The Left Bank (1927)
Rhys’s first book was a collection of short fiction, a common apprenticeship among novelists. In these early stories, she established major
characteristics of her style. She continued to write short fiction all her life.
The collection consists of twenty-two stories, some very brief. Though the title indicates the bohemian, intellectual, artistic
Paris that Rhys experienced most with Ford, there are pieces set in or which refer to the Caribbean (“Mixing Cocktails,” “Again
the Antilles” and “Trio”). In “La Grosse Fifi,” the central character’s name is Roseau, the capital of Dominica. “Trio,” in
its Antillean exile theme, is the bridge to two Dominican memoir pieces, “Mixing Cocktails” and “Again the Antilles.” But
if the Caribbean is an important point of reference in this collection, Paris is central. To be there in the early 1920s as
an artist was to be at the birth of High Modernism, and even though Rhys was never a joiner of groups or movements, literary
or not, her association with Ford temporarily put her right in the center of parties and literary discussions in cafés and
restaurants such as the famous Café du Dôme (more simply Le Dôme), mentioned at the opening of “The Blue Bird.” Rhys identified
Montparnasse as “Chelsea, London, with a large dash of Greenwich
Village, New York, to liven it, and a slight sprinkling of Moscow, Christiania and even of Paris to give incongruous local
colourings” (
CS:16–17). Rhys had not visited the US at that time, but Greenwich Village was often compared to Montparnasse by cosmopolitan
people who knew both.
The cryptic, wry tone that is a hallmark of much of Rhys’s writing is already established in her early stories. Diana Athill
remarks that “there is more humour in Jean Rhys’s observation of life than is usually recognized” (
CS:ix). The stories in
TLB frequently express a subversive attitude to those who dominate or feel themselves superior to others. In “Tout Montparnasse
and a Lady,” the central character is an American fashion artist “who was there to be thrilled” (
CS:17). She has read Francis Carco’s portraits of Paris street life, one of which Rhys translated.
1 Disliking Anglo-Saxons, this woman nevertheless looks for excitement where Anglo-Saxons go. She stares at a man, thinking
he is on drugs, when he is actually imagining his next creative work. Annoyed, thinking she is a journalist, he says: “Oh
God! How I hate women who write! How I
hate them!” (
CS:17). Rhys has some fun describing the “slightly strained expressions characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon.” They try to unwind
and enjoy the music, but like “people engaged in some difficult but extremely important gymnastic exercise” (
CS:16). The men are young, the women not so young, “with that tendency to be thick about the ankles and incongruous about the
shoes, which is nearly always to be found in the really intelligent woman” (
CS:16).
In “A Spiritualist,” an emotionally obtuse and exploitative Commandant’s persistent self-delusions are neatly and comically
skewered. A chunk of marble mysteriously crashes into the apartment of his dead mistress whilst he is there: he thinks she
is reminding him that he promised to get a white marble tombstone for her, but a woman he knows comments, “How furious that
poor Madeleine must have been that she missed you!” (CS:9).
The ironic “In a Café” portrays both French customers and foreign tourists listening to “middle-aged, staid” musicians who
match the decor of the café. A stout man in evening dress begins to sing, looking “self-confident, eager and extraordinarily
vulgar.” His song is about
les grues, the tarts who are so easily sentimentalized for their hard lives and fragile, available femininity. In the song, three stages
are observed, the way the girl becomes a
grue, her emotional generosity, and the absolute indifference from one of her former lovers when she is wretched and in great
need. His sentimental tribute is met with much applause but then a withdrawal into awkwardness: women attend to their makeup,
men drink and “looked sideways” (
CS:14). The singer sells a couple of copies of his song, and then the mood changes. The next song is to be American, “Mommer
loves Popper … .” (
CS:15), on a
much safer if more infantile emotional level. The brief story “Hunger” is much more acerbic: it reminds Rhys’s well-fed readers
that they are entertained by horror: “I have never gone without food for more than five days, so I cannot amuse you any longer”
(
CS:44).
The early stories rehearse a major later Rhys theme: marginalization of poor young women exploited by an indifferent elite.
“Mannequin” is about the doll-like models, human “flowers,” who work for an expensive couture house in Paris, a place where
tiring work and economic exploitation are hidden under the façade of pretty girls showing off in pretty clothes. Those who
come to buy are often foreign (Dutch, South American, American, English), attracted by the legend of French style.
Rhys often reveals that the inner reality of a character is far more interesting than surface impressions. Her initial descriptions
are usually very spare, sometimes to take the reader in. In “Illusion,” Miss Bruce, a painter, is depicted through few physical
details, “tall, thin,” “large bones and hands and feet,” a face bare of powder and therefore shining, “beautifully washed
… with here and there a few rather lovable freckles” (CS:2). She is literally a “shining example of what … British character and training can do” and resists the Parisian “cult of
beauty” (CS:1). But when she is ill, the narrator is sent to collect some personal things for her, and finds in her wardrobe a marvelous
collection of highly feminine, brightly colored dresses, her secret passion. By the story’s end, Miss Bruce is well again,
and appraising the hands and arms of a girl “in her gentlemanly manner” (CS:5).
This subversion of gender stereotypes is repeated in “The Blue Bird”: Carlo, an English expatriate in Paris, is a woman with
a voice “as deep as a man’s,” the narrow shoulders and hips “of a fragile schoolgirl,” “faithful” eyes, and a “bitter and
tormented mouth” (CS:61). She has had a tragic love affair with a “Bad Man” and now sees a man she calls “my Arab” who has a beauty spot on his
cheek (CS:65).
Rhys experiments with both first- and third-person narration. She would go on in her novels to use both. Some of her short
pieces are more personal essay than short story. “Learning to be a Mother” is a very spare account of the birth of her first
child, William Owen.
2 The narrative voice in “Hunger” speaks directly to the reader with a laconic tone which is horrifying: “On the third day
one feels sick; on the fourth, one starts crying very easily … A bad habit that; it sticks” (
CS:43). In “A Night” a woman speaks of her temptation to commit suicide. Both Antilles stories are first person. The tone of
memoir is reinforced by the resemblance of the house in “Mixing Cocktails” to Bona Vista, the house Rhys’s father bought in
the hills north of Roseau in Dominica. “Again the Antilles” very effectively portrays verbal skirmishes in
the lively Dominican press at the end of the nineteenth century, by which the powerful “mulatto” elite and the white English
colonials challenged each other. “Vienne,” by far the longest story here, follows the first heady and then turbulent period
in Rhys’s first marriage to Jean Lenglet, when he took a job of secretary-interpreter to the Interallied Commission in Vienna
shortly after the First World War ended and then got into trouble over art and currency dealings. It has a strong first-person
narrative and is told in a terse voice, often sounding like a journal, with margin interruptions as if this were a piece of
modernist poetry:
The girls were well dressed, not the slightest bit made up–
that seemed odd after Paris.
Gorgeous blue sky and green trees and a good orchestra.
And heat and heat.
I was cracky with joy of life that summer of 1921.
I’d darling muslin frocks covered with frills and floppy hats–
or a little peasant dress and no hat.
(CS:101)
The narrator goes through a good deal in hoping for financial security and then gradually faces the fact that her husband
is on the wrong side of the law, just as Lenglet was: “… as I touched him my courage, my calm, my insensibility left me and
I felt a sort of vague and bewildered fright” (
CS:115).
Ford complained that Rhys had little sense of place in the preface he wrote for
The Left Bank: “I tried … very hard to induce the author … to introduce some sort of topography of that region, bit by bit, into her sketches
… but would she do it? No!”
3 He noticed a sense of locale in her Caribbean landscapes but he could not find one in her stories set in Montparnasse, London
or Vienna. Rhys does, however, clearly map the locations of her stories, and in later Rhys texts these would again be important.
In
The Left Bank, there are four geographical clusters: the Latin Quarter, Montparnasse, the Left Bank and a prison somewhere within a tram
ride of the city; Rhys’s birthplace of Dominica; the South of France; and Vienna, Budapest and Prague. Miss Bruce lives in
“The Quarter.” The “little flat” of the young mistress of the Commandant in “A Spiritualist” is on the Place de L’Odéon, which
is just north of the Luxembourg Gardens. “In a Café” is again vaguely located in “the Quarter,” but in “Tout Montparnasse
and a Lady” the
bal musette is on the Rue St. Jacques, which runs right past the Sorbonne. “Mannequin” is set in a high-class dress salon on the affluent
north bank of the Seine, in the Place Vendôme, a location where bohemian girls from the Quarter might find work serving wealthy
patrons. “In the Luxemburg Gardens” (
sic) is as much about the ambience of the gardens as the brief sketch of a young man there. In “Tea with an Artist,” the painter
Verhausen lives in “the real Latin Quarter which lies north of the Montparnasse district and is shabbier and not cosmopolitan
yet” (
CS:30). “Trio” is set in a restaurant in Montparnasse. “In the Rue de L’Arrivée” again references an actual street, running
south from the Boulevard Montparnasse. “The Blue Bird” takes place in the famous Café du Dôme restaurant, 108, Boulevard du
Montparnasse. The place in a Rhys story is very often represented as a way of demonstrating emotion in a narrator or main
character. This determines what will be noticed (perhaps certain colors or details of dress or behavior, or a pervasive depressive
erasure of such details). But Rhys’s close attention to geography helps identify many small details that subtly illuminate
her characters.
These stories are an early demonstration of her mastery of precise and effective use of language, always very economical:
“Fifi was not terrific except metaphorically” (CS:80); “(f )rom the small, blurred glass her eyes stared back at her, darkly circled, the whites slightly bloodshot, the clear
look of youth going-gone” (“In the Rue de L’Arrivée, CS:51). The style of the stories is strongly modernist, leaving many gaps for the reader to fill in, often more collage than
linear development. In her expression of power and powerlessness, and the role of language in sustaining inequities, Rhys
anticipates postcolonial perspectives, as in “Again the Antilles,” when a colonial Englishman’s patronizing letter appears
in the newspaper complaining about the “ignorant of another race and colour.” The narrator adds, “Mr Mugrave had really written
‘damn niggers’” (CS:41).
Rhys also makes the reader experience Paris through her references to or use of French. In “A Night,” the female narrator
is haunted by a phrase, written in Rhys’s text as if on a billboard, “Le Saut dans l’Inconnu,” which she remembers reading
as red letters on a black ground. It means “a leap in the dark,” but is never translated in the story. In “In the Rue de l’Arrivée”
a man approaches the protagonist. Although she gives the first part of the dialogue in English, Rhys makes clear that the
two characters actually speak in French by the latter part of the brief exchange: “ ‘Allez-vous en’ she said fiercely … She heard him say softly, as if meditatively, ‘Pauvre petite, va’ ” (CS:53).
