Introduction
1. Kenneth Ramchand, “An Introduction to this Novel,” in The Lonely Londoners, by Sam Selvon, p. 3.
2. Nancy R. Harrison points to this description of the lover talking and Rhys feeling as indicative of the sexual difference Rhys’s narrative style inscribes (Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text).
3. Pierre d’Ailly, Cardinal of Cambria, Imago Mundi (1410–1480), quoted by Christopher Columbus in marginal notes on his own copy. The passage describes a land near the Orient that Columbus later thought he had rediscovered from the West when he arrived in what he named the West Indies. See Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, trans. and ed. Samuel Eliot Morison.
4. Teresa O’Connor adopts this term in Jean Rhys: The West Indian Novels to divide Rhys’s novels into two groups according to their settings, rather than the history of the literary movements to which they contribute.
5. I have depended upon the following sources for chronological information. Where sources differ, I have made decisions based on the evidence brought to bear and agreements among most reliable or most recent sources. In some instances, exact dates, especially for periods of composition, were not available, and I have indicated the general period or most likely dates: Diana Athill, “Foreword,” in Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, by Jean Rhys, pp. 10–15; Arnold E. Davidson, Jean Rhys, pp. ix–x; Jean Rhys Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa; Jean Rhys, The Letters of Jean Rhys, ed. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly, pp. 13–16; Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography; Thomas F. Staley, Jean Rhys: A Critical Study, chap. 1.
1. Bruce King, The New English Literatures: Cultural Nationalism in a Changing World, p. 107.
2. According to the chronology presented by Diana Athill in Smile Please and to other sources as well, Rhys was born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams. In the chapter titled “Chorus Girls” (Smile Please, p. 107), Rhys mentions that “Gray was the name I was using then.” Carole Angier describes Rhys’s use of Ella and Emma Gray during the time she worked on the stage (Jean Rhys, chap. 2). According to Wyndham and Melly, Rhys took the stage name of Vivien Gray; her daughter Maryvonne preferred that she use her given name, Ella, long after she had been calling herself Jean (The Letters of Jean Rhys, pp. 13, 90, and 93n).
3. Elizabeth Burns discusses the social marginality of the theater throughout European history in Theatricality. Julie Holledge describes how women in the Edwardian theater recognized their subversive potential and began to use the stage for political purposes (Innocent Flowers: Women in the Edwardian Theater). See Albert Auster’s Actresses and Suffragists: Women in the American Theater, 1890–1920 for discussions of the feminization of the American theater and of feminist theater at the turn of the century.
4. Rhys, Smile Please, p. 52.
5. Roger D. Abrahams and John F. Szwed emphasize these qualities of the Caribbean carnival and their potential for catalyzing revolt: “. . . we do have considerable evidence that many rebellions which occurred did begin during one or another season of license. . . . at least 35% of the rebellions in the British Caribbean were planned or executed in late December” (After Africa, p. 226). Such evidence goes against the theory that carnival celebrations only reversed power hierarchies in order to reaffirm and sustain them. Discussion of the literary and “real” effects of carnival rebellion appears in recent literary criticism, including Terry Castle, “The Carnivalization of Eighteenth-Century English Narrative,” PMLA 99 (1984): 903–991; and Natalie Davis, “Women on Top,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France.
6. In After Africa, Abrahams and Szwed describe the history of Jamaican set dances, which they state began as peasant dances in Europe, then spread to the upper classes, only to be changed, then carried to the West Indies by European planters whose slaves took them up and again changed them (p. 227).
7. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Introduction,” Rabelais and His World.
8. For brief introductory discussions of the theme of masks in Rhys’s fiction, see Judith Thurman, “The Mistress and the Mask,” Ms. 4, no. 7 (January 1976): 50–53; and Helen Tiffin, “Colonial Motifs in the Novels of Jean Rhys,” World Literature Written in English 17 (April 1978): 328–341.
9. Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1974), pp. 108–109. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited in the text.
10. Teresa de Lauretis discusses these two terms and their implications for feminist theory in “Issues, Terms, and Contexts,” in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis, p. 17. The metaphor of the mask is also important to theories of colonization and its psychological effects on the colonized person. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.
11. With the term “carnivalesque,” I am referring to Mikhail Bakhtin’s influential discussion of the role of the European medieval carnival in literature and especially the novel. See his “Introduction,” in Rabelais and His World. For feminist perspectives on Bakhtin’s theory, see Dale M. Bauer, Feminist Dialogics: A Theory of Failed Community; Davis, “Women on Top”; and Mary Russo, “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis.
12. Russo, “Female Grotesques,” p. 214.
13. Ibid., p. 217.
14. Ibid. The portrayals of the carnival as “historical performance” place Rhys’s novels in a tradition of West Indian literature in which Carnival figures as a climactic turning point. Some examples include Paule Marshall, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People; Sam Selvon, Moses Migrating; Earl Lovelace, The Dragon Can’t Dance; and Wilson Harris, Carnival
15. Cheryl M. L. Dash, “Jean Rhys,” in West Indian Literature, ed. Bruce King, p. 197.
16. Such rearrangement and the implied, if not explicit, conflation of author and character appear in many critical discussions, including Elgin Mellown, “Character and Themes in the Novels of Jean Rhys,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 13, no. 4 (Autumn 1972): 459–475; Peter Wolfe, Jean Rhys; Harrison, Jean Rhys and the Novel as Woman’s Text; and Dash, “Jean Rhys.” Though Harrison takes the single protagonist line, her study represents a partial exception to the fiction-as-autobiography argument since she redefines autobiography to give it a collective import—that is, the women Rhys writes about and for include herself but others, her readers, as well. Harrison still, however, conforms to biographical methods by citing Rhys’s personal and autobiographical writings as evidence for interpretations of the novels. The most flagrant identification of author with character appears in the undocumented study by Angier, Jean Rhys.
17. Veronica Marie Gregg, “Jean Rhys and Modernism: A Different Voice,” Jean Rhys Review 1, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 30–46.
