with feelings of dismay; on the other hand, Heidler’s solidity suggests warmth and security to her in spite of her sense that he wants something more of her than what might be expected from a houseguest.
Later, when Stephan encourages Marya to stay with the Heidlers, she walks back to her tram wondering “why she had ever thought the matter important at all.” A merry-go-round set up at the Porte d’Orléans helps her to suppress her earlier misgivings more completely. She watches a little girl, “holding tightly on to the neck of her steed, her face tense and strained with delight.” The sight of such manic pleasure relieves Marya: “The merry-go-round made her feel more normal, less like a grey ghost walking in a vague, shadowy world” (Quartet, p. 57). Both of these early passages draw upon carnival scenes to express the ambiguity of the streets for Marya, who is now confronted with their “endless labyrinth,” and the self-deception that accompanies her social displacement.
The weekly experiences of waiting in the long lines of women to visit Stephan in the prison Santé, then walking the streets alone, “possessed by pity as by a devil,” make her realize the waste of her life. “And her longing for joy, for any joy, for any pleasure was a mad thing in her heart. It was sharp like pain and she clenched her teeth” (Quartet, p. 74).
In these lines the language of possession, pleasure, and pain mixes in telling ways. Marya does not indulge masochistically in her dependency and suffering but, longing for joy, chooses reluctantly the situation that Stephan, Heidler, and Lois all seem to approve for her—that of dependence on a man who will become her lover. Bohemian Paris offers little else for an untrained, attractive young woman, especially one “vagabond by nature.” She might model for an artist, which she does for Lois, or try for a job on the stage, which Lois assesses realistically: “Well, I hope you’re not thinking of trying for a job as a femme nue in a music-hall. They don’t get paid anything at all, poor dears” (Quartet, p. 52).
Eventually Marya experiences herself painfully as Other and in the most concrete way—the “other woman.” In spite of their bohemian ways, the Heidlers live by a game composed of strict categories and codes for social behavior. In this code, the other woman becomes the object of their desires, and they assume their prerogative to inflict pain upon her. From their very first meeting they speak of Marya in her presence in the third person, as if she were not there. In an argument among the three of them, Heidler shouts at Lois, “No, let me talk to her . . . you don’t understand how to deal with this sort of woman; I do” (Quartet, p. 103). The category “this sort of woman” conflates in Heidler’s mind with another candidate for the position of Other, the tribal “savage”:
Her head had dropped backwards over the edge of the bed and from that angle her face seemed strange to him: the cheek-bones looked higher and more prominent, the nostrils wider, the lips thicker. A strange little Kalmuch face.
He whispered: “Open your eyes, savage. Open your eyes, savage.” (Quartet, p. 131)
Heidler thus identifies Marya as Other sexually and even racially, though no information appears in Quartet to give her any background other than English. Positioning her as doubly Other, he forces her into “playing the game” according to his rules; he gives Marya another name, like Rochester’s renaming of Antoinette, to appropriate her for his use: “he was forcing her to be nothing but the little woman who lived in the Hotel du Bosphore for the express purpose of being made love to. A petite femme. It was, of course, part of his mania for classification. But he did it with such conviction that she, miserable weakling that she was, found herself trying to live up to his idea of her” (Quartet, p. 118).
Rhys’s narrative style revolts against this mania for classification and, at the same time, formalizes the pain and confusion it causes. It seems to one critic that “the abrupt shifts into the thoughts of another character—often the one against whom the heroine is reacting—destroy the continuity of the narrative and weaken its psychological verisimilitude.”6 But Rhys is not interested in narrative continuity and verisimilitude, rather in the forces that disrupt such unities. That the voices of Heidler and Lois inhabit Marya’s mind indicates the degree to which she has been possessed, deprived of an authentic point of view, if such a thing exists, and eventually metamorphosed into a zombie,” . . . a thing. Quite dead” (Quartet, p. 123), or a soucriant, “as if all the blood in my body is being drained, very slowly, all the time, all the blood in my heart” (Quartet, p. 156). As she is possessed, Marya becomes obsessed: “Then her obsession gripped her, arid, torturing, gigantic, possessing her as utterly as the longing for water possesses someone who is dying of thirst” (Quartet, p. 117).