This collection has been seen as apprentice work, but there are several very strong stories, such as “La Grosse Fifi.” A troubled
young woman, Roseau, meets Fifi, an ageing and preposterously costumed woman who is in love with a much younger gigolo. Fifi
loves French poetry, and is extremely romantic. After the gigolo fatally stabs her, he claims she attacked him first with
a knife because he told her of his impending marriage. The story ends with Roseau’s realization of the irony of a piece of
French poetry Fifi had
given her in which a speaker’s life is put in the hands of a lover. The story weaves together several themes (disappointed
love, female ageing and isolation, the role of literature in emotional life). It demonstrates Rhys’s early remarkable style:
“as she swam into the room like a big vessel with all sails set, three, four, five would follow in her wake” (
CS:89).
Quartet (1929)
Angier claims that Ford Madox Ford and Jean Rhys “were perhaps the two greatest artists of self-pity in English fiction, never
more so than in
When the Wicked Man and
Quartet.”
4 But, precisely in order to make this first novel distanced enough from the painful emotional raw material from which it was
fashioned, Rhys imposed a tight structure, identified by the title
Quartet, with its clever reflection of the four major characters. Despite the centrality of Marya, the title suggests carefully orchestrated
interactions with something of the deliberately patterned and emotionally choreographed nature of chamber music.The book had
another title for its English debut (
Postures 1928), but Angier notes that
Quartet was Rhys’s first choice,
5 and it clearly enabled her to keep a firm grasp on the story.
There are twenty-three numbered chapters, most subdivided by both asterisks and gaps in the text. The resulting ellipses enable
Rhys to minimize the clutter of logistical detail. Most chapters have a few main divisions (between two and four), but there
is often further ellipsis within a section. An asterisk indicates a more major shift in time and circumstances. Chapter 5
portrays one continuous evening from one point of view and so needs no sectioning. Chapter 7 begins with Marya visiting Stephan
in the prison in Fresnes, a tram ride outside Paris. She sees how prison is changing him and tells him the Heidlers have invited
her to stay with them, which Stephan insists she should do despite her objections. This is a really key moment of dramatic
irony. A break in the text sets Marya walking back to the tram for Paris in a separate space, which is appropriate because
she has dismissed her concerns over the Heidlers. Another break conveys a time lapse, and the receipt of a letter from her
aunt in England with five pounds and a request not to be bothered again. Thus this chapter’s sections move Marya along from
refusal to go to the Heidlers to a realization that she has no other reasonable option, since she has no money. Chapter 10
has four major sections, three of them marked by asterisks. The first of these sections is divided into three by ellipses,
to signify the shifts from the group of three (Marya, Heidler and Lois), to two (Marya and Heidler), and finally one (Marya
alone in her bedroom, spooked by her apprehension of Heidler’s sexual intentions to think of ways to defeat them such as bolting
the door or getting away). Then an asterisk marks time passing (to the next day). Marya avoids Lois and plans to meet her
friend Cairn. In this short section, she realizes she longs “for joy” (
Q:74). Stephan is in prison and she is alone. It seems she will weaken with regard to Heidler. Another asterisk and space (ellipsis)
takes us to the meeting with Cairn, who is clear-sighted about Heidler, though Marya still wants to believe he is kind. After
another asterisk, Marya is back at the Heidlers’ apartment where Heidler tries to seduce her. The last section of the chapter
has no subvisions, because it tracks one continuous scene during which Marya tries to distract Heidler (by asking for a cigarette),
and finally stops him by telling him Lois has come home. So the asterisks mark particularly key emotional developments and
disruptions in Marya’s path towards the affair with Heidler.
Though the narrative voice is third person and Marya is central to the whole text, there are many shifts of perspective. At
first we observe Marya from the outside, as if she is in the opening shot of a film, but soon we see the world from her point
of view.
6 There are one or two moments when she is not present (the reader is with the Heidlers as they wait for her to arrive, with
Cairn as he writes a note to Marya in a bar, and with Mr. Rolls and his guests at the Bal du Printemps), but these few absences
only make Marya the more central to the story. We hear Heidler, Lois and Stephan speak to Marya, so we know what they choose
to express about their feelings, but we have a much larger emotional vocabulary for Marya because we are told what she cannot
or will not express or does not understand but intensely feels: “she looked at them with calmness, clear-sightedly, freed
for one moment from her obsessions of love and hatred” (
Q:97); “She had meant to tell him ‘I love you. You aren’t making any mistake about that, are you?’ But all she said was ‘Please
will you draw the curtains?’ ” (
Q:112); “When they were seated in the Restaurant de Versailles she was still thinking uneasily about the hat, because it seemed
symbolical of a new attitude” (
Q:113). Confronted with first-person narrative, many ordinary readers want to feel some attraction to the voice that interprets
the story. But Marya is more remote than passionate, emotionally and morally confused and often careless. The reader needs
to appreciate the novel’s style rather than looking to like the main character.
Rhys’s style draws subtle attention to itself, in the way poetry does. She employs poetic techniques, such as heightened rhythms,
like alliteration and assonance or repetition, as well as figurative language. Marya suffers in the Hôtel du Bosphore, and
describes her feelings for Heidler in these
terms: “(t)hen her obsession gripped her, arid, torturing, gigantic, possessing her as utterly as the longing for water possesses
someone who is dying of thirst” (
Q:117). These exact words return later on, when she returns to the same room, and relives her relationship with Heidler in
a horrific way (Q:145). Before the earlier passage, she can keep her mind a blank for ten seconds, and by the time it reappears,
she can manage that for thirty seconds, showing that she is slightly improved. The language suggests much through its sound
patterns, such as the employment of assonance, as in “(t)he unutterably sweet peace of giving in” (
Q:107), or alliteration, “When she had posted the pneumatique” (
Q:146), “looked doubtfully into the dark dining room of the hotel” (
Q:158). These cadences heighten the language and emphasize reverberative details.
The text foregrounds multilingual, that is, transnational life, so the reader must think about which language is being spoken
at a given time. Stephan is Polish, speaks English, and adopts an American accent when nervous, which is an interesting sign
that he has had reason to conceal his national identity. Marya and Stephan mainly use French with each other. But the emotional
trauma of visiting him in prison makes Marya unable to speak it. The text emphasizes languages and accents (French, English,
American). Cairn, an American short-story writer, uses French tags in his conversation with Marya. Rhys includes waiters and
others who speak French, made perfectly understandable in the context of the narrative without the necessity of translation.
They particularly would have alerted the reader in the late 1920s to the fact that this is not entirely familiar space and
that the British reader’s own likely monolingual expectations were not going to be indulged by Rhys.
Rhys uses juxtapositions to emphasize character traits that drive the plot: Marya is referred to as a child, and Stephan admits
to crying like a boy; Stephan seems freer in a sense in prison, and Marya in prison at the Heidlers. Images are also often
amusingly subversive, the way women (and others) without power have to think about those who control them if they are not
to be violently angry. Marya thinks Heidler’s nose lengthens as he speaks. This is an unspoken reference to Pinocchio and
lying – he has just said that Lois is very fond of Marya (Q:114). He looks to her “exactly like a picture of Queen Victoria,” a damning connection to not only imperial power, and homely
female looks, but extremely controlled emotions.
Art is also an important connective theme in the novel. It can be practical, like the photographs that Bernadet enlarges for
a living, gorgeous, like the amethyst necklace Stephan and another man discuss, or sinister, like Napoleon’s sabre, laid down
“naked” by Stephan on Marya’s bed, a vaguely menacing metaphor (like the sword that lies between two lovers to keep
them chaste;
Q:20). There is a chain of references to sensation, which are often disturbing (torture, numbness), and repeated references
to light, darkness or greyness and to warmth or cold. Lois has a “dark face” (
Q:97, 99); Heidler’s face looks “white and lined” (
Q:100); and when distressed Marya’s face is “greyish” (
Q:124). Dreams and ghosts are another important chain of images: leaving Stephan in prison, Marya says she feels like a “grey
ghost” (
Q:57).
Creatures are particularly important and denote emotional realities and intensities with great economy. Marya, horribly affected
by drink and drugs, imagines herself as small as a fly (flies are usually reviled and rejected, anything but beautiful, but
here the fly is frail and wanting to live). Lois moves her head like a “bird picking up crumbs” (Q:59). References to animals are frequent and key. Marya is “a strange animal or … a strayed animal” (Q:11). Her desire for joy is “like some splendid caged animal” (Q:74). As she sees her bedroom door open, and Heidler makes his move, she has the “(f )right of an animal caught in a trap”
(Q:90). She claims she would “fight like a wild animal” if anyone locked her up, but Stephan says everyone becomes a wild animal
after they are let out, himself included (Q:136). This relates to the caged fox (Q:160). Stephan is as “(n)atural as an animal” (Q:60) early on and has something “wolf-like” about him at the end of the novel. In prison he is like “some bright-eyed animal”
(Q:56). Lois has the eyes of a “well-trained domestic animal” (Q:107), and makes Marya think of someone who would imagine a mouse enjoys being played with by a cat (Q:62). The warder at the prison “snarled” (Q:109). When Heidler says no-one knows about his affair with Marya, she says his “crest ought to be an ostrich” (Q:120). Heidler is “a swine” (Q:124). Marya lies in Heidler’s arms “quivering and abject … like some unfortunate dog abasing
itself before its master” (Q:131). If people are animals, animals can be treated as if they are people, like the “minute and hairy dog” which is “kissed
… passionately” (Q:139) by its owner.
In a directly ironical use of the literary convention of pastoral, Marya wakes in the mornings in the sordid Hôtel du Bosphore
to the sound of a “man with a flock of goats who passed under her window every morning about half-past ten, playing a frail
little tune on a pipe” (
Q:111).
7 His music fascinates her, because it is “thin, high, sweet,” “like water running in the sun,” not intended to entertain or
to pursue artistic ambitions, but merely to keep the sheep in order (so he is like an ancient shepherd giving the world unintentional
poetry, in a twist on the pastoral tradition). Marya thinks his music “persistent as the hope of happiness.” This is still
listened for against all reason, just as she still listens as the music fades.
Rhys uses tiny touches of color and design to indicate emotions. Marya remembers a yellow dress Stephan once bought her, in
Belgium, which made her feel “like a flower” (Q:164). But she is disturbed by the “vaguely erotic” wallpaper in her room in the Hôtel de Bosphore, which has mauve, green
and yellow flowers on a black background (Q:111). Pink and purple are worn by women trying to appeal to men: the bedcover in this room is pink, and even Lois Heidler
wears it. In the country house at Brunoy, the wallpaper in Marya’s room has “ridiculous rabbits” chasing each other on it,
like a child’s room (Q:99). Makeup is either done well, “(c)rimson was where crimson should be” (Q:8), or badly, “the powder and rouge stood out in clownish patches” (Q:124).