18. Rhys, The Letters of Jean Rhys, ed. Wyndham and Melly, and the various manuscripts in the Jean Rhys Collection, including the original version of Voyage in the Dark, a radio script of Good Morning, Midnight, early drafts of short stories, and unpublished short stories and essays, which were often reworked into the published fiction. See Gregg, “Jean Rhys and Modernism,” for a detailed account of the many drafts and the changes they underwent in Rhys’s writing.
19. O’Connor, Jean Rhys.
20. For a summary of Rhys’s life that includes a description of her relationship with Ford, see Staley, Jean Rhys, chap. 1.
21. King, The New English Literatures, chaps. 6 and 7.
22. Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940, p. 448.
23. Wolfe (Jean Rhys) states that Rhys disguised herself in her characters, but he sees this disguise as a means of autobiography and does not consider the subversive nature of masquerade.
24. Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other,” After the Great Divide, pp. 44–64.
25. Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting, p. 35.
26. Both O’Connor (Jean Rhys) and Harrison (Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text) treat only Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark.
27. These are the reasons given by Harrison (Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text) for her exclusive focus on these two novels. O’Connor does stress the importance of the West Indies as a place in a governing fictional myth. However, her study brings their history to bear as evidence for a psychological thesis concerning Rhys’s relation to her mother and the trajectory of Rhys’s career.
28. Elizabeth Nunez-Harrell, “The Paradoxes of Belonging: The White West Indian Woman in Fiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 31, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 1–2.
29. Ramchand, “An Introduction to this Novel,” p. 3. Ramchand’s description may also take into account the questions Anna’s aunt raises concerning her lineage as possibly racially mixed.
30. Derek Walcott, “A Far Cry from Africa,” in The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English, ed. Paula Burnett, p. 243.
31. Louis James, “Introduction,” in The Islands in Between, ed. Louis James, p. 8.
32. Everett V. Stonequist, The Marginal Man, p. 8.
33. Tiffin, “Mirror and Mask,” p. 328.
34. Jean Rhys, “How I Became a Novelist,” unpub. ms., Jean Rhys Collection, quoted in Gregg, “Jean Rhys and Modernism,” p. 32.
35. V. S. Naipaul uses these phrases to describe what must have been the European attitude toward the Caribbean in the 1920s. Quoted in Gregg, “Jean Rhys and Modernism,” pp. 32–33.
36. Trevor James, English Literature from the Third World, p. 17. See also Bruce King, “Introduction,” in West Indian Literature, ed. Bruce King, p. 6.
37. See Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, for a post–Wide Sargasso Sea discussion of Jane Eyre that views Bertha Rochester as symbolic of Jane’s repressed rage. Elizabeth Baer traces the parallels between Jane and Antoinette in both novels, arguing that in Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys presents them as “sisters” (“The Sisterhood of Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway Mason,” in The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland).
38. The exceptions usually appear in essays by critics of Third World literature who address the implications of womanhood as presented in Rhys’s novels. They tend not to draw on feminist theory or criticism to do so. These include, most notably, Tiffin, “Mirror and Mask”; Nunez-Harrell, “The Paradoxes of Belonging”; and Erika Smilowitz, “Childlike Women and Paternal Men: Colonialism in Jean Rhys’s Fiction,” Ariel 17, no. 4 (October 1986): 93–104. Their analyses also tend to make analogous the social hierarchies of colonial and sexual oppression so that the protagonists are seen as all the more victimized. Selma James (The Ladies and the Mammies) identifies Rhys as a West Indian writer in sensibility and style. James, nevertheless, bases her discussion of Rhys’s work on a comparison with that of Jane Austen. O’Connor’s study (Jean Rhys) examines the “West Indian” novels within their Caribbean setting, but their location is important to her more for a psychological than a literary, cultural, or historical reading of Jean Rhys’s vision. Bev E. L. Brown’s essay, “Mansong and Matrix: A Radical Experiment,” Kunapipi 7, nos. 2 and 3 (1985): 68–80, is exceptional in its analysis of specifically female Creole patterns in Rhys’s writing.
39. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., pp. 262–280.
40. Judith Kegan Gardiner and Susan Squier have written about the ways in which Good Morning, Midnight suggests a critique of modernism through ironical allusions to works of Rhys’s contemporaries. See Susan Squier, “‘Yes—Yes’: Sasha Jansen as a Critique of Molly Bloom” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, Houston, Texas, 1980); and Judith Kegan Gardiner, “Good Morning, Midnight; Good Night, Modernism,” Boundary 2 11, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1982–83): 233–252. My point here, however, is that the very structure of Rhys’s novels alters as a result of a Third World perspective that disrupts that of European modernism.
41. See Jean Rhys to Selma Vaz Dias, January 23, 1950, and the Green Exercise Book, Jean Rhys Collection.
42. Luce Irigaray writes, “It is therefore useless to trap women into giving an exact definition of what they mean, to make them repeat (themselves) so the meaning will be clear. They are already elsewhere than in this discursive machinery where you claim to take them by surprise.” See Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which Is Not One,” trans. Claudia Reeder, in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, p. 103.
43. Sandra Drake, Wilson Harris and the Modern Tradition: A New Architecture of the World, p. 175.
44. Drake identifies Third World modernism in her book on Wilson Harris (ibid.). I am aware of the problems in using the term “Third World”; it can become, as Régis Debray has charged, a dumping ground or “shapeless sack” that obscures whole peoples and continents and the differences among them. I use it here to call attention to emerging literatures that are ignored or marginalized in English departments and also to set up a view of Jean Rhys’s writing as working in between problematic categories such as “British,” “English,” and “Third World.” For a history of the term “Third World,” see Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature, pp. 5–6.
45. Perry Anderson identifies the social, political, and economic conditions of literary modernism in “Modernity and Revolution,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. He describes a triad of factors—persisting dominance by the aristocratic landowning classes; emergence of novel and key technologies; and the imaginative proximity of social revolution—as present in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and in “developing” Third World countries in the 1960s and 1970s.
46. Rhys’s personal feelings about the history of slavery were quite mixed, for she wished to believe that her slave-owning grandfather might not have been a cruel man; yet she also identified closely with the blacks and their sufferings. See the Black Exercise Book, Jean Rhys Collection; and O’Connor, Jean Rhys, especially chap. 1. Writing about the struggles for independence, however, Rhys stated that it served the white people of the West Indies right to be no longer on top (Black Exercise Book).