It is the “game” that makes such evil obeah possible, and the game depends upon marriage—Marya’s interrupted marriage and the Heidlers’ threatened one. Lois allows, even encourages, Heidler’s affairs but “doesn’t want to be given away; she doesn’t want anybody to know” (Quartet, p. 89). The “well-trained domestic animal,” “definitely of the species wife,” must submit to H. J., even become procuress for him, to deter him from leaving her permanently. In an early scene she appeals to Marya:
Her voice trembled. Marya was amazed to see tears in her eyes. . . . “You know,” Lois added, “H. J., I love him so terribly . . . and he isn’t awfully nice to me.”
They sat side by side on the divan and wept together. (Quartet, p. 53)
Such sisterly sympathy disappears, however, as the posturing trio repeat among themselves actions of sadomasochistic torment. Marya bows to Lois, who, like Sade’s Juliette, joins in torturing the Justine figure rather than become the victim herself: “‘Let’s go to Luna-park after dinner,’ she said. ‘We’ll put Mado on the joy wheel, and watch her being banged about a bit. Well, she ought to amuse us sometimes; she ought to sing for her supper; that’s what she’s here for, isn’t it?’” (Quartet, p. 85). In this dialogue we see how completely the carnival image has lost its ambiguity and solidified into cruelty. Here the inversion of joy and pain does not signify a liberating turnabout, but the successful appropriation and possession of another human being.
Marya’s methods of resistance resemble those of Antoinette and of Anna; they range from mockery and sarcasm, to running away, to the physical violence she inflicts on both Heidler and herself. Her mockery inverts the values of the world that oppresses her. The Heidlers’ well-fed good health and energetic intelligence, for instance, become synonyms for evil in Marya’s and the narrator’s satiric character descriptions. Marya imagines a conversation with Heidler:
She’d talk and all the time her eyes would be saying, “I loved you. I loved you. D’you remember?”
But he wouldn’t look at her eyes, or if he did he’d look away again very quickly. He’d be feeling healthy-minded, outrageously so. He’d long for cold baths and fresh air. Can’t she explain and get it over?
“Didn’t I tell her that she made me feel sick? The extraordinary persistence of this type of woman.” (Quartet, p. 177)
To Heidler, Marya now represents a diseased Other, one whose illness is contagious and threatens him. She does suffer recurring spells of real illness; he has in actuality informed her that she makes him sick. Marya and the narrator do not, however, acquiesce to the association of disease with evil and immorality in Heidler’s confused projections. When a woman in a cafe makes a nasty remark, the narrative describes her as “. . . very healthy looking . . . with long, very sharp teeth” (Quartet, p. 70). It is helpful to again consider the context of social reform movements of the early twentieth century, discussed in the previous chapter, that made health and purity their slogans, while harassing working-class women and depriving them of their civil liberties. In this light, we can see in Rhys’s first novel the gestures of turnabout that make illness oppose the established order of the healthy, unified ego, complacent in its cruelty.
Both the narrator and Marya mock Lois’s reasonable and well-informed discussions, her “healthy” frankness of mind:
Lois also discussed Love, Childbirth (especially childbirth, for the subject fascinated her), Complexes, Paris, Men, Prostitution, and Sensitiveness, which she thought an unmitigated nuisance.
“Clergymen’s daughters without money. Long slim fingers and all the rest. What’s the use of it? Those sort of people don’t do any good in the world.”