The four actual people fictionalized as the novel’s “quartet” were all creative people. Ford was the major-domo of Anglophone
writers in Paris in the early twenties; Stella Bowen, his companion, was a painter; Jean Lenglet, Rhys’s first husband, was
a journalist and a writer, as was Rhys herself. But Marya, Stephan and Heidler are not writers: Marya is a former chorus girl
but not a writer; Stephan a trader in art objects; and Heidler a “picture–dealer” (Q:6). This is a nicely ironical positioning in relation to Stephan – having more money, Heidler escapes the necessity to cut
corners in what he buys and sells. Lois paints, as Bowen did, but it does not seem that this is very serious, given her commitment
to Heidler’s life in bars and her concern that she facilitate his young lovers. Stephan is literary, however: he tells Marya
he took care of the prison library at the end of his sentence: “oh, my dear, what a selection of books!” (Q:135). There are other creative artists of various degrees of seriousness and accomplishment in the novel. These include Esther
de Solla, a serious painter, the cabaret singer Cri-Cri, the former Ziegfried Folly, Plump Polly, members of a party Mr. Rolls
the author gives at the Bal du Printemps, including a “little funny man, who is a sculptor” (Q:73) and Cairn, the American short-story writer. This being Paris in the twenties, there are also those whose artistry goes
into creating themselves, via particularly theatrical and exact makeup or cross-dressing, as well as those whose art entertains
others, like the violinist who has to play “sentimental music on muted strings” (Q:143), or the “something-or-other girls” who do acrobatics (Q:143), and those whose art is about amusing themselves privately,
like the Japanese man who draws “elongated and gracefully perverse little women” on the tablecloth in a café (Q:140). There is also reference to fairs and circuses (Q:57) and marionettes (Q:105). Marya, letting others control her, is a “marionette,” but she thinks Heidler is one too (Q:105). What this does is to heighten the reader’s attention to the artistry of the novel, since its story is about the interaction
of people who practice, appreciate or sell art.
The plot follows from the interaction of the major characters, like the unfolding of a drama. The four central characters
make up two troubled couples, but then their relationships interchange as in a complicated board game. Marya is the central
character because her relationships with the other three are crucial to the movement of the novel. She is married to Stephan
but has an affair with Heidler and an understandably tense relationship with Heidler’s wife Lois.
In the early stages of the novel, Rhys introduces all four characters via the kind of brief, particular physical descriptions
that suggest character traits, similar to her method in describing Miss Bruce in the story “Illusion.” Marya is blonde, “not
very tall, slender-waisted,” and she has a “short” face, “high cheek-boned, full-lipped; her long eyes slanted upwards towards
the temples and were gentle and oddly remote in expression” (Q:5). As if attracted to her strangeness, “shabby youths” approach her to “speak in unknown and spitting tongues,” presumably
themselves foreigners (Q:5). Lois has “the voice of a well-educated young male” and she and her husband are “fresh, sturdy people” (Q:10). Heidler, who is “perhaps” forty-five, is tall, fair, with “tremendous” shoulders, an “arrogant” nose, and broad, dimpled,
short hands (Q:11). He has intelligent light-blue eyes, but they have both obtuseness and even brutality. Lois is “plump and dark” (a description
Rhys used in her story “Illusion”) and her eyes are “beautiful, clearly brown, the long lashes curving upwards,” but also
suspicious and “deadened” (Q:11). Finally, when we meet Stephan, Marya thinks he looks very thin “after the well-fed Heidlers” (Q:13). She embraces him “violently” (Q:13), which suggests something is amiss. It is not until later that we see him as a “short, slim, supple young man of thirty-three
or four, with very quick, bright brown eyes and an eager but secretive expression” (Q:17). His mind is described as “clean-cut” and “hard,” but also as “disconcertingly and disquietingly skeptical” (Q:17). Each character is both appealing and subtly disturbing. That Heidler and Marya are described as obtuse/brutal and remote/gentle
respectively suggests, as with the other main characters, that something problematic but harmless can easily combine or turn
into something difficult or even dangerous, making what seems like an ordinary story of love gone wrong into a far more sinister
tale.
The interactions of the major characters are therefore understandably complicated. Stephan’s mind seems to appeal to Marya
more than his body. She accepts (even enjoys) his criticism of her clothes and of her body: he thinks her arms are too thin
and that she is a “Slav type” and needs petting (
Q:8). He acts, oddly, both on impulse and “always in a careful and businesslike manner” (
Q:18), which gives Marya both a sense of excitement and
one of security. She lets him pay, and does not ask penetrating questions about his business dealings. Sometimes he goes away
and leaves her alone in the hotel: she knows he is both secretive and a liar, but he is a good lover, and he treats her very
well, as well as appealing to her by occasionally seeming like “a little boy” (
Q:22). The same willingness to discard warning signs occurs when Marya notices how Heidler’s uninvited hand lies on her knee
“possessively, heavy as lead” (
Q:13). She also cannot decide whether she likes “or intensely” dislikes Lois Heidler’s touch, but acutely senses that Lois
is most nervous when she sounds most firm (
Q:48).
Though the four main characters are very different, they share traits. Marya and Heidler express their feelings at times in
the same sort of melodramatic fashion, especially when alcohol is involved. Lois and Marya both listen at doors, despite Marya’s
denying that she would. Misunderstanding is rife also. Stephan misreads the Heidlers entirely. Heidler and Lois imagine Marya
will tolerate their different abuses of her and give themselves praise because they are helping her. Marya underestimates
the impact of her final cruel confession on Stephan, and too late sees the danger to herself she has caused.
By making both respectability and a naive admiration for those who break society’s rules suspect, the reader is forced to withhold simple moral judgments.
When Marya says she can’t go on with the sexual relationship with Heidler whilst living with him and Lois, Heidler says she
is “not playing the game” (in the British sense of playing by the right rules), and wants neither Lois nor himself to suffer
public embarrassment if Marya goes “off in a hurry” (Q:89). Marya is dubious about the men Stephan has met in prison, who live by their wits and outside the law: they seem to lack
any respectability and worry her, but she does not seem to take in the real impact of the changed Stephan who returns from
confinement. Rather, she idealizes him as a “frail and shrunken apostle” (Q:133): the convicted thief is spiritually ennobled whereas the smug middle-class Heidler is the real thief of other people’s
happiness and opportunity. Yet Stephan has a gun when he meets Marya for the last time, though he does not threaten her. On
his side, he says that grues (prostitutes) take care of their men. This is an ironical comment on Marya, who didn’t take care of him, and became a kept
woman with Heidler. He goes off, very unhappy, with an apparently warm-hearted if highly self-interested prostitute at the
end.
Rhys carefully, if subtly, maps the chronology of the story, though the reader needs to pay close attention to decipher it.
The novel begins in October, during the time Marya and Stephan are living in Paris after their marriage (
Q:5). A year they recently spent in Brussels is mentioned in one
abrupt sentence. What is more important is its lasting effect on Marya: she has accepted the unevenness of income Stephan
provides and has ceased to suspect him. In the immediate shock of hearing Stephan is arrested, Marya notices the trees on
the Boulevard Clichy stretch “ridiculously frail and naked arms to a sky without stars” (
Q:26) Though the month is not mentioned, there are several references to weather typical of a Parisian October. The Seine reflects
lights like jewels (it is five in the afternoon and clearly dark by then in mid-autumn;
Q:29). When she goes to Lefranc’s to see the Heidlers, she has a cold, it is raining, and she gets chilled. When Stefan is
sentenced to a year in prison, we learn he will be free in September, so we know this takes place in October also. Other references
to weather reinforce impending winter. Marya walks on the Boulevard Arago shortly after seeing Stephan in the Santé prison,
and it is foggy, with a “cold sharpness in the air” (
Q:46). She finds a bar on the Avenue D’Orléans for some coffee (she is cold).
The next spring comes early and “very suddenly” and Marya enjoys being in the Luxembourg Gardens and seeing the cosmopolitan
crowd there (Q:67). It is on an unusually warm spring night, “a wonderfully still and brooding night,” that Heidler makes his first unsuccessful
move on her (Q:71). The next day is “cloudless, intoxicating” (Q:74). After Heidler seduces Marya, some time passes, and then at the end of April Marya’s friend Cairn invites her to meet
him, to find out what is happening to her.
After a dramatic scene at the Heidlers’ country place in Brunoy in which Marya hits Heidler, she moves out of their place
in Montparnasse. When Marya tells Stephan about this she also reminds him that he will be free in four months, so this is
June. Through the summer, she continues a complicated relationship with the Heidlers. Heidler visits Marya in her hotel in
an oppressively hot August (Q:127). Stephan is free “the second Sunday in September” (Q:125). Heidler finds her hotel too hot in September. He sends her to Cannes, which is hot, until “suddenly, the weather changed,”
and it is cold and grey (Q:164). Back in Paris, it is cold on a café terrace, as she tries to sort out her feelings for Stephan and Heidler, and it
is a cool night when Stephan leaves her at the end of the novel. Thus the main action of the novel takes a little over a year.
The beginning of the story is structured like the opening act of a play. The last paragraph of
Chapter 2 offers a comment
on illusion replacing reality, important because it follows Marya’s meeting Heidler and the description of her willingness
to ask no probing questions when Stephan goes away mysteriously: both have to do with self-deception and Marya’s capacity
to dream. Then the plot moves along quickly in succeeding chapters: Stephan
is arrested and jailed, accused of selling stolen paintings, leaving Marya alone and penniless. Marya falls into the clutches
of the Heidlers and becomes their project, their neurotically desired source of drama and also self-praise, and finally, when
she refuses to behave, their highly disliked problem. Stephan finally gets out of jail and discovers that both his trust in
his wife and his appreciation of the Heidlers for helping her is misplaced. After Marya refuses to help him take physical
revenge on Heidler, and then not only declares her love for Heidler but threatens to betray Stephan to the police, he becomes
so enraged he pushes her away from him and she hits her head on the edge of the table. He leaves her unconscious (perhaps
even dead).
Accident and coincidence play key roles in the action and outcome. Marya turns into a street after failing to find Esther
de Solla to ask for help and sees the Heidlers walking together on the other side of it, but they do not see her. After moving
in with them, Marya encounters Esther in the street and sees discomfort or disapproval in her face. Stephan runs into a female
acquaintance just when he is in need of solace as the novel closes.
Rhys has other ways of engaging the adroit reader. Like T. S. Eliot, Joyce and Hemingway, she uses place evocatively, and
to provide a richness of association that supplements the spareness of her prose. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” evoked a real place,
where a seventeenth-century Anglican community had lived in England; Hemingway’s famous story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” used
the legendary Kenyan mountain as an active element in his story of the ending of a man’s life.