47. Staley, Jean Rhys, p. 16; and O’Connor, Jean Rhys, p. 70.
48. Rhonda Cobham, “The Background,” in West Indian Literature, ed. Bruce King; Bruce King, “Introduction,” in ibid.; and Trevor James, “The Caribbean,” in English Literature from the Third World.
49. Elaine Campbell, “Introduction,” in The Orchid House, by Phyllis Shand Allfrey; and “From Dominica to Devonshire, A Momento of Jean Rhys,” Kunapipi 1, no. 2 (1979): 13; Nunez-Harrell, “The Paradox of Belonging.” In a letter dated December 6, 1960, Rhys describes her attempts to write “patois” and says that she has not read “any of the ‘West Indian’ people” (The Letters of Jean Rhys, p. 197). She may not have read them but she clearly knew about them and shared their project of representing in literature the folk dialects of the Caribbean.
50. Edward Brathwaite, quoted in Campbell, “Introduction,” p. xv.
51. Simone Schwarz-Bart, The Bridge of Beyond, trans. Barbara Bray.
2. Countertexts, Countercommunities
1. Wilson Harris, “The Writer and Society,” in Tradition, the Writer and Society, p. 48.
2. Ibid.
3. Harris, “Tradition and the West Indian Novel,” in Tradition, the Writer and Society, p. 28.
4. Mary Louise Pratt, “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., pp. 138–162. See also Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Boundary 2 12, no. 3 / 13, no. 1 (Spring–Fall 1984): 333–353, on the ways a similar dynamic operates in the discourse of Western feminism so that it constitutes its subject—the secular, mobile, independent woman—by positing Third World women as an undifferentiated mass, different only in respect to European and North American women.
5. Anne McClintock, “Maidens, Maps, and Mines: The Reinvention of Patriarchy in Colonial South Africa,” South Atlantic Quarterly 87 (Winter 1988): 163.
6. According to McClintock, scientists positioned the white prostitute on the threshold between white and black races. However, comparing the iconography of modem painting with that of medical texts, Sander Gilman finds that the white prostitute and the female “Hottentot” were identified with one another at the very bottom of the scale. See McClintock, “Maidens, Maps, and Mines”; and Sander Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., pp. 223–261.
7. Huyssen, “Introduction,” p. vii.
8. Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman,” p. 52.
9. Joseph Conrad, “A Familiar Preface,” in A Personal Record, p. 10.
10. See Judith Walkowitz’s account of the campaign to defeat the Contagious Diseases Acts in Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State; and, for a first-hand account of the repeal campaign, see Josephine Butler, Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade.
11. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar open the first volume of No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century with an epigraph from The Education of Henry Adams in which Henry Adams describes the “myriads of new types” of women “created since 1840” that “had been set free . . . running into millions on millions.”
12. See Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society; and Mary Poovey, “‘Scenes of an Indelicate Character’: The Medical ‘Treatment’ of Victorian Women,” Representations 14 (Spring 1986): 137–168.
13. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, “The Uses and Abuses of Anthropology,” Signs 5, no. 3 (Spring 1980): 389–417.
14. Sandra M. Gilbert, “Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War,” Signs 8, no. 3 (Spring 1983): 422–450; and No Man’s Land, vol. 2, Sexchanges, chap. 7.
15. Paul Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics: The Approaches to Symbol,” in Freud and Philosophy, pp. 494–552.
16. Anthony Layng, “Dominica, An Island in Need of an Historian,” Caribbean Quarterly 19, no. 4 (December 1973): 36–41.
17. Raymond Meyer helped me to identify and translate this passage.
18. Elizabeth Abel, “Women and Schizophrenia: The Fiction of Jean Rhys,” Contemporary Literature 20, no. 2 (1979): 155–177.
19. Robert Park, “Human Migration and the Marginal Man,” in Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, ed. Richard Sennett, pp. 131–142; Stonequist, The Marginal Man.
20. Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, p. 349.
21. Ibid.
3. Wide Sargasso Sea: Obeah Nights
1. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (New York and London: Norton, 1982), p. 102. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited in the text.
2. Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock, pp. 13–14.
3. Drake defines Third World modernism in Wilson Harris and the Modern Tradition.
4. Ibid., p. 4.
5. Wilson Harris, “The Whirling Stone,” in The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination, p. 55.
6. Richard Price, “Introduction: Maroons and Their Communities,” in Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, pp. 1–30; Selwyn R. Cudjoe, Resistance and Caribbean Literature, chap. 1.
7. Florence Harris, quoted in Ancestral Voices 4: Ancient Caribbean Music, Ritual and Dance (London: Arts Center, Commonwealth Institute, 1986), p. 11. For a discussion of Maroon Nanny as an ancestor of Christophine in Wide Sargasso Sea, see Angelita Reyes, “Maroon Nanny and Creole Difference: Reconsidering Jean Rhys’s West Indian Landscape and Wide Sargasso Sea.”
8. See especially Nancy K. Miller, “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s Fiction,” in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter, pp. 339–360.
9. Elizabeth Baer, “The Sisterhood of Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway.”
10. Williams, From Columbus to Castro, p. 199.
11. Drake, Wilson Harris and the Modern Tradition, p. 23.
12. Williams, From Columbus to Castro, p. 199.
13. Ivor Morrish, Obeah, Christ and Rastaman: Jamaica and Its Religions, p. 40.
14. Abrahams and Szwed, After Africa, p. 182.
15. Sandra Drake has discussed the importance of the zombie motif in Wide Sargasso Sea in “‘All That Foolishness’: The Zombi and Afro-Caribbean Culture in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.” In Smile Please (p. 30), Rhys defines soucriant (“women . . . who came at night and sucked your blood. During the day they looked like ordinary women but you could tell them by their red eyes”) and zombie (“black shapeless things . . . you didn’t see them . . .”).
16. For descriptions of obeah practices and their social functions, see Morrish, Obeah, Christ and Rastaman; Abrahams and Szwed, After Africa; and Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery.