“Well, don’t worry,” answered Marya. “They’re getting killed off slowly.” (Quartet, p. 61)
Unhealthily “obsessed” with Heidler, Marya’s unconscious mind nevertheless sees through his posturing, classifying, and rationalizing. While she is ill and confined in Cannes, her dreams deride his pretenses at religious feeling:
“God’s a pal of mine,” he said. “He probably looks rather like me, with cold eyes and fattish hands. I’m in His image or He’s in mine. It’s all one. I prayed to Him to get you and I got you. Shall I give you a letter of introduction? Yes, I might do that if you remind me. No trouble at all. Now then, don’t be hysterical. Besides Lois was there first. Lois is a good woman and you are a bad one; it’s quite simple. These things are. That’s what is meant by having principles. Nobody owes a fair deal to a prostitute. It isn’t done. My dear girl, what would become of things if it were? Come, come to think it over. Intact or not intact, that’s the first question. An income or not an income, that’s the second.” (Quartet, p. 22)
Mocking Heidler, Marya also reflects critically on the class and sexual hypocrisy that divides women, the myth of the good woman/bad woman and its collusion in the morality of money and property.
Her inversions of bourgeois values, like the allusions to carnival scenes and masquerade, do not, however, help her transform the meaning of her possession by the Heidlers. Though resembling the methods of a slave, these gestures do not give her escape. She begs him to “say something nice to me” and lies “quivering and abject in his arms, like some unfortunate dog abasing itself before its master” (Quartet, p. 131). In the novel’s climactic scene, after Heidler has abandoned Marya, she screams at her husband: “You think I’d let you touch him? I love him.” A delicious relief flooded her as she said the words and she screamed again louder: “I love him! I love him!” (Quartet, p. 184). The scene contrasts sharply with the final pages in Wide Sargasso Sea when Antoinette dreams and then enacts her rejection of Rochester’s enslavement and chooses instead kinship with her black friend Tia.
Why don’t the Caribbean motifs work for the protagonist in Quartet as they do for Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea and, to a certain extent, for Anna in Voyage in the Dark? Why is it that these same motifs actually measure the degree to which she has been subjected to the wills of others? I think the answer lies in the novel’s social setting, in the Montmartre scene of upper-middle-class Paris where, in Bakhtinian terms, Carnival is co-opted into an “official feast.” The official feasts of the Middle Ages, according to Bakhtin, “did not lead the people out of the existing world order and created no second life. On the contrary, they sanctioned the existing pattern of things and reinforced it.”7 The feasts in Quartet occasionally resemble those of true carnivals; for instance, at the Bal du Printemps and at other numerous cafes and bars of Montmartre, couples “shake themselves and turn with abandon” and a cacophony of voices assaults Marya’s ears along with “the nasal music of the concertina of the bal musette” (Quartet, p. 73). Their official nature shows, however, at LeFranc’s, where the Heidlers take Marya to dine and Monsieur Le Franc thinks of Marya, “Ah, the grue!” It is true that, afterward, they watch two naked women dancing, while a woman resembling Gertrude Stein with “the head of a Roman emperor” paces and watches. Lois exclaims: “I’m bored, bored, bored! Look here. Let’s go to a music-hall, the promenoir of a music-hall, that’s what I feel like. Something canaille, what?” (Quartet, p. 85). Lois’s associations with the rabble are limited to the trendy, however, to just what is allowed at these official feasts in which class snobbery, cliqueishness, and fashionable appearances preside. Lois keeps up appearances by insisting that Marya be present at her parties. She then humiliates the necessarily silent Marya in front of the guests, claiming all the while to be “terribly fond” of her.
On her own behalf, Marya makes vague attempts at imaginary alliances with other women. Confined to the Hotel du Bosphore in a way that closely parallels Stephan’s imprisonment, she imagines “all the women who had lain where she was lying” (Quartet, p. 119). Thinking with tender nostalgia of her husband, she empathizes with other trapped and degraded human beings, especially women: “Soon, for her sentimental mechanism was very simple, she extended this passion to all the inmates of the prison, to the women who waited with her under the eye of the fat warder, to all unsuccessful and humbled prostitutes, to everybody who wasn’t plump, sleek, satisfied, smiling and hard-eyed” (Quartet, p. 125). But unlike the spiritual kinships of women with whom Antoinette and Anna choose to ally themselves, these women can provide no alternative cultural myth through which Marya might revise the meaning of her captivity. The renewal promised by carnival mockery eludes her, and she is left with the despair of modernist irony and satire.