8 The stories in
The Dubliners collectively evoke Joyce’s critical and complex reading of the city of Dublin. As in
The Left Bank, Rhys uses Parisian geography very deliberately in
Quartet, and the careful reader will find this is an important subtext in the novel, by which Rhys indicates aspects of the emotional,
social and economic circumstances of her major characters.
We meet Marya first coming out of a café on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, the broad artery on the Left Bank that connects
the Boulevard des Invalides with the Boulevard Port-Royal. She compares it to London’s Tottenham Court Road, which immediately
places it for British readers (the novel was published in London) as a bustling, cosmopolitan, bohemian thoroughfare. It is
here and on Boulevard St. Michel (which runs between the Seine and Boulevard Montparnasse) that she has been accosted by “shabby
youths.” So we know she is here often. Her friend, the artist Esther De Solla, lives “in a street at the back of the Lion
de Belfort” (
Q:6), in Montparnasse. Marya is acutely aware of changes in the social fabric of the city’s neighborhoods: she never wants
to walk to the end of the Rue Vaugirard, because it is so respectable, preferring to go “far enough towards Grenelle”
and then turn “down side streets” (
Q:8). These details are easily located on a map of Paris.
Marya loves to find places where flamboyant and elegant cross-dressers hang out (
Q:8), but Stephan highly disapproves of such adventures. Twice they have lived in a cheap Montmartre hotel, in the north of
the city, far away from Marya’s favorite haunts.
9 She first meets the Heidlers at Lefranc’s, a small restaurant on the Boulevard du Montparnasse (
Q:10), whose clientele is mainly English. At the end of the evening, Heidler puts her in a taxi to go back to Stephan and their
hotel, which is quite far, across the Seine. She arrives after midnight in the Rue Cauchois, a little street not far from
Boulevard de Clichy: Montmartre is later described as having “hazards” (
Q:15). Not too far away is the Moulin Rouge, the infamous home of the can-can, and far more risqué and entertaining chorus
girls than Marya had ever been
.
Stephan has known Montmartre for fifteen years but seems to have made no strong personal connections there. From the balcony
of their hotel, Marya can see the Place Blanche in one direction and the Rue Lepic in the other, which would certainly be
possible from a hotel in the Rue Cauchois (Q:22–3). Lights from the Moulin Rouge shine as Marya goes out after hearing of Stephan’s arrest. She comes out of the Métro
into Montmartre at the Place Denfert-Rochereau. She then hurries to the Avenue d’Orléans, a part of the city where English
is often heard. Her friend Esther’s studio is close by, but she is not in. Marya then sees the Heidlers at a distance walking
along the Rue Denfert-Rochereau. To find news of Stephan, she goes the next day to the Palais de Justice on the Quai des Orfévres,
on the Île de la Cité which lies in the middle of the Seine (Q:29) She takes a taxi back to Montmartre (a ridiculously extravagant thing to do given her financial fragility). Finally,
she finds out that Stephan is in the Santé prison, near the Métro station of Denfert-Rochereau, in Montparnasse. It is ironical
that Marya’s husband is confined in the district she so loves.
The prison is described as having an outside wall that “frowns down on the Boulevard Arago,” which indeed is actually true
(Q:35). Later Marya is late to meet the Heidlers at a restaurant on the Boulevard St. Michel, which is quite a walk (Q:47). Afterwards, Lois and Marya walk along St. Michel and cross over into the Avenue de l’Observatoire, which intersects
with St. Michel and cuts across Denfert-Rochereau. The Heidlers live here, “halfway up the street.” Stephan is moved to a
prison in Fresnes and to visit him Marya must take a tram from Paris, from the Porte d’Orléans, the end of the Métro line
south of Montparnasse.
Now Marya lives in Montparnasse, with the Heidlers, eats lunch each day at Lefranc’s, travels to Fresnes each Saturday to
visit Stephan, and, as a
dependant in the Heidler household, runs errands at Lois’s request, such as picking up a wig in the nearby Rue St. Honoré.
She eats dinner alone in the Rue St. Jacques, just behind Denfert-Rochereau and close to the Heidlers’ place, with a pitiful
gesture of pride in spending her last hundred-franc note. Lois offers to get her a job as a mannequin in the Rue Royale (in
an affluent district on the opposite bank of the Seine from Montmartre.) When the Heidlers leave for their place in the country
at Brunoy, on the way to Fontainebleau, Marya stays at their apartment, and eats close by again in the Rue St. Jacques. She
goes for walks, avoiding St. Michel and “its rows of glaring cafes,” preferring the “Boulevard Montparnasse,” “softer, more
dimly lit, more kindly” (
Q:67), where she can more easily dream. It is after one such evening that she meets Esther De Solla, outside a café.
There is a cartoonish gathering of artists in a scruffy little café on the Rue Mouffetard, not far from where the Heidlers
live. Afterwards, Heidler makes a move on Marya in a bar quite close to where he lives with Lois. But the next day Marya escapes
to meet with her friend Cairn in a restaurant on the Place Pigalle: by coming to Montmartre she has returned to the part of
the city where she used to be happy with Stephan (Q:74). Then the Heidlers’ apartment, Lefranc’s, a music hall with naked girls, a bar in Montparnasse and Luxembourg Gardens
all successively witness Marya’s seduction by Heidler and its aftermath. Eventually she moves out of the Heidlers’ apartment
and goes to a seedy hotel that looks down on the Gare de Montparnasse. The name Hôtel du Bosphore has a vague and ironic overtone
of tired exoticism (Q:110). Heidler takes her to eat at a restaurant called “Versailles” (also an ironical name), in the Rue de Rennes (not far
from the hotel), but insists that she is seen at the apartment or at Lefrancs, so no-one thinks there is a quarrel. Marya
takes to drinking alone, avoiding the Boulevard de Montparnasse and finding cheap restaurants where she will not run into
the crowd around the Heidlers. Sometimes she takes walks and wanders into the very street where the Heidlers live. But on
the seventh day (an ironical echo of Genesis), she “rests” from the Heidlers and visits Fresnes, once more Stephan’s wife.
As Stephan comes close to being freed, Marya finds him a room in a cheap hotel in the Latin Quarter, but forgets his clothes
are left in the hotel in Montmartre. After Heidler summons Marya and Stephan to a meeting, she abandons Stephan to get into
a taxi with the Heidlers, to go to the Bosphore, only to announce on the way that she is going to go back to Stephan after
all. She eats with him extravagantly in the Rue de l’Ecole de Médécine, just off Boulevard St. Michel, in the very territory
that is associated with the Heidlers.
10 They go to the major train station, the Gare du Nord, not too far
from where they used to live, from where he is to leave for Amsterdam. She continues in the taxi to Bosphore. After a difficult
encounter with Heidler, she walks across the Place du Maine and up “the avenue,” presumably the Avenue du Maine, to find a
place to drink and lose herself. Despite her initial resistance, she does take Heidler’s suggestion, and funding, to go to
Cannes, and then visits Nice. Stephan calls her back to Paris to meet him when he returns and gets a room for her in a hotel
near the Gare du Nord (
Q:160). This is an area with old happy memories for Stephan and Marya. Then after their final quarrel, in the spare room of
his friend Bernadet, Stephan goes off to somewhere near the Gare de Lyon, from where he will leave France. Clearly Rhys mapped
this geography very carefully, and realizing it adds greatly to the reader’s apprehension of the novel.
Rhys represents a range of ethnicities, which signify the cosmopolitan nature of a great city. Many characters are migrants
(not only the primary four, but also Marya’s one-night stand, whose family live in Toulon and are immigrants from Tonkin).
Stephan is Polish. Esther de Solla is Jewish (and resistant to the English), as is one of the men Stephan was in prison with.
Stephan comments, “People abuse Jews, but sometimes they help you when nobody else will” (Q:137). “Michel the nigger” is another former prison-mate of Stephan’s (Q:135). Marya’s face is described by Heidler as “Kalmuck” (a term for Mongol people), in the same moment that he calls her
“savage,” just before they have sex (Q:131). When Stephan and Marya go to a bar, there are Chinese students dancing there, as well as a “little flat-faced Japanese”
drawing on the tablecloth. These references make clear that Marya and Stephan are part of a cosmopolitan city, in which the
“Anglo-Saxons,” like Heidler or Cairn, are one of the most privileged groups of foreigners. Marya is separated from the English
in Paris by her exotic looks and her attitude: she is described as “a Slav type” by Stephan early in their relationship. Marya
sees Heidler as German (which is a negative). When she wants to hurt him and is very angry, she calls him “Horrible German”
(Q:104). Mademoiselle Simone Chardin, who goes off with Stephan at the end of the novel, is “swarthy” and has curly hair, perhaps
suggesting she is of mixed race.
Then alcohol, a significant agent in the late-Romantic artistic circles in 1920s Paris, significantly drives the plot. Marya
only realizes that the drawings Esther de Solla shows her are beautiful because of alcohol (
Q:6). Many of the locales in the novel serve alcohol. Marya and Stephan drink white wine with ice cubes in it when they cannot
afford food, because wine makes the world seem different, more tolerable. After Stephan’s arrest, Heidler fills up Marya’s
wine glass constantly (we therefore assume she is emptying it frequently too;
Q:40). A Miss Lola Hewitt is moody, and Lois prescribes
another brandy. At one of Lois’s parties, two male guests fight because a woman who sculpts complains to one about the other:
alcohol is not mentioned but seems a likely element in the story. Everybody is somewhat drunk by midnight at parties that
Marya enjoys. Heidler is drunk when he tells Marya he is obsessed with her. Cairn invites her to have a cocktail at lunch
(they do drink coffee afterwards;
Q:74) and on another occasion he drinks gin and vermouth whilst he writes to invite Marya for lunch (at which they drink burgundy;
Q:91). Even sin is equated to a drink, for Heidler, when he says to Marya in church that we are all sinners, more or less,
“a dirty glass or a very dirty glass” (
Q:95). When the Heidlers take Marya to Brunoy, Lois drinks more than usual at dinner, then leaves Heidler and Marya together.
Heidler claims to be “awfully drunk” after Marya confronts him and Lois over their treatment of her: he says he will not remember
anything of this in the morning, which Lois affirms as a habitual ploy (
Q:104).