17. Peter Wolfe describes Antoinette in this scene as “beyond the purviews of reason” (Jean Rhys, p. 146). Helen Nebeker writes of Antoinette’s “unreasoning fear and essential dependency,” concluding that Antoinette (and “woman” in Rhys’s novels) is “ultimately the victim, not of man but of herself” (Jean Rhys: Woman in Passage, p. 155). Teresa O’Connor states that Antoinette visits Christophine because she is “sexually obsessed, tormented by . . . desire” and that “the desire to please the man” is “the first step in the cycle of descent of Rhys’s women” (Jean Rhys, pp. 191, 164).
18. Wolfe does state that, while Antoinette’s voice in Part II “breaks narrative consistency” (a flaw in his view), it does so at a time “when she reveals her true worth.” He finds her worth, however, in the love for Rochester he sees expressed in her demand for an aphrodisiac (Jean Rhys, p. 146). This “love” is exactly the quality that O’Connor, in line with Thomas Staley, sees as “sexual obsession.” Staley also faults Antoinette for her “assumption that sexual passion can evoke and redeem love” (Jean Rhys, p. 112).
19. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers, pp. 2, 5.
20. Staley discusses both Rochester’s and Antoinette’s character flaws as responsible for their inability to form “a vital union” (Jean Rhys, p. 116). Wolfe, faulting Rochester, describes the “excellent prospects for happiness” that he and Antoinette might have enjoyed (Jean Rhys, p. 114). O’Connor states, “With their union, the dissolution and resolution of the opposites symbolized by their respective homes might have been possible” (Jean Rhys, p. 157).
21. Harris, Tradition, the Writer and Society, pp. 28–30, quoted in Drake, Wilson Harris and the Modern Tradition, p. 7. Harris’s critique of the self-sufficient and consolidated character contrasts strongly with the assumption made in O’Connor’s critical study of Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark that the normal healthy ego is centered psychologically through a positive mother-child relationship.
22. For discussions of Anancy folktales and their social functions, see Abrahams and Szwed, After Africa; Wilson Harris, “The Whirling Stone”; and Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery.
23. Gordon Lewis, The Growth of the Modern West Indies, chap. 7.
24. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans, and ed. James Strachey, especially chap. 6. Nancy Harrison also discusses Antoinette’s dreams from a Freudian perspective, but her interest lies in their expression of a female, rather than a more specifically Third World or Caribbean female, text. In line with current emphases on mother-daughter relations in Rhys’s writing, she describes Antoinette’s dreams as a “mother text” (Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text, chap. 7).
25. Jacques Lacan, “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious,” in The Structuralists from Marx to Lévi-Strauss, ed. Richard and Fernande De George.
26. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 279.
27. Baer discusses textual parallels that link Jane and Antoinette in “The Sisterhood of Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway.”
28. Harris, “The Whirling Stone,” p. 58.
29. Wilson Harris, “Carnival of the Psyche: Wide Sargasso Sea,” Kunapipi 2, no. 2 (1980): 143–144.
30. Wilson Harris identifies this voice as coming from ancient endangered peoples in “Jean Rhys’s ‘Tree of Life,’” Review of Contemporary Fiction 5, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 114–117.
31. Tiffin, in “Mirror and Mask,” makes the point that Rochester’s treatment of Antoinette allows her to overcome historical and racial barriers separating her from the island’s blacks. Edward Brathwaite has argued to the contrary in “Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean,” in Savacou, Monograph 1. He states that “no matter what Jean Rhys might have made Antoinette think, Tia was historically separated from her” by racist ideologies and by the gulf, imposed by white Creoles as a group, between themselves and black West Indians (pp. 36–38). Brathwaite makes a valid point concerning actual historical events and ideologies as well as concerning Wide Sargasso Sea if one considers literature as obligated to reflect historical “reality.” He does not consider, however, the novel as a creative response to that history and to its eclipse in nineteenth-century English fiction, a response written in another historical period of West Indian and colonial histories. Thus, he does not consider the ways in which the novel exposes Antoinette’s racism as partly responsible for her dilemma nor the myth-making strategies of Rhys’s writing that link Antoinette’s consciousness to other groups of Caribbean peoples; nor does he consider her marriage as a kind of slavery, despite explicit portrayals of Rochester’s legal possession and confinement of Antoinette and the rituals of slavery enacted in their relationship.
32. Ronnie Scharfman compares Antoinette to Simone Schwarz-Bart’s character Telumee and states that Telumee keeps her “self” intact by joining female history because of early successful bonding with her grandmother. In contrast, she argues, Antoinette’s inability to bond with her mother leads her to simply repeat her mother’s madness and self-destruction. This interpretation denies the transformative power of Antoinette’s vision and ignores the specifically Caribbean elements that enable Antoinette to overcome her alienation. See Ronnie Scharfman, “Mirroring and Mothering in Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea,” Yale French Studies 62 (1982): 88–106. Scharfman, Harrison (Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text), and Nancy J. Leigh emphasize sexual difference and focus on mother-daughter relations, neglecting the racial and cultural differences determining Antoinette’s situation. Leigh even takes the European perspective that associates colonial natives with children by referring to native religion as a “childhood belief” in her discussion of the importance to Antoinette of her name. See Nancy J. Leigh, “Mirror, Mirror: The Development of Female Identity in Jean Rhys’s Fiction,” World Literature Written in English 25, no. 2 (1985): 270–285.
The predominance of analysis of the mother-daughter relationship in Rhys’s life and writing testifies, I think, to its currency in feminist criticism and its ability to illuminate writing by women. However, while illuminating, it limits interpretation to an emphasis on sexual difference or flattens other kinds of difference to analogy with the sexual. It also encourages an ahistorical approach, or one that assumes twentieth-century European psychological norms to be representative. Rhys’s novels remain compelling to us perhaps in part because they exceed our current categories of feminist analysis and call for a more complex theoretical accounting of social and textual difference.