Hence, she appears a masochist, a weak and self-destructive woman, even to herself (“weakling that she was”). Having thought of herself already in terms of a soucriant, a victimized vampire from whom all the blood has been drained, she awakens from a drugged dream one morning to discover that she has bitten her own arm. Even so, Marya is able, through the narrator’s voice, which comes close to and sometimes merges with her own, to comment satirically on discussions of “sensitiveness” and “weakness”:
Heidler said: “Lois doesn’t believe in fate, and she doesn’t approve of weakness.”
“Oh, it’s a damn convenient excuse sometimes,” answered Lois. The two women stared coldly at each other.
“After all,” remarked Marya suddenly, “weak, weak, how does anybody really know who’s weak and who isn’t? You don’t need to be a fine bouncing girl to stab anybody, either. The will to stab would be the chief thing, I should think.”
Heidler coughed. (Quartet, p. 87)
The dialogic perspective within the narrative does not find fulfillment in an alternative cultural language or myth, as we have seen; however, I think we might place it within the European context in which it appears, especially the context of psychological debate concerning the concept of “masochism” that took place during the 1920s. This debate participated in a larger one concerning the “nature” of female sexuality and involved such important figures in the history of psychoanalytical and social-psychological thought as Sigmund Freud, Karen Horney, and Havelock Ellis. Its ideas were current in Paris in the 1920s, furnishing topics for the “well-informed” and “intelligent” discussions that Lois loves and that Marya mocks.
Karen Horney began challenging Freud’s assumptions regarding the “primacy of the phallus” and “penis-envy” in the early 1920s. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s she continued to criticize accepted psychoanalytic thought regarding women and to propose that the “dread of women” on the part of men and a male-oriented society contributed to the inhibitions and conflicts felt by modern Western women. Between 1922 and 1926 she debated with Freud in an exchange of papers on the psychoanalytic theory of femininity.8 Horney’s 1922 paper, which initiated the exchange, questioned the assumption that women felt their bodies to be inferior and argued that such a perception of female bodies resulted from a male-oriented culture. She also suggested that women might experience a pleasurable sexuality of their own. Freud put forward his theory two years later, insisting upon the inferiority of the female body and the development of femininity through penis-envy. Then in 1926 Horney published two papers, one arguing that Freud’s view of women was a male fantasy, resulting from unconscious fears of women, that women enjoyed sexual desire and physical/psychological pleasure in motherhood that was undermined by their social subordination.9 In the second paper, discussing frigidity in women, Horney states, “Our culture, as is well known, is a male culture, and therefore by and large not favorable to the unfolding of woman and her individuality.”10 Always beginning with clinical data, she opposed prevailing psychoanalytic theories with empirical evidence that led her to cultural critiques of marriage. She viewed marriage, with its accompanying social ideals of romantic love and monogamy, as responsible for what had previously been diagnosed as inherent physiological/psychological disorders in women.11
The ideas Horney developed in these early debates led to a full critique of the concept of female masochism, which she felt related directly to the institution of marriage. From 1929 to 1933 she confronted not only Freud but also Helene Deutsch in her battle against antifemale psychoanalytic theories. Deutsch argued that women must renounce clitoral pleasure in favor of desire for a child and, to be normal, must accept their instinctual masochistic tendencies.12 Horney presented in response her 1933 paper, “The Problem of Feminine Masochism.” The basic ideas were not new to her theory of femininity, but she extended it to challenge this specific concept. Horney argued that the social conditions of modern Western societies induced the kind of masochism psychoanalysts found in their patients and that, in particular, the institution of marriage in our culture contributed to this phenomenon.