Marya imagines women lying in the bed she occupies in the Hôtel du Bosphore, “crying if they were drunk enough” (Q:119), enough to endure loveless sex and also know it. When lonely, Marya drinks the very strong Pernod, “to deaden the hurt”
(Q:121), though she is sternly advised not to do so by a kindly, if interfering patronne. Stephan has been in jail and thus not able to have alcohol for a year, and he wants to go to a bar the first night she meets
him after he is free. When they meet the Heidlers, Stephan unsuccessfully tries to prevent Marya drinking brandy, which triggers
her rejection of him. After Stephan leaves Paris for Amsterdam, Marya meets Heidler and he orders them both coffee and brandy,
as if he controls her tastes and desires. Marya drinks brandy alone after Heidler makes it clear she is to “go down South”
on his money and “get well”: the affair is over (Q:150). She goes with a stranger that night, evidently for a sexual encounter. In Cannes, she drinks a lot of Pernod alone
(a very bad sign) after she has a disturbing visit from a friend of Lois. This bender (together with taking veronal) makes
her very sick, and she badly bites her own arm in her drugged state (Q:161).
When Stephan comes back to Paris illegally, he orders four Pernods for himself, Marya and his host and partner. Marya drinks
a second round of this with the two men. There is a third round, after which Marya and Stephan eat a cheap dinner, wine included:
the last we see of them, they are visiting Stephan’s friend Bernadet, who the next day finds Marya where they drink aperitifs.
Afterwards, she blames the alcohol (which she continues to drink after Bernadet leaves) for making her feel so empathic towards
Stephan’s vulnerability and hurt: ironically she therefore leaves half the glass. When she meets Stephan next he has wine
and rum to go with a cold meal. He drinks rum after hearing her confession of the affair with Heidler, and then
threatens to hurt Heidler, even showing a revolver he carries. Every time alcohol is mentioned, it is a specific drink that
has a specific effect (all of them are ruinous, of course, if consumed to excess). The choice and number of drinks mark particular
emotional choices and conditions, especially in Marya.
Marya also smokes (Q:5), as so many did in the 1920s, when smoking became fashionable for bohemian women as well as men. Heidler complains she
smokes too much (Q:78) and Stephan is annoyed that she breaks up a cigarette on his bed after he comes out of prison (Q:137). There are other drugs. A “fresh-faced boy” says he can drink anything and “pull myself together in a minute” (Q:42), and gives Marya something in a capsule that evidently increases her heart-rate and makes her flush. Like Djuna Barnes,
Rhys depicts a fast life lived on the edge, but each brutally realistic detail of drug use is functional in the plot.
This was Rhys’s first attempt at full-length fiction and in it she worked out how to integrate all the elements of her style
and her thematic concerns with great economy. Both the plot and the visual intensity of Rhys’s writing lend themselves to
the cinematic. Though she would use similar techniques and even thematic elements again in her work, each of her texts also
has its own unique texture, and though some critics have seen her protagonists as the same woman in different locations, each
one has a particular identity.
After Leaving Mr. MacKenzie (1931)
If
Quartet is structured like an elaborate emotional chess game, Rhys’s second novel seems to be structured like a three-act play. It
has three sections (like three acts), subdivided into numbered and titled chapters, which may be seen as dramatic “scenes.”
Two innovations are introduced: the chapters have titles, and the sections are numbered instead of being separated by asterisks.
As in the case of
Quartet, these are then often subdivided. Part I has four sections, subdivided into 5, 7, 4 and 3 subsections respectively, Part
II has 14 (subdivided 2, 2, 2, 4, 4, 3, 2, 3, 7, 6, 3, 3, 2, 3) and Part III has 3 (subdivided 3, 2, with the last one not
subdivided at all). The plot is laid out like a well-made play, with an opening “act” to set up the plot and characters, a
substantial central “act” which complicates and deepens characters and their dramatic interaction, and a third “act” to resolve
the action and bring it to a close. The emotional tone is both comic (often bitterly ironical) and tragic (in the sense of
the crises that change lives in major ways being connected to personality, a version of the idea that character is fate. Ellipses
are again important in this complicatedly structured novel: scene shifts
are sometimes dependent on dialogue for the reader to fully realize them, which gives a sense of eavesdropping on impulsive
characters who change direction on a whim. They also provide for shifts in narrative point of view, from Julia to MacKenzie,
Horsfield, James and Norah and back.
There are scenes with a great deal of dialogue, such as in the chapter “Mr. Horsfield.” Rhys includes references to both literature
and film. At the time the novel is set, literature provided ideas for thinking about life for the middle class: Conrad’s
Almayer’s Folly offers Julia’s sister Norah a depressing comment on the emotional numbness of a trapped slave, which she both associates
with herself and then resists (
ALMM:103).
11 Uncle Griffiths talks of Dostoievsky.
12 But the film is on its way to becoming mass entertainment. Julia dislikes plays, which she finds “unreal,” and prefers films,
falling into the illusion that filmed representations of fictive characters are more “real” than characters portrayed by actual
human beings in the theater, moving and speaking in real time (
ALMM:133). She and Mr. Horsfield go to the cinema.
As in Quartet, Rhys pays attention to geography. The thirteen chapter titles indicate either places or locations like a staircase. This
is a tale of two cities, London and Paris. These two cities are contrasted in three of her five novels. In this case, Part
I is set in Paris, Part II in London and Part III in Paris. When the novel opens, Julia Martin lives on the Seine waterfront,
in a cheap hotel on the Quai des Grands Augustins, opposite the Île de la Cité, the location of the Palais de Justice. She
likes to lunch at a German restaurant in the Rue Huchette, very close to the street in which she lives. This section sets
up her habits and inner emotional landscape by tracking her through locales (something Rhys began to do with regard to her
central character in Quartet). She goes to her former lover’s house, walking along the Boulevard St. Michel. Standing outside in the dark she sees him
come out and walk towards the Boulevard Montparnasse. She follows. Part I ends with Julia being approached by a strange man
near a dark quay on the Seine, opposite the Île de la Cité, and then leaving Paris for Calais, on her way to London.
The second “Act” concerns what happens in London: chapters are titled Acton, Golders Green, Notting Hill (and then one mocks
this specificity, “It Might Have Happened Anywhere”). Julia goes to a hotel in Bloomsbury, close to a similar location she
had left “nearly ten years before” (
ALMM:67). Bloomsbury of course is known for its famous literary and intellectual associations, most notably because of the presence
of the British Museum, London University and the “Bloomsbury Group” around Virginia and Leonard Woolf, their friends and her
extended family and their friends, during the first quarter of the twentieth century.
13 It is thus parallel in many ways to
the Left Bank, but the Bloomsbury Group is upper-class and well-heeled, unlike Julia. She passes a man selling violets on
the corner of Woburn Square, walks into Tottenham Court Road, crosses Oxford Street into Charing Cross Road, gets lost in
Soho, and goes back to Oxford Street, an easily achievable walk and one familiar to any London reader. Julia’s uncle lives
in Bayswater, appropriate for a shabby-genteel man: after a difficult meeting with him, she gets on a bus “going in the direction
of Oxford Circus” to meet Mr. Horsfield (
ALMM:86). After dinner they cross Regent Street to find a place to have a drink. Julia’s mother and sister live in Acton, in the
suburbs west of the city. Julia moves to a boarding house in Notting Hill. Like Bayswater, Notting Hill is to the north of
Holland Park and the northwest of Hyde Park, not in central London. We do not learn the address of either Mr. Horsfield or
Julia’s rich ex-lover, Mr. James, but James’s house is clearly an impressive town house and Horsfield’s (to which Julia never
goes) is quite unnerving, “quiet and not without dignity … part of a world … of passions, like Japanese dwarf trees, suppressed
for many generations” (
ALMM:175). She goes by bus to see a film in the Edgware Road, also well outside central London. Mr. Horsfield promised to find
her a better place than the hotel in Bloomsbury, but he seems a frugal sort of man, and Notting Hill is likely at the time
to have offered cheaper accommodation. Her mother’s cremation requires the family to take hired cars to transport them to
Golders Green, a well-known crematorium established in 1902, where the ashes of famous people have been scattered. It is a
significant distance from Acton, to the north of Hampstead. Later Horsfield and Julia go out in her neighborhood, though he
thinks snobbishly the place where they finish their evening “was more to be expected in the provinces or in a very distant
suburb” (
ALMM:146). He would have preferred to go to the famous Café Royal, in the centre of London, long associated with famous writers
such as Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and George Bernard Shaw, Stephen Spender and Dylan Thomas.
14 After Julia’s landlady sees him sneaking up the stairs to her room, he thinks he ought to get her a room in “Paddington or
obscurer Bloomsbury” (
ALMM:169), which would not be too expensive for him and would give him more anonymity, not being his sort of area of London.
In the third “Act,” Julia is back in the same part of Paris as she was in Part I (as if it were the same stage set). Her hotel
overlooks a square in the Île de la Cité. She goes for a walk and sits on a stone seat “near the statue of Henry IV on the
Pont Neuf,” which connects the western end of the Île de la Cité to both banks of the Seine (
ALMM:181), and walks along the Quai des Orfèvres, on the Left Bank side of the island. She decides to shop in the Avenue de l’Opéra,
just north of the Louvre, in an affluent district on the opposite side
of the river. After dinner, she walks along the Seine, in different directions (towards the Place St. Michel, the Place du
Châtelet, and finally Les Halles, known for the famous market. Mr. Mackenzie is having a drink in the Rue Dauphine, which
runs south of the Pont Neuf.
The chapters are titled as if in a nineteenth-century novel, charting the moral journey of a protagonist (such as a woman
fallen from grace through her own weakness and the demon sex). Rhys puts a different, ironical spin on that genre by exposing
the ordinary, depressing vacancy that lies in the center of much of what we call sexual passion or love. She also switches
narrative point of view from time to time to include both male and other female perspectives.
Chapter 2 is titled “Mr. Mackenzie,” a significant former lover, from whom Julia receives a letter containing a cheque he
announces is the last one he will send.
Chapter 3 is titled “Mr. Horsfield,” who becomes a new man in Julia’s life.
Chapter 4, “The First Unknown,” refers to a man who tries to pick her up as a prostitute on the street. Part II begins with “Return
to London,” identifying a geographical location just as the first chapter of Part I did in the title “The Hotel on the Quay.”
The second chapter, “Norah,” is a dramatic interaction between Julia and Norah, her sister. “Uncle Griffiths” follows, about
Julia’s attempt to get money from this disapproving relative.
Both of these chapters see the world from Julia’s point of view, but the fourth chapter, titled with the name of the café
where she accosts Mr. MacKenzie, witnesses Horsfield’s struggle with himself over his attraction to Julia. “Acton” is the
location of Julia’s difficult reconnection with her family, and the narrative focus switches in mid-chapter to Julia’s sister
Norah. “Mr. James” is another former lover (the Mr. or gentlemanly titles for all three men are deliciously ironical). Chapter
7 is “Change of Address,” to signify Julia is now living in Notting Hill. “Death” is that of her mother and “Golders Green”
the cremation, though it includes the lunch afterwards back in Acton. “Notting Hill” is about her journey back from Acton,
her encounter with a man who tries to pick her up, and an evening with Horsfield. The ironical title “It Might Have Been Anywhere”
is about the sexual encounter between Julia and Horsfield.