33. Deborah Kelly Kloepfer argues that Rhys’s characters are silenced or misunderstood “as the novels turn into schizophrenic monologues” and that such censorship is concurrent with maternal loss. See “Voyage in the Dark: Jean Rhys’s Masquerade for the Mother,” Contemporary Literature 26, no. 4 (1985): 443–459; and The Unspeakable Mother: Forbidden Discourse in Jean Rhys and H. D. I disagree that the narrative monologues are schizophrenic and see in them instead, as argued in Chapter 1, a strategy for identifying and engaging in dialogue with other marginalized people. Harrison (Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text) also discusses the silencing of Rhys’s characters and argues that in Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea, the silenced woman speaks through actions and words given to her by men. In these two novels, Rhys “speaks out loud what is left unsaid” in dialogues between men and women, thus retrieving the woman’s voice. Harrison states that only in Wide Sargasso Sea does the female voice displace the dominant masculine discourse that suppresses it. Her analysis, however, is largely based on sexual difference. In contrast to both, Brown (“Mansong and Matrix”) has demonstrated the ways in which Rhys’s characters speak, not only against the suppression of masculine discourse, but through specifically female Creole patterns. By addressing the masculine bias in Edward Brathwaite’s theory of creolization, Brown positions Rhys’s characters as women within a specifically Caribbean context.
34. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics.
35. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering; Elizabeth Abel, “(E)Merging Identities: The Dynamics of Female Friendship in Contemporary Fiction by Women,” Signs 6, no. 3 (1981): 413–435; Judith Kegan Gardiner, “On Female Identity and Writing by Women,” in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel, pp. 177–191.
36. See, for examples, the essays by Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray presented with helpful introductions in the French Feminist Theory issue of Signs 7, no. 1 (1981); and Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis.
37. Margaret Homans, “‘Her Very Own Howl’: The Ambiguities of Representation in Recent Women’s Fiction,” Signs 9, no. 2 (1983): 200.
4. Voyage in the Dark: Carnival/Consciousness
1. Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (1934; New York: Popular Library, n.d.), p. 63. Subsequent references to this edition will be included in the text.
2. DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending, p. 4.
3. O’Connor describes the ending lines as expressing Anna’s “false hope of starting again.” Commenting on Anna’s “yearning and nostalgia,” O’Connor states that “she becomes more and more childlike” (Jean Rhys, p. 103). Staley refers to “Anna’s failure” and her “inability . . . to fit the experiences of both worlds together into her life” (Jean Rhys, p. 61). Nancy Casey, “Study in the Alienation of a Creole Woman—Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark,” Caribbean Quarterly 19, no. 3 (September 1972): 96, states that Anna suffers from an “innate weakness” and “a lack of will, an absence of energy.”
4. For the original version of the ending to Voyage in the Dark, see Nancy Hemond Brown, “Jean Rhys and Voyage in the Dark,” London Magazine 25, nos. 1 and 2 (April/May 1985): 40–59.
5. Kloepfer argues that the changed ending forced Rhys to “mask the text,” to censor the lost mother that Kloepfer believes Anna’s death recalls (“Voyage in the Dark,” p. 455). O’Connor states, on the other hand, that “the published version contributes more brilliantly to the structure Rhys has developed in the rest of the book” (Jean Rhys, p. 129).
6. See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, especially the fourth essay, “Discourse in the Novel.”
7. Ibid., p. 273.
8. Abrahams and Szwed, After Africa, p. 227; and chap. 1, note 6. Edward Brathwaite describes more general social parallels between West Indian planter society and medieval European society in The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770–1820.
9. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, pp. 7–8.
10. Stonequist, The Marginal Man, p. 145.
11. Georg Lukàcs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock.
12. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 47.
13. Rhys, Smile Please, p. 31.
14. See chap. 1, note 5.
15. Wilson Harris, quoted in Drake, Wilson Harris and the Modern Tradition, p. 37.
16. Kloepfer, “Voyage in the Dark.” Harrison, Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text, also interprets the meaning of the masks as reflections of power differences between men and women, differences which she argues remain even though racial difference is parodied. She does not consider the possibility that the masks may parody the condition of white women in European culture. Harrison consequently sees Anna’s vision of the carnival as one of brutal injustice and does not find in the novel or its conclusion in either version any liberating or even illuminating moments.
17. Abrahams and Szwed, After Africa, Figure 18.
18. Etching reproduced in Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell, p. 38.
19. Brown, “Jean Rhys and Voyage in the Dark,” p. 52.
20. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 53.
21. Ibid., p. 21.
22. In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White cite the passage in Smile Please in which Rhys describes watching the Dominican carnival with mixed feelings of envy and fear. They refer to it as an example of “bourgeois hysteria” or “the phobic fascination afflicting bourgeois women in their exclusion from the carnivalesque” (p. 182). This clinical diagnosis does not take sufficiently into account the sexual subordination of women within the bourgeois class and the political dimensions of Rhys’s wish to be part of the masquerade. Nor does it account for the cultural differences between Caribbean carnivals and those taking place in Europe. Even if such a diagnosis were valid in the case of the author, it becomes contradictory if applied to her novel, for it is the very excess or “hysteria” of Anna’s hallucinations that allows her to resolve, through a politicized understanding of the carnival masks, her “neurotic” conflict.
23. We should also remember that Jean Rhys remained faced with a conflict between her preference for the more closed and conventional ending that an explicitly conveyed death would have given the novel and her publisher’s demand for a less depressing ending. The ray of light Anna sees under the door in the final paragraph is “like the last thrust of remembering before everything is blotted out.” We cannot be certain, even in the published version, that Anna actually lives.
5. Voyage in the Dark: The Other Great War
1. Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (1934; New York: Popular Library, n.d.), p. 160. Subsequent references to this edition will be included in the text.
2. Fredric Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject,” Yale French Studies, nos. 55/56 (1977): 338–395, discusses the ways in which the use of pronouns divides the subject.
3. I owe to a conversation with Katherine Hayles the idea of the mistress as a destabilizing third term.
4. I am alluding to the “French” feminists such as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous. See the 1981 Signs issue (vol. 7, no. 1) on French Feminist Theory for excerpts from their work, accompanied by helpful introductions. See also Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, for a critical introduction to their theories.
5. The original version appears in Brown, “Jean Rhys and Voyage in the Dark,” p. 52.
6. Jean Rhys, Black Exercise Book, Jean Rhys Collection.
7. Wolfe, Jean Rhys, p. 117.
8. Ibid., “Preface.”
9. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship.
10. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, “Woman, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview,” in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, pp. 17–42, develops the implications of Lévi-Strauss’s analysis, arguing that the confinement of women to a domestic realm in virtually every culture maintains an asymmetrical opposition between domestic and public lives. Her later article, “The Uses and Abuses of Anthropology,” reconsiders her earlier position, noting that the categories “domestic” and “public” in social analysis derive from Victorian social science with its implicit interest in developing an ideology of the family.
11. Jane Lewis, Women in England 1870–1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change, pp. 147, 156.
12. Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History, chaps. 17 and 19.
13. Lewis, Women in England 1870–1950, p. 16.
14. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 231.
15. President of the Board of Trade to Parliament, Statistical Abstract for the United Kingdom, 1935–1946, no. 84 (February 1935).
16. Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind, p. 200.
17. Ibid., p. 211.
18. Poovey, “‘Scenes of Indelicate Character.’”
19. Ibid., p. 146.
20. Ibid., p. 153.
21. Josephine Butler, quoted in Walkowitz’s detailed description and analysis of the Contagious Diseases Acts and the campaign for their repeal (Prostitution and Victorian Society, p. 114).
22. Quoted in ibid., p. 80.
23. Quoted in ibid., p. 81.
24. Quoted in ibid., pp. 45–46.
25. Quoted in ibid., p. 87.
26. Ibid., p. 87.
27. Lewis, Women in England 1870–1950, p. 133.
28. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, p. 244.
29. Erving Goff man has analyzed the significance of chance encounters in solidifying other kinds of group identity. Goffman suggests, for instance, that encounters with strangers present a contrast to and reinforce the solidarity of a group that the participants already belong to. A few strangers invited to a party, for example, reinforce the group’s sense of itself and marks the occasion as memorable. The chance encounter with Anna and Maudie then reinforces the class, gender, and kinship ties between Walter and his male friend, the only participants in the encounter who belong to solid social groups. See Erving Goffman, “Preface,” Encounters.
30. Lyn Hebert Lofland, A World of Strangers: Order and Action in Urban Places, examines the kinds of codes enacted by strangers in urban milieus and ways of learning them. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, describes the history of changes in dress and their significance for expressing and identifying personality and social position in urban environments.
31. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 231.
32. As both Karl Marx and Georg Lukàcs have pointed out, in a society based on exchange of commodities, the workers must exchange their labor for wages, they become estranged from their productive activity, and their own labor power becomes a commodity: “Subjectively—where the market economy has been fully developed—a man’s activity becomes estranged from himself, it turns into a commodity which, subject to nonhuman objectivity of the natural laws of society, must go its own way independently of man just like any consumer article” (Lukàcs, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” History and Class Consciousness, p. 87).
33.“The direct barter of products attains the elementary form of the relative expression of value in one respect, but not in another. That form is x Commodity A = y Commodity B. The form of direct barter is x use-value A = use-value B. The Articles A and B in this case are not as yet commodities, but become so only by the act of barter” (Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 87), Urban environments intensify this reduction of human life and experience to quantitative values of exchange, as noted by George Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, ed. Richard Sennett, pp. 47–60.
34. Marx’s commodities speak, saying, “In the eyes of each other, we are nothing but exchange-values” (Capital, vol. 1, p. 87).
35. Marx analyzed the alienation felt by workers whose labor power becomes a commodity, which he called “estranged labor” or “alienated labor”: “It [alienated labor] alienates from man his own body, external nature, his mental life and his human life . . . This is self-alienation . . .” (Karl Marx, “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans, and ed. T. B. Bottomore, pp. 129, 126).
36. Fernando Henriques discusses the history of prostitution and attitudes toward it in the Caribbean in his book Children of Caliban. Henriques describes the open systems of prostitution that operated on estates and the open acquisition of mistresses or concubines by white men. The men might set up private housekeeping with a black or colored woman but would never consider marrying her. A woman who became mistress to a white man might, however, expect to gain from the alliance either in status, wealth, or, during slavery, through the purchase of her freedom. On the other hand, such women who remained slaves were subject to gross mistreatment at the hands of their masters and often their masters’ wives. In Voyage in the Dark Anna may hope at first to marry her lover, but mostly she expects improvements in her life. Though the system of exogamous exchange in marriage breaks down for women like Anna, class groups still adhere to norms of endogamy. Prostitution and the practice of keeping mistresses help maintain marriage alliances within class strata by protecting upper-class women from illicit sexual advances and, at the same time, allowing men of their class extramarital sexual relations. Anna’s situation is thus not atypical, but her déclassé position, intensified by the anomic urban environment, casts her unprepared into this unexpected state of affairs.
37. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison. Gayle Rubin discusses both Mauss’s theory and its significance for Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of kinship and marriage in “The Traffic in Women,” in Towards an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter, pp. 157–210.
38. From a review contained in the Jean Rhys Collection.
39. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A. M. Sheridan-Smith, p. 34.
40. Ibid., pp. 34–35.
41. I owe to Katherine Hayles a suggestion concerning some of the implications of the man’s occluded role in circulating venereal disease that the discourse and enactment of the Contagious Diseases Acts institutionalized.
42. Girard, in Violence and the Sacred, describes the social victim as a marginal individual sacrificed for the sake of public calm and order.
6. Quartet: “Postures,” Possession, and Point of View
1. Wolfe considers all of Rhys’s protagonists to be examples of a psychological type characterized by “her readiness to subjugate herself” (Jean Rhys, p. 25). Wolfe places all responsibility on the character’s personality, argues that she “perpetuates male tyranny,” and states that “Jean Rhys does not study the dynamics of dominance and dependence” (pp. 28–29). Mellown, “Character and Themes in the Novels of Jean Rhys,” p. 464, claims that Marya “increasingly debases herself . . . a victim of love because she is at the mercy of her uncontrollable desires.” Thurman, “The Mistress and the Mask,” compares Marya with the character in The Story of O, who no longer wishes to remove the mask her sadistic master forces her to wear. Staley perceives that “the exploration of [Marya’s] passivity lies at the heart of the novel” and describes Marya as unable “to assume postures which would require decisiveness and direction” (“The Emergence of a Form: Style and Consciousness in Jean Rhys’s Quartet,” Twentieth Century Literature 24, no. 2 [Summer 1978]: 206–207). He states that these negative qualities are “in her nature” and thus he, too, concentrates on Marya, the psychological type, rather than the social relations and institutions that involve her.