Among the conditions of women’s lives and of marriage, Horney cites many that describe Lois’s life with Heidler and Marya’s connections to both Stephan and Heidler. These include the estimation of women as inferior to men, the economic dependence of women on men or on family, the restrictions of women to spheres of life concerned primarily with emotional ties, sexual repression and lack of outlets for expansiveness, and a surplus of marriageable women, “particularly when marriage offers the principal opportunity for sexual gratification, children, security, and social recognition.”13 These constraints destroy women’s chances to establish secure and confident identities or to develop their own voices and points of view. They become vulnerable to other people’s views of them and susceptible, like Marya and Lois, to their manipulation and control.
The conditions described by Horney certainly apply to male-female relations as Rhys’s characters experience them and, according to Horney, are likely to produce any or all of the following masochistic symptoms: an inhibited and emotionally dependent personality; a weak and helpless self-image; the use of weakness and helplessness in struggles for power and as reasons for special consideration; and the tendency to behave submissively, to be and feel exploited, to confer responsibility on men. All of these symptoms are aspects of the masochistic tendency “to arrange in fantasies, dreams, or in the real world, situations that imply suffering; or to feel suffering in situations that would not have this concomitant for the average person.”14
According to Horney, then, the social conditions of women’s lives in modern Western culture generate the attributes of clinically diagnosed masochism. Horney’s study points out the contradiction between a diagnosis of masochism as pathological and the theory that it results from women’s physiological nature. If both theses were correct, all women would be naturally masochistic and, at the same time, neurotic, implying a nonexistent model of unnatural but normal womanhood. Her analysis reveals the logical contradictions and masculine fantasies informing some critical evaluations of Rhys’s heroines as masochistic and thereby representatives of an archetypal “Woman.”15 Attempting “to shake off this [masculine] mode of thought,”16 as did Horney in reading her clinical data, we discover instead in Rhys’s novels the specific social conditions that create an insecure and dependent ego in women. The narrative in Quartet reveals the social construction of an uncertain and vacillating feminine point of view.
In her attempts to combat what she perceived as psychoanalytic misogyny, Horney failed to take into account something Freud wrestled with: the construction of gender and sexual identity through the unconscious. Freud is most radical in his theories of female sexuality when he questions the difficult “very circuitous path” that leads to “the ultimate normal feminine attitude.”17 Horney bases her arguments on biological characteristics (as does Freud at times) and assumes female desire for heterosexual relations and motherhood to be natural as well as normal. In this respect, her theories are seriously flawed, especially from a Lacanian perspective.18 Yet because Horney moves analytically between cultural institutions and the unconscious and because this analytical orientation leads her to focus on heterosexual marriage as an institution, her theories have descriptive power. Most important, they contribute to the discourses of “Love, Childbirth . . . , Complexes . . .” to which Quartet alludes and which are the conditions for the kinds of questions the novel can raise and explore.
Thrown together in ways that enhance the social causes of masochism described by Horney, Lois and Marya dramatically enact its symptoms, giving to Heidler the role of tormentor and borrowing some of his tricks when it suits them.19 Lois—who enjoys no other sexual relation, has no children, believes women to be inferior to men, and depends on Heidler economically, emotionally, and socially—competes with Marya and every other available woman for Heidler’s continued support. She sacrifices her integrity, compromising and complying with her husband’s desires; she inhibits expression of her own wishes, limiting them only to the need to keep up appearances. But like Caribbean planters’ wives, who so abused their slaves, Lois behaves in sadistic ways as well, admiring and attempting to ally herself with the master by becoming like him in an exaggerated manner.20
[Lois] made an impatient and expressive gesture, as if to say:
“D’you suppose that I care what you are, or think or feel? I’m talking about the man, the male, the important person, the only person who matters.” (Quartet, p. 81)
Lois . . . sat very straight, dominating the situation and talking steadily in a cool voice.
“We must get Mado another hat, H. J.”
Heidler looked sideways at Marya cautiously and critically.