The next chapter, “Childhood,” is Julia’s escape from the present and her attraction for Horsfield, who says “you’ve given
me back my youth” (
ALMM:161). In “The Staircase” he comes back for another sexual encounter which involves creeping into the house, only to be thwarted
by the landlady. “Departure” finds Julia packing to go back to Paris, having been evicted from her room the next day, and
leaving Horsfield, who is still attracted but relieved. The opening chapter of Part III is titled “Île de la Cité,” again
indicating something of importance to Julia will happen here. “The Second Unknown” is another strange man, very young, who
follows her until he sees her clearly under a street lamp. The last chapter is, appropriately, called “Last.”
There is a great deal of structural detail in this short novel. Over and above the chapter structure and the geographical
detail, Rhys repeats the motif of three (three lovers or ex-lovers all titled Mr., and three strange men who approach Julia).
Throughout, the motif of money connected to sex is evident. MacKenzie, Horsfield and James all give Julia money to make themselves
feel better. MacKenzie is flustered enough by the request she makes at the end of the novel that he sticks a bundle of currency
into her hand, probably more than she has asked for. Horsfield feels “powerful and dominant” the first time he gives her cash
(ALMM:47). Money raises their hopes that her unacceptable behavior after they have had their way with her will go away if she has
money to spend. The only time Julia thinks about earning money from a job is when she writes an advertisement in Paris in
which she optimistically describes herself as a “jeune dame” of thirty-six, speaking French, English and German, and seeking to be a companion or a governess (ALMM:180). Rhys locates the price (and therefore class) level of eating places and bars carefully. Julia eats twice at a Lyons
tea-shop, a popular low-cost chain of restaurants at the time, so we know she is a bit short of cash, because she usually
likes interesting, bohemian places. Twice when she gets money from a man she spends it on clothes (first second-hand, the
other time new), so we know she prefers instant gratification and looking good in public to stretching out the pennies.
Alcohol plays an important role once more. Like Marya, Julia drinks, both wine and strong drinks, like Pernod in Paris. Rhys
gives the detail that she drinks it at times without enough water, which is a bad sign. Julia follows and accosts Mr. Mackenzie
one evening after drinking Pernod, responds to Horsfield after brandy, and after more drinks agrees to go to a film with him.
After that, he takes Julia to his hotel and they drink whisky and soda. The next time she sees him they begin with sherry,
drink something else with dinner, then have liqueurs, and then Julia has a brandy and Horsfield a whisky. That evening ends,
unsurprisingly, with him recoiling from the smell of brandy on her breath. The next time they meet, they have wine with dinner,
and then Julia wants an after-dinner brandy but there is none available: that is the night they first have sex. Julia is “bewildered,
sleepy,” “soft and unresisting” (
ALMM:153) and impossible for Horsfield to fathom emotionally: perhaps she has had enough drink to make her woozy but not enough
to make her belligerent. On the last evening together in London, Julia drinks most of a bottle of wine and is then quite hostile
to him. Back
in Paris, she drinks wine at lunch, then three brandies after dinner, all in different places, before two Pernods with Mr.
MacKenzie. Julia drinks alone in public. She drinks in private in her room. She drinks with the men she wants to impress and
have as her protectors. She gets drunk, and then her voice changes and she becomes “passionate and incoherent” (
ALMM:42). She reflects that striped wallpaper makes “her head ache more when she awoke after she had been drinking” (
ALMM:10). A landlady is reported as minding the bottle Julia brings home each night more than the chance of her coming home with
a man. Drinking makes the Seine seem like the sea to her. After a solitary dinner one night (where she probably had something
alcoholic to drink), she finds her anger at MacKenzie for stopping payments to her comes out at the man who seizes her arm
and wants to buy sex from her: she wants to hit him but is afraid he will retaliate. It is also clear that Horsfield’s most
sympathetic responses to Julia are fueled largely by alcohol.
Rhys makes the alcohol dependency functional in the novel, for it explains Julia’s strange moodiness, and her willingness
to go along with what men want. But she does sometimes seem to experience genuine emotions without the mask of alcohol when
with her family. The reader does not know if alcohol is drunk at the lunch after the cremation, but Julia is aggressively
emotional with her sister and, tellingly, Norah thinks Julia is talking in an “incoherent voice” (ALMM:135).
Emotional immaturity clearly contributes to the family drama. There are many references to adults as if they are babies or
young children in the novel: Julia’s mother cries like a child, Julia appears to look at Horsfield “like a baby” (ALMM:40), but thinks her attempt to get money from her uncle is “childish” (ALMM:84), the stranger who accosts her in Paris turns out to be “a boy” (ALMM:187), and Julia remembers she originally left England because of a feeling she thinks a boy might have, wanting to run away
to sea (ALMM:51). Mr. James’s handwriting is “rather like a boy’s” (ALMM:172). Julia’s family is dysfunctional, made up of two estranged sisters who nevertheless have some tormented affection for
each other as well as the dying mother and a chilly uncle. There is no mention of a father. Julia is said to have lost a child
in an early marriage that took her away from England immediately after the First World War ended. This is of course what happened
to Rhys. Horsfield finds it easy to imagine Julia as a child (ALMM:161). Even if Julia’s emotions are intense in response to her family, they are more genuine and less confused: “a dam inside
her head burst, and she leant her arms on her head and sobbed” (ALMM:130).
But once again, the plot is not the most important aspect of this novel. There are, as in
Quartet, images and themes that provide key subtexts. One is
around the arts, most especially the visual arts, but also music and literature. In the tawdry room Julia stays in at the
beginning of the novel, there is “fantasy” wallpaper, with a large bird facing a half-lizard, half-bird, sitting on a strangely
ornate branch, and a faded pink imitation satin cover on the bed, suggesting tawdry sex (
ALMM:10). There is also an unframed still-life in oils which suggests a painter needed to settle his bill by leaving his work.
The still-life (of a half-empty bottle of wine and some cheese) and the red plush sofa strike her as the idea and the act,
presumably of sordid sensuality: she sees them both as having “perversion.”
15 A picture in a shop window depicts a man “encircled by what appeared to be a huge mauve corkscrew” (
ALMM:15), the colour mauve a key clue to this comic representation of modernism’s distortions of reality. Julia talks about a
Modigliani painting of a woman lying on a couch, “with a lovely, lovely body … like an utterly lovely proud animal” (
ALMM:52). Her face is like a mask but Julia finds as she looks at it more, it seems as if she is looking “at a real woman, a live
woman” (
ALMM:52). The reserved and pompous Neil James collects pictures, which he loves, and which seem to make him “a different man”
(
ALMM:115). Julia once was an artist’s model and a mannequin, and it is clear that she regards clothes and makeup as the essential
props that can give her a place in the world. Men will do things for women they regard as beautiful (thus Julia worries, with
poignant clarity, about the way men see her as losing her youthful attractiveness). Women who are clearly trying to be appealing
to men but who have lost their looks are taken for prostitutes.
But it is not sex that is key here. The sexual scene with Horsfield shows Julia to be emotionally remote. Sex is a means by
which to acquire protection and economic support, and to give an illusion of not being alone. The three English lovers each
have significant emotional damage, and are easily turned off women, or to put it another way seem to choose women with whom
they cannot have a long-term comfortable relationship, so justifying their constant withdrawals. For them, art and emotions
have complicated interactions. James finds buying art is the safe place where he can let his affections free; for Horsfield,
an enjoyable “illusion of art” comes when he is sitting with Julia in a cinema, somewhere a little out of his own world (“that
bare place,” with “frail music”; (ALMM:44)); and for Mackenzie, emotional mistakes are somehow connected to the poetry he wrote in his youth.
Money is a substitute for affection: the men may offer cheques in the mail to make up for their inability to give or receive
love. The only way a woman can make herself feel independent or virtuous is to refuse the money (or refuse casual sex). Thus
ageing is a very worrying development. For Julia and Norah, mirrors are both friends and enemies, in which they search for
affirmation of their surviving looks or for the cruel truth that they are no longer young enough to capture male attention.
A terrifying old woman, with a “white face and black nails,” malevolent eyes and a “cringing manner” (
ALMM:14, 15) reminds Julia of the horrible possibilities that may lie ahead. So a hat with a veil can act as a mask or shield
that keeps the world away. A room is also a shelter from public gaze. These change as an income diminishes (rooms in hotels
give way to rooms in boarding houses). But those rooms can also be prisons, self-imposed or as the result of not having the
resources to go out into the world and do what is interesting and distracting.
Creatures, both real and fantastic, are again important. Both Norah and Julia call people they do not like “beasts” (ALMM:104, 135), though Norah retracts this. Julia also thinks “animals are better than we are” (ALMM:135). Julia and her “second unknown,” the “boy,” are “tense, like two animals” (ALMM:187). Julia’s landlady early in the novel thinks that Julia lives “the life of a dog” (ALMM:11). Julia knows she hasn’t “a dog’s chance” against a rich man and a lawyer working together against her (ALMM:22): there is a “doggy page” in an English newspaper she reads on the boat-train coming back to London (ALMM: 61). Miss Wyatt, who helps Norah take care of her sick mother, has an alert expression, like a terrier (a feisty little
dog with a sense of purpose; ALMM: 97). A woman Julia sees as “mournful and lost” is “like a dog without a master” (ALMM: 145). Master is a term applied to Horsfield in relation to his cat, with whom he seems to have as close a relationship as
he is capable of with anything or anyone, though it quickly becomes inconvenient if the cat doesn’t get out of his way. The
cat is also odd. It gallops to meet him as if it were a dog, but it has “rather malevolent eyes” (ALMM:168), just like the old woman Julia sees whose eyes are the last evidence of a negative emotion that is keeping her alive,
and her mother in her last days, whose eyes seem more animal than human. Ironies abound, as in depiction of dead lobsters
and birds painted on the walls of the restaurant to which Julia goes to with Horsfield, “ready to be eaten” (signifying the
reduction of living creatures to food in the most crude way; ALMM:144). The memories of childhood which occupy Julia just after the desolate sex with Horsfield involve butterflies, a child’s
thoughtless catching of them and breaking of their bodies. The ending of the novel has to be read in the light of these references:
“It was the hour between dog and wolf ” (ALMM:191). Julia has been dog and is becoming wolf.
The statement about dog and wolf is connected to twilight, the transition between light and dark. This novel is filled with
oppositions and transitions such as cold and warmth, dreams and nightmares, fear and happiness, death and life, ghosts and
the living, hardness and softness, tragedy and comedy.