2. Jean Rhys, Quartet (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1974), p. 34. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text.
3. Mellown writes of Rhys’s “failure to control the point of view” in her first two novels and states that in Quartet “Rhys’s point of view is so patently that of the main female character and so biased in her favor” (“Character and Themes in the Novels of Jean Rhys,” p. 470). Staley defends Rhys’s technique in Quartet but also remarks that “she may occasionally appear to hover too closely over her heroine’s misfortunes” (Jean Rhys, p. 204). Arnold E. Davidson sums up the general critical view: Quartet is “too close to . . . the writer’s life to allow her the total dispassion and control that we expect in a major work of modernist fiction” (Jean Rhys, p. 61). His statement reveals the aesthetic values (of dispassion and control) behind such critical judgments, which we might question for their cultural and sexual biases.
4. Staley has described their affair in Jean Rhys, chap. 1. Davidson’s chapter on Quartet in Jean Rhys continually compares the real-life individuals involved in Rhys’s affair with Ford to the characters in the novel. To my mind the best criticism of Quartet compares, not Rhys’s life to her novel, but the text to another text—that is, to Ford’s The Good Soldier, elaborating his literary influence on Rhys’s writing and her transformation of his artistic precepts to suit her own purposes. See Judith Kegan Gardiner, “Rhys Recalls Ford: Quartet and The Good Soldier,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 1 (Spring 1982): 67–81; and Todd K. Bender, “Jean Rhys and the Genius of Impressionism,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 11, no. 2 (Fall 1968): 43–54.
5. Rhys first titled the novel Masquerade, then changed it to Quartet, but the publishers encouraged her to call it Postures. At first she thought this title was meaningless but, in retrospect, believed it conveyed the sense of pretense she originally intended. See Jean Rhys to Selma Vaz Dias, January 23, 1950, and the Green Exercise Book, Jean Rhys Collection.
6. Mellown, “Character and Themes in the Novels of Jean Rhys,” p. 470.
7. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 9.
8. Dee Garrison describes Horney’s debate with Freud in “Karen Horney and Feminism,” Signs 6, no. 4 (1981): 672–691. Other voices participated in the debate, including those of Joan Riviere, Marie Bonaparte, and Clara Thompson. For an introduction to their work, see the collection Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality, ed. Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek. For an account of these debates that defends Freud’s radical notion of the unconscious from a feminist perspective, see Juliet Mitchell, “Introduction—I,” in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne, by Jacques Lacan.
9. Karen Horney, “The Flight from Womanhood,” in Feminine Psychology, ed. Harold Kelman, pp. 54–70. This paper is discussed by Garrison, “Karen Horney and Feminism,” p. 679.
10. Karen Horney, “Inhibited Femininity,” in Feminine Psychology, p. 82.
11. See also Karen Horney, “The Overvaluation of Love,” in Feminine Psychology, pp. 182–213; and “The Problem of the Monogamous Ideal,” in Feminine Psychology, pp. 84–98.
12. Garrison discusses Deutsch’s views in “Karen Horney and Feminism,” p. 681.
13. Karen Horney, “The Problem of Feminine Masochism,” in Feminine Psychology, p. 230.
14. Ibid., p. 226.
15. Mellown, “Characters and Themes in the Novels of Jean Rhys.”
16. Horney, “The Flight from Womanhood,” p. 57.
17. Sigmund Freud, “Feminine Sexuality,” in Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality, ed. Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek, p. 93.
18. Mitchell, “Introduction—I.”
19. Rhys has deliberately departed from autobiographical fact in portraying the Heidlers as legally married since Ford and Stella Bowen were not. Her fictional experiment—in narrative point of view and analysis of the social construction of feminine character—requires the marriage.
20. Tiffin’s excellent article, “Mirror and Mask,” makes similar analogies, discussing Marya’s postures in relation to Stephan, Lois, and Heidler as reflections of colonial relations between captives, victims, and underdogs, the ruler and the ruled.
21. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. I, p. 89.
22. Ibid., p. 42.
23. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 39.
24. Ibid., p. 40.
7. After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie: Repetition and Counterromance
1. Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930; New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1974), p. 53. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited in the text.
2. Susan Gubar, “The Blank Page’ and Female Creativity,” in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel, pp. 73–94.
3. John Berger, Ways of Seeing, p. 47.
4. O’Connor, Jean Rhys. Kloepfer also mentions After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie in connection with this theme in “Voyage in the Dark.”
5. Mary Ann Doane, “Veiling Over Desire: Close-Ups of the Woman,” pp. 6–7.
6. Ibid., p. 4.
7. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980. See also Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World, pp. 29–31.
8. Gilbert, “Soldier’s Heart”; and Gilbert and Gubar, No Man’s Land, vol. 2, chap. 7.
9. Gilbert, “Soldier’s Heart.”
10. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas. Woolf quotes a British editorial of the 1930s: “Homes are the real places of the women who are now compelling men to be idle. It is time the Government insisted upon employers giving work to more men, thus enabling them to marry the women they cannot now approach” (p. 53). Woolf compares the argument to Hitler’s philosophy that “the woman’s world is her family, her husband, her children, and her home,” stating that both represent the interrelated dictatorial impulses of fascism and patriarchy.
11. Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 2. Ellis writes, for example, “first of all, women must claim their right to their own womanhood as mothers of the race and thereby the supreme lawgivers in the sphere of sex and the large part of life dependent on sex” (p. 411). See Margaret Jackson, “Sexual Liberation or Social Control?” Women’s Studies International Forum 6, no. 1 (1983): 1–17, for an analysis of Ellis’s work as a reaction against feminists’ efforts toward women’s sexual autonomy.
8. Good Morning, Midnight: The Paris Exhibition and the Paradox of Style
1. John Allwood, The Great Exhibitions. The Champs de Mars, as Lucio Ruotolo has reminded me, was traditionally a parade ground for the French military, so the location both joins and opposes the Soviet and Nazi exhibition buildings through a symbol of France’s own military aggression.
2. Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (1939; New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1974), p. 13. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited in the text.
3. Staley, Jean Rhys, p. 84. Following Staley’s insistence on viewing Rhys’s writing exclusively as an expression of interiority, Helen Nebeker, for instance, analyzes the dream from a Jungian perspective as presenting the “warring mythologies of time” in Sasha’s psyche (Jean Rhys, pp. 95–96). Peter Wolfe comments briefly that Sasha dreams “about her father being shot through the head in a London tube station” (Jean Rhys, p. 124). He also describes what he sees as Rhys’s “indifference to the writing of social criticism” (p. 122). Jan Curtis interprets Sasha’s dream metaphorically, stating that the Paris Exhibition is all exhibitions, displays, and “sketches of . . . illusions.” She also reads Good Morning, Midnight as a social critique, but one critical of “the social system” and the “conventional regularity of the world” rather than of any historically specific time or place. See Jan Curtis, “The Room and the Black Background: A Re-interpretation of Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight,” World Literature Written in English 25, no. 2 (1985): 264–270.
4. Both Gardiner (“Good Morning, Midnight; Good Night, Modernism”) and Squier (“‘Yes—Yes’”) have discussed the allusion to Molly Bloom in this final line.
5. Rosalind Miles, The Fiction of Sex, pp. 96–106.
6. Wolfe, Jean Rhys, p. 133; Nebeker, Jean Rhys.
7. Abel, “Women and Schizophrenia,” p. 167.
8. Staley, Jean Rhys, p. 98.
9. Thurman, in “The Mistress and the Mask,” describes ambiguity as the ending’s important quality. She does not, however, develop her conclusion beyond attributing ambiguity to modern tragedy. Nebeker (Jean Rhys) also discusses an exhilarating ambivalence felt by the reader at the conclusion to the novel. Her archetypal analysis, however, leads her to stress themes of rebirth even while acknowledging this ambivalence.
10. Squier, “‘Yes—Yes.’”
11. In this scene’s interior monologue, Sasha quotes Heine’s “Lyrical Intermezzo”: “aus meinen grossen Schmerzen mach ich die kleinen Lieder” (out of my great pains, I make the little songs) (Midnight, p. 24). Raymond Meyer helped me to identify and translate this passage. See Chapter 1 for a full discussion of the paragraph’s textual dynamics and significance.
12. Allwood describes the Italian exhibit as “the most extensive of the foreign pavilions . . . [showing] every aspect of life under Mussolini” (The Great Exhibitions, p. 141).
13. Gertrude Stein, quoted in Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, p. 130.
14. Woolf, Three Guineas, p. 142.
15. Ibid., p. 141.
16. Ibid., p. 142.
17. “. . . situations of danger, of birth and death, of suicide and homicide . . . are indicated by ritual, taboo and forbidden language.” R. H. Grathoff, The Structure of Social Inconsistencies (The Hague: Nighoff, 1970), p. 147, quoted in Burns, Theatricality, p. 131.
18. Jean-Paul Sartre has stated that in a consumer society the labor process itself is not as significant as the product, reified as an object and ritualistically consumed. Nevertheless, the claim to labor (property) lends that ritual authenticity. Neither thieves nor monks, he says, produce; their consumption is a stolen illusion, a fake participation in society’s most meaningful activity. The female derelict also gains her money obliquely and spends it in a false world of appearances that negates, as through a distorted mirror, the authentic, real world. An inability or refusal to use the world as it defines itself renders its categories of morality and reason useless. Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, pp. 361–363.
19. Ibid.
20. Staley, Jean Rhys, p. 91.
21. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 12. Though Girard often conflates myth, literature, and more empirical social reality, he does convincingly describe the pattern of victimization and sacrifice in cultural and symbolic systems.
22. Benstock, The Left Bank, p. 134.
23. Marshall Dill, Jr., Paris in Time, p. 195.
24. Harold Ettlinger, Fair Fantastic Paris, pp. 129–145.
25. Dill, Paris in Time, pp. 297–300; Ettlinger, Fair Fantastic Paris, chaps. 13 and 17.
26. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 40.
27. Thurman, “The Mistress and the Mask.”
28. Printed in “Leaving Dominica,” in Smile Please, by Jean Rhys, and contained in the Jean Rhys Collection.
29. Orin T. Klapp has said about the role of the fool: “Chiefly, the social type of the fool functions as a device of status reduction and social control. . . .” See “The Fool as Social Type,” American Journal of Sociology 4 (1949): 162, quoted in Burns, Theatricality, pp. 123–124. And Girard has commented, “The fool is eminently ‘sacrificeable’” (Violence and the Sacred, p. 12).
30. Allwood, The Great Exhibitions, p. 144.
31. Michel Foucault has traced through the theater a theme common to the subversive powers of appearance and madness. He refers to the plays of Georges de Scudery, in which illusion becomes the equivalent of madness: “One group of actors takes the part of spectators, another that of actors. The former must pretend to take the decor for reality, the play for life, while in reality these actors are performing in a real decor; on the other hand, the latter must pretend to play the part of actor, while in fact, quite simply, they are actors acting. . . . In this extravaganza, the theater develops its truth which is illusion. Which is, in the strict sense, madness.” See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard, p. 35.
32. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 238.
33. Kenneth W. Luckhurst, The Story of Exhibitions, p. 162.
34. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 271.
35. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Reflections, p. 152.
36. Gardiner, for instance, has argued that the ending presents a culmination of the novel’s textual collapsing of oppositions (“Good Morning, Midnight; Good Night, Modernism”).
Conclusion
1. Michelle Cliff, Abeng, p. 21.
2. Ibid., p. 166.
3. Ibid., p. 21.
4. Selwyn R. Cudjoe, Resistance and Caribbean Literature.
5. Wilson Harris, cited in ibid., p. 266.
6. Abdul R. JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa, p. 4.
7. I am modeling this suggestion on the title of the study by M. M. Mahood, The Colonial Encounter: A Reading of Six Novels, which treats novels by Conrad, Forster, and Greene and by Achebe, Narayan, and Naipaul.