“She must be chic,” his wife went on. “She must do us credit.” She might have been discussing the dressing of a doll. (Quartet, p. 85)
Unable to forge any alliances and finding no one to imitate, Marya vacillates between begging Heidler to “be kind to Lois” (Quartet, p. 106) and threatening fantastically to “strangle your cad of a Lois—kill her, d’you see?” (Quartet, p. 130). She feels “like a marionette,” complicit in their possession and control of her: “It seemed to her that, staring at the couple, she had hypnotized herself into thinking, as they did, that her mind was part of their minds . . .” (Quartet, p. 98). And she longs “to assert her point of view.”
While the debate over the “nature” of female sexuality and the concept of female masochism opened wide during the 1920s, it began to close in the next decade with the victory of the traditional Freudian view. Female masochism as a natural and simultaneously neurotic aspect of women’s development became analytical dogma and also gained much popular support in the early decades of the twentieth century through the widely read work of the British sexologists, in particular Havelock Ellis.
Ellis’s multivolumed and much-printed Studies in the Psychology of Sex represented a progressive challenge to Victorian taboos by arguing that women experienced a natural sexual passion. However, Ellis defined female sexual desire as heterosexual, maternal, and (here, quite unlike Horney) masochistic. In the interplay of Horney’s and Ellis’s theories, we see some of the social limitations to arguments possible during this time. Both Ellis and Horney believed in an innate heterosexuality and an innate wish in women for motherhood, while Horney criticized the masculine bias in psychoanalysis and the feminine subordination instituted in marriage. She based her counterarguments most often on what she considered natural or biological conditions unique to female sexuality that the masculine orientation in psychoanalysis simply missed. Her critique lost out, however, to orthodox Freudian views of the “normal feminine attitude” and then to those popularized by Ellis, who stated that only in marriage could a woman’s natural sexuality unfold. Female desire expressed itself, Ellis argued, in modesty and reluctance and then took “delight in experiencing physical pain when inflicted by a lover, and [expressed] an eagerness to accept subjection to his will.”21 Such pleasure in pain, he wrote, “is certainly normal” and complemented the masculine desire to exercise force which “may easily pass into a kind of sadism, but . . . is nevertheless in its origin an innocent and instinctive impulse.”22 Influential during the Edwardian period, Ellis’s views, unlike Horney’s, became widely popular during the 1920s and 1930s especially, and ironically, through the many marriage manuals published during those years.
Readers and critics of Rhys’s novels have inherited, I would argue, the official psychoanalytic and popular conclusions of a debate that had earlier, during the time that Rhys began writing, opened to question the nature of female sexuality. We tend to read Quartet not in the context of Horney’s challenges but with attitudes similar to those expressed in the 1935 review of Voyage in the Dark mentioned in the preceding chapter. That reviewer found in the novel a neurological study of a pathological woman. The reviewer’s language mimics that of a clinician, assuming that the reading public will accept and understand such terms. Focusing exclusively on an individual woman’s “character” or personality, it forgoes any discussion of how those traits develop within certain social conditions and in interaction with others who have the power to categorize “that type of woman.” I am not arguing that Rhys read Horney’s papers or followed the debate I have described; I think the questions posed by the debate were available to her through the cultural climate in which she wrote, and her Caribbean background provided insight into racial and sexual power relations that opened to dialogic questioning in her writing any official conclusions about feminine masochism.
Though the narrative stays close to Marya’s perspective, Quartet works with the problem of point of view and in this way inscribes thematically and stylistically the dialogic questioning of official judgments. Each character almost ritualistically states his or her pretensions at understanding the other’s point of view:
She looked at Marya with a dubious but intelligent expression as if to say: “Go on. Explain yourself. I’m listening. I’m making an effort to get at your point of view.” (Quartet, p. 51)
“I’m not saying,” he told her, with a judicial expression, “that I don’t see your point of view.” (Quartet, p. 106)
Marya’s possession dispossesses her of point of view. Through recurring suggestions of another character’s interiority within hers and through the fluctuation in narrative voice that tends to merge with Marya’s, we perceive the process of psychic displacement. For one must stand on stable and certain ground long enough to develop a perspective that may be described as a particular point of view, and Marya’s stance is constantly endangered. Moreover, no cultural myth other than that of female masochism is available to her as a means by which to transform the meaning of her degradation or to renew her life. The critical questioning of that myth in this novel finds expression through a modernist irony that inverts bourgeois values but cannot transcend despair.