Whatever is in the outside world (political and social pressures) or inner emotional space is deferred to and absorbed into
these large generic oppositions. Sometimes Rhys makes an unusual juxtaposition, as when lights are hard.
Tiny details are again important, often repeated. Flowers (especially red roses) reflect conventional emotional responses
(the extravagant red roses that Julia takes to her mother, bought out of the little money she has left, the small artificial
red rose Norah wears on the shoulder of her dress, sewn on, reflecting her lack of a love life).
Julia is sensitive to the shape of particular things, including houses that are alike: “Each house she passed was exactly
like the last. Each house bulged forward a little. And before each a flight of four or five steps led up to a portico supported
by two fat pillars” (ALMM:85). This gives an exact idea of Julia’s dislike for the smug gentility and self-protectiveness of houses that belong to
the materially affluent with aspirations to social prominence. She also rejects a fat man who approaches her ‘and’ strongly
dislikes her own appearance after she has put on weight. Rhys’s use of such tiny details and also of heightened sound patterns
is reminiscent of poetry. Flowers (such as red roses) reflect conventional emotional responses: Julia spends more than she
can afford on them for her mother, and Norah’s small artificial red rose, sewn on the shoulder of her dress, indicates her
lack of a love life, or of passionate emotions. Rhys’s economical prose is often made the more poetic by the use of alliteration
and assonance. In the following passage, s (and sh) are prevalent, counterpointed by other less obvious repetitions of consonants
such as f: “Julia stared at the bed and saw her mother’s body – a huge, shapeless mass under the sheets and blankets – and
her mother’s face against the white-frilled pillow” (ALMM:97). There is a distinct rhythm to this sentence, made the more noticeable by the use of pauses. Sometimes Rhys employs alliteration
to heighten a description made rhythmic by two or three nouns or adjectives connected by “and” (“short and slim”), or by several
multisyllabic words in a passage made up mainly of monosyllabic ones: “He leaned forward and stared at her, and she looked
back at him in a heavy, bewildered, sleepy way” (ALMM:153). The final shift to the monosyllabic “way” is effective in conveying the fuzzy, complicated expression she has at this
moment.
Rhys’s second novel has some important commonalities in detail with her first. The names of the protagonists are rhythmically
similar:
Marya
Zelli,
Julia
Martin. Bold wallpaper disturbs the protagonists (such designs were popular in the 1920s and 1930s). The word “chic” is important
in both texts. Pairs of colors mark particular emotions: in both novels pink and red signify
sex, but in
After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie red and green are associated with Norah’s suppressed sexuality and attempt to be a pure woman, and colors are minimal (and
often faded): dark, black, white, pale and gray predominate. Dark is particularly key in Julia’s emotional lexicon, applied
to buildings, streets, people and clothing (pale is also important). Juxtaposing dark and pale recalls black and white films.
Even people are often thus described: “very pale and with very small, dark eyes” (
ALMM:187), “white face” (
ALMM:155), “her face was dark and still” (
ALMM:74). Clocks signify in both novels: the protagonists have no set routine or employment or stable emotional ties and so paradoxically
time exists as a painful reminder of what they are not doing right. Also, just as Marya has oriental eyes, Julia has oriental
hands: both signify they are slightly exotic to the European men who are attracted to them.
The plots of both novels have clear connections to events in Rhys’s own life, so making them have distinct similarities in
detail if not in overall movement (the men in
After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie are deliberately vaguely drawn, however, and quite similar). Both Marya and Julia are capable of self-destruction and careless
of their health and well-being. Gender is a minefield for a woman in both novels, where traps and dangerous hidden threats
lurk under the surface everywhere and men feel free to stereotype women and avoid looking hard at themselves. Fatigue haunts
both Marya and Julia (emotional as much as physical). But Julia has none of the hopes and dreams of Marya: their different
ages and the fact that Julia is more deeply emotionally damaged than Marya mark them as very different women. It is very clear
that in this second novel Rhys was settling into her novelistic practice: her highly structured text withholds any comfort
for the reader. It has an atmosphere reminiscent of Eliot, particularly of
The Waste Land (1922): “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.”
16
Voyage in the Dark (1934)
This novel is a
bildungsroman, a novel about coming of age. Often this is a first novel, but for Rhys it comes third. It may be that Rhys needed to wait
until she had two well-constructed novels behind her before mining some of the material in her first unpublished attempt at
a novel, “Triple Sec.”
17 This time, the story is about a very young woman, Anna Morgan, and the love affair that causes her great emotional and ultimately
physical damage. As in her previous fiction, Rhys does not attempt to contextualize the story in the public events of the
novel’s chronological moment, in this case the onset of World War I.
Voyage in the Dark was published in the middle of the 1930s, the period of stressful and widespread economic hardship following the First World
War, which may have contributed to Constable’s editor, Michael Sadleir, asking for the ending to be changed to something more
positive. Critics have been divided as to which ending is the stronger: Rhys evidently did not choose her original manuscript
ending to replace the first published one when the novel was reprinted after many years.
The irony is that, whereas the revised ending satisfied Sadleir, it isn’t really positive at all, and can still be read as
a subtle suggestion that Anna’s spirit and will to live are broken. It is tempting to find Sadleir’s insistence on changing
the ending as a typically male bid for control over a female author’s work. But the longer ending indulges Anna’s nostalgia
for her childhood and betrays Rhys’s own stern rule of tight control and ruthless cutting to keep the shape of a text. The
rambling memories are vivid and interesting but ultimately place far too much emphasis on Anna’s loss of home, with a real
danger of sentimentality arising from leaving the reader with a final image of her as victim. They plunge the reader into
the prison of Anna’s fading consciousness, ending with a final descent into an implied death. Also the longer ending has references
to the deaths of both Anna’s parents, whereas the revised ending makes the novel focus more on Anna’s father’s death, which
reverberates effectively with Walter as surrogate father-figure (though horrifically careless and exploitative). There is
a passage early in the novel when Anna is sick with some sort of flu, which is very similar in tone to the original ending
(the ramblings of a mind unable through ill-health to bring coherence or rationality to the expression of memory and feelings).
It is the more effective to have just one such passage in this fairly short text. There is also a fuller description of Carnival
in the longer ending, with a great deal about masks, as well as references to earlier parts of Anna’s story, namely her affair
with Walter, but this material doesn’t add anything to the novel of sufficient importance to prefer the longer ending.
The original ending clearly utilized parts of Rhys’s notebooks (specifically the Red). When the ending was changed, she was
free to use what she had excised for other texts. Her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please (published posthumously in 1979) begins from the professional photographer who takes a picture of the young Rhys. This passage
was the opening for the original version of the last section of Voyage in the Dark, showing how Rhys cut and pasted material and then reworked it to suit the fictional purpose at hand. There is a character
called Meta in the original ending also, a servant who evidently loved Anna’s mother as well as being stern and provoking
the young Anna. But in the autobiography Meta is only the cruel and frightening nurse.
The “dark” in Voyage in the Dark reverberates strongly in the novel. It is metaphoric for Anna as well as real. When Anna lies in bed haunted by the fact
that she has become a bad girl, the kept woman of an older man, she thinks this makes no sense but that “something about the
darkness of the streets” does have a meaning (V:57). She wants the lights out when she and Walter have sex (V:56). Though dark is a key word in much of Rhys’s fiction, here it has a particular emphasis because of the juxtaposition
of Anna’s romantically remembered brightly colored Caribbean and the absence of bright colors in England (except on one bright
summer day when Anna goes with Walter to Savernake Forest). Walter wants to have adventurous sex in the forest in public (he
is anonymous there), but strictly brought up Anna thinks that sex has to be behind a closed door, with curtains over the windows.
Sex and darkness are closely associated for her.
This novel has four parts, but there is no contents page, unlike in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, announcing the structure and substructure (in this Voyage in the Dark is like Quartet). There are once more subsections to each of the four parts (asymmetrical in number, respectively, 7, 5; 7,1). The subsections
are numbered as in the case of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, but there are no chapter titles. The first part is long (a hundred pages, telling the story of Anna’s whole affair with
Walter). In Part Two, Anna meets the “masseuse” Ethel, half-heartedly begins to associate with call-girl Laurie and her clients,
then moves in with Ethel. Part Three is the period at Ethel’s, and then Anna’s move to stay with Laurie, who arranges Anna’s
abortion. Part Four is the aftermath of the abortion.
Anna has much more of a youthful energy than either Marya or Julia. Marya’s “air of fatigue, disillusion and extreme youth”
(
Q:18) which Stephan Zelli notices when he first meets her, is never attributed to any experience she has had but is clearly
a symptom of emotional dysfunction. Julia Martin is even more severely damaged (among other things she knows “(i)t was always
places that she thought of, not people”;
ALMM:12). But Anna Morgan is a little cheeky and wayward, an attractive, spunky girl making her own way in a hard world. Rhys
chose first-person narration for this novel and so needed a central character whose consciousness is appealing (and complex)
enough for the reader to sustain attachment to her story. In
After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, all the major characters are emotional losers, but here Rhys constructs the voice of a girl who is a genuine ancestor of
Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid’s feisty female protagonists.
18Anna is a chorus girl in England when we meet her. She misses home, in the West Indies. But she isn’t at all the cliché of
the mindless young hoofer. She likes to read, and, shortly after the beginning of the novel, she is reading
Emile Zola’s
Nana (this is a very subtle connection to the major role of France in Rhys’s own life, and in that of female protagonists in her
first two novels).
19 First-person narrative provides opportunity for the reader to engage with the senses of the narrator, the power of smell,
sight and touch. Smell is a powerful agent in personal memory for Anna, for the smells are so radically different in England
that she feels the connection between things and identity is “different.” At the cinema with a new friend, Ethel Matthews,
she says it “smelt of poor people” (
V:107). The flat of her call-girl friend Laurie “smelt of her scent” (
V:114). An older man, d’Adhémar, wears scent, which makes Anna feel queasy (affirming that she is pregnant).
20She also has a subversive sense of humor in the beginning which is far more effective for being heard directly through the
first-person voice. She has evidently learned much from her fellow chorus girls, such as Maudie, about the way working-class
girls have to learn to deal with the world of exploitative men. Maudie’s cockney accent is confident: when she meets a man
whose clothes and accent suggest he has money and is therefore of a higher class, and he ignores her request for his name,
she says, “I was speaking to you, ’Orace. You ’eard. You ain’t got clorf ears” (V:12). On Anna’s first evening with Walter, a dinner in a private, oppressively decorated dining room, she can’t help seeing
the similarity of his face (especially his nose) to the waiter’s: “The Brothers Slick and Slack, the Brothers Pushmeofftheearth”
(V:20). She describes a disliked landlady as having a face “like a prawn” (V:103). The reader is entertained by her subversive response to powerful older figures around her and knows other characters
in the novel are not in Anna’s confidence.