In Bakhtin’s discussion of the changes in carnival imagery throughout literary history, he identifies Romanticism and its influences in modernism as transforming the meaning of the carnival so that it loses its regenerative qualities to angry satire.23 The mask becomes a way to deceive, to keep a secret; the marionette becomes “the puppet as victim . . . the tragic doll.”24 Whatever traces of ambiguity and potential joy emerged in Marya’s initial loosening from her marriage disappear as she becomes more and more isolated from any community or subculture that might have preserved the original popular nature of the carnival motifs in the novel. Her fear of life represented in the life of the streets becomes the overpowering force, and she is consumed in the official feast of the Heidlers’ marriage.
The irony of the novel is fulfilled when we realize that Marya has found a place for herself. No longer allowed to wander the streets (“it wouldn’t do to leave the girl trailing round Montparnasse looking as ill as all that”), nor to see her own friends, nor finally to stay with Stephan on his release, Marya finds her place within the fold of the family. A loose woman, she’s been tightened up, regulated, controlled. The ambiguous threat she once posed to the Heidlers’ marriage as a helpless and available woman no longer subverts the rules of their game.
Marya loses her place again at the end of the novel when she defies Heidler’s injunction against seeing Stephan, who has been released from prison. Assuming the double standard as the foundational rule to his game, Heidler insists, “I’ve never shared a woman in my life, not knowingly anyhow, and I’m not going to start now” (Quartet, p. 147). He no longer visits Marya and sends her only small amounts of money, not enough for her to help Stephan or to leave France with him. In the final, rather melodramatic scene, Stephan plans to kill Heidler, and Marya hysterically threatens him with the police. Stephan strikes her so that she falls, hitting her forehead on the edge of the table and losing—literally now—her consciousness. Stephan hurries outside where a Mademoiselle Chardin waits to pick him up. She wants to go to a hotel she knows: “‘Encore une grue,’ he was thinking” (Quartet, p. 186).
Though initially displaced into the Paris of the 1920s and bohemian life, supposedly free of bourgeois prejudices and Victorian attitudes toward marriage and sexuality, Marya finds herself in a situation resembling Antoinette’s in the nineteenth-century setting of Rhys’s last novel, Wide Sargasso Sea—that of a woman driven to illness and madness or neurosis, confined by a man she loves, and seemingly acquiescent in her fate. The same power dynamics appear in this modern setting in different forms, characters, and ideologies—a reorganization of sex and power under the guise of sophistication. We are reminded of Christophine’s complaints about neocolonialism: “These new ones have Letter of the Law. Same thing. They got magistrate. They got fine. They got jail house and chain gang. They got tread machine to mash up people’s feet. New ones worse than old ones—more cunning that’s all” (Sea, pp. 26–27). And perhaps Lois’s tolerance of her husband’s in-house affair differs little from the plantation wife’s acceptance of her master/husband’s extramarital sex life on the estate.
Bohemian experimentation of the 1920s promised adventure and liberation. Reading Quartet, however, we discover the shadow side to the sexual revolution; the institution of marriage still regulates the sexual lives of women. It constructs socially a feminine identity that then conveniently, if illogically, fits a psychological diagnosis of pathological yet normal female masochism. The Heidlers’ marriage imprisons Marya as brutally as the Santé imprisons Stephan. It confines Lois and ultimately H. J., too, but their voices prevail and gain power in the official feast that the erotically ambiguous figure of a marginalized woman threatens. Taken in, her identity spliced and reassembled, Marya becomes the other woman, the mistress who finds her place but loses her point of view within a tormented and oppressive marriage.
Jean Rhys initiated her narrative experiments in an exploration and critique of feminine masochism as engendered through modern European marriage; her second novel to be published, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), addresses social and literary conventions of romance, countering them through narrative repetition that reveals the illusion of “character” in the context of a social backlash against female independence and adventure.