But there is gradually more and more anger under Anna’s voice. Like Marya and Julia, she becomes capable of violence towards
a man who has used and abandoned her. But whereas Marya hits Heidler and Julia slaps Mackenzie across the face with her glove,
Anna presses a lit cigarette hard into Walter’s hand after he laughs at her in a particularly insensitive way (
V:86), showing she is not just a young and innocent victim. It gives him another reason to end the affair. Though they have
sex afterwards, he dismisses her apology for the injury to his hand and smoothly talks about his unavailability to see her
before he goes to New York (a trip about which he never told her). Her anger has no one focus after Walter’s abandonment of
the relationship. She describes a policeman as staring at her “like a damned baboon” (
V:148). She tells Ethel, the seedy masseuse, that it is “damned funny” that her client scalds his foot. She brings a man back
to Ethel’s place, gets drunk, throws a shoe at a picture of a “damned dog” and thinks of the man as “(t)he fool”(
V:161). First-person narrative gives Rhys the chance to
convey the dislocation between public face and private thoughts, and the total lack of productive introspection in Anna.
Anna’s sense of the world dominates the novel. The rather stagey homesick paragraph that locates the island in which Anna
was born alongside a description of it as “all crumpled into hills and mountains” (a reference to an anecdote about Columbus’s
description of Dominica) leads into a memory of arriving in England with her stepmother Hester.
21 Rhys gives Anna’s stream of consciousness the same kind of breathless flow of feelings and thoughts that characterize her
own notebooks, in which she withheld punctuation, did not complete sentences, and included repetition as reinforcement of
an idea. Anna’s internal narrative is similarly constructed: “smaller meaner everything is never mind – this is London – hundreds
thousands of white people white people rushing along” (
V:17).
Rhys’s story is also enhanced by the use of letters, folk stories and by reference to well-known literary works. As in the
earlier novels, letters are key. Rhys wrote most of her work in the era when people could receive a letter and send a reply
by return of post, making letters the key bearers of good and bad news as well as agents of misunderstandings. Modes of telling
folk stories in the West Indies are also important, and remind us that Anna is
talking to us, for the voice changes depending on how she is feeling.
22 There are few scribal literary references but they are significant. Apart from Zola’s
Nana, which Anna reads, an unattributed line from Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” is part of Anna’s experience of a film she goes to
with Ethel (
V:107).
23 Vincent has read and enjoyed
The Rosary and so assumes it is written by a man, but Walter points out it is written by a woman, exposing Vincent’s extreme gender
prejudice (
V:85). Anna thinks of a frightening story about walls getting smaller in a room to crush someone, “
The Iron Shroud, it was called. It wasn’t Poe’s story” (
V:30). Teresa O’Connor identified “The Iron Shroud” as a terrifying story by William Mudford, about a man being slowly crushed
to death in a prison cell whose walls move in
24 and
The Rosary (1904) as written by Florence Barclay. O’Connor says it “sentimentally extols the virtues of “Christian womanhood”.
25 As elsewhere in Rhys’s work, popular songs are important, such as “Adieu, sweetheart, adieu” (
V:22), “Connais-tu le pays” (
V:161, 162), “By the Blue Alsatian Mountains I Watch and Wait Always”. (
V:162), and “Camptown Racecourse” (
V:152, 154–5).
Art is significant here as elsewhere in Rhys’s work. Some of this is popular, the kind of cheap reproduction sold for hanging
in rented rooms, like “Cries of London” (
V:139, 179), “Cherry Ripe” (
V:44), a picture of a little girl fondling a dog, “Loyal Heart,” the dog sitting up begging, at which Anna eventually throws
her shoe (
V:148, 161); and some of this is expensive, like
the paintings Walter Jeffries collects (he also has a “damn bust of Voltaire,” as Anna terms it; (
V:87).
26 Wallpaper is a key detail in
Quartet and
After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. In
Voyage in the Dark it is only mentioned once, vaguely: Ethel’s sitting room has white wallpaper with stripes. Music is particularly important
in the novel, appropriately since Anna is a chorus girl who lives in the world of music hall, where working-class culture
enjoys both escapist fantasies and tongue-in-cheek social commentary. West Indian culture is also indicated here, including
references to folk beliefs (the
soucriant), story-telling practices and obeah, as well as religious terms associated with Catholicism, which is strong in Dominica
(hell, damnation, devils).
27This is Rhys’s portrait of the destruction of hopeful youth by a web of emotionally dysfunctional people, most centrally Walter.
Anna is young twice over, chronologically and because of her childlike emotional nature. When Walter Jeffries first meets
her, he thinks she is younger than her age (eighteen). This is a sinister detail, because he goes on to enquire if Hester
Morgan is her mother, and finds out the girl has only a stepmother, who he may assume will not directly protect her (V:15). He knows she was born in the West Indies, about which he, like most of his countrymen, probably has assumptions that
will not work in Anna’s favour. Maudie is a bit older than Anna, but she is also much wiser than her years, and she calls
Anna “kid” (V:45). Walter describes his young friend Vincent as “a good-looking boy” (V:49), but Vincent becomes his agent in dealing with Anna when Walter wants to distance himself. The summer after the novel
begins Anna is nineteen. Vincent still calls Anna “the child” and “infantile Anna” (V:80), says Walter has been “baby-snatching” (V:85), and that she will be “a great girl one day,” addresses her as “(m)y dear child” (V:87), and, in the letter telling her the relationship with Walter is over, calls her “nice girl” and “dear Infant” (V:93). In their final meeting, he calls her “(p)oor little Anna” and “(m)y dear girl” (V:172, 173). Walter called her “only a baby” when he first seduced her (V:51) and, later, “you rum child” (V:55). Vincent’s friend Germaine says Anna is “awfully young” (V:85). One of Anna’s landladies calls her “a young girl” (V:90) and another a “young lady” (V:106). Ethel says Anna seems “well under twenty” (V:112) and both Ethel and Joe, a man who wants to seduce Anna, call her “kid” (V:155, 156, 125), though when Anna’s call-girl friend Laurie tells him she is not seventeen, Joe challenges that, thinking
she is older. The woman who does the abortion speaks to Anna “as if she were talking to a child” (V:177). But this “child” is seduced by Walter, loses her good name, and sinks into an increasingly sordid life of casual sex
for money, culminating in the abortion that almost causes her death.
Like a child, Anna apprehends the world through simple opposites – warm and cold, sad and happy. When Walter first touches
her hand, she is cold (she is always cold in England). When he first tries to seduce her, she feels cold, despite a fire in
the bedroom. The next time, she feels “fire” until he talks about her being a virgin, and then she is cold, until she gets
into bed with him and his body is warm and she wants the warmth. She does not adapt to England but remains emotionally frozen
as the child she was in the Caribbean, shown by her simplistic but urgent expression of the difference between England and
the Caribbean: “a difference in the way I was frightened and the way I was happy” (V:7); “how sad the sun can be … but in a different way from the sadness of cold places” (V:56). Her apprehension of emotion remains simplistic throughout the novel: “it was sad” (V:57, 74), “being afraid is cold like ice” (V:88), “cold as life” (V:154). Anna remembers the Caribbean in vivid colors, such as gold, red, blue, green and purple, as well as “fire-colour”;
England is pale and gloomy and emotionally frigid.
Anna was formed in a racially divided culture. We know she has absorbed racist white cultural norms by the way she speaks:
“the narrow street smelt of niggers” (
V:7); “the black women” (
V:7) carry fishcakes to sell on trays on their heads. “The” objectifies them. She also remembers her childhood desire to be
black, which entirely misses the realities of the racial hierarchy in which she is privileged and expresses itself in terms
of warm and cold again: “being black is warm and gay, being white is cold and sad” (
V:31). In a sense, when she is called “the Hottentot” by the other chorus girls, she is given a “black” identity. Their casually
picked up, unquestioned English racism fuses Anna with the sexualization of African women (made into a lurid sensation when
the “Hottentot Venus,” Sarah Bartmann or Saat-Jee, was on view in London in 1810, from whence this association bled into popular
culture).
28Clearly a binary structure was Rhys’s intention, as we can read from her original title “Two Tunes”.
29 Many details juxtapose opposites. In England, Anna is conscious of “white people” and “dark houses” (
V:17). When Anna finds poems in a drawer in her rented room in London, left by a bad poet who lived there before, she mockingly
reads out some lines to Maudie, “
But where are they – / The cool arms, white as alabaster” (
V:47). Her childhood memories represent race as performed by whites. She was raised to be a white “lady,” forced to wear a woolen
vest, starched drawers, petticoat and dress, black wool stockings and brown kid gloves to church in the tropical heat, and
then live up to an expectation that ladies do not perspire (
V:41–2). A Miss Jackson Anna knew as a child stayed out of the sun to protect her “dead-white face” (
V:162–3) because she was “Colonel Jackson’s illegitimate daughter” (
V:162), and so probably of mixed race. She was educated and
gave French lessons, but being caught between the races meant she lived a lonely life.
Yet Anna’s fondest memories suggest that she breached racial divisions somewhat. She remembers a Venezuelan girl and Black
Pappy, her family’s boatman, fondly, but a white policeman is a “fair baboon … worse than a dark one every time” (V:148). Her stepmother Hester was nervous about racial categories not being properly enacted as different: “never seeing a
white face from one week’s end to the other and you growing up more like a nigger every day” (V:62). Hester hears Anna’s Uncle Bo as having “exactly the laugh of a negro” (V:65), and that “(e)xactly like a nigger you talked” (V:65). Hester wanted to send away Francine, the servant girl who was close to Anna, and refers to people of color as “these
people” (V:68). But Anna also objectifies race in her casual conversation, still a colonial child in a racist society. Hester has two
“jumbie-beads” from the Caribbean which are set in gold as a brooch: she plans to give this to a rector’s daughter who is
getting married. She wants to check with Anna that the “niggers” say such beads are lucky: the way Anna replies “Yes, they
do … They always say that” (V:58) implies she is an authority, but doesn’t belong to “they.” Anna thinks about the Caribs not intermarrying “with the negroes”
at home (V:105). When talking about how Francine did not know how old she was, she says, “Sometimes they don’t” (V:68). Anna knew Francine did not like her because she was white.
As in other Rhys texts, a number of ethnicities are present, demonstrating in small but telling details the complex hierarchies
of English class and race prejudices of the early twentieth century. White Creole women, were imagined to be highly emotionally
volatile, over-sexed, and fond of the bottle. When Anna meets a man to whom she mentions that she was born in the West Indies,
he jokes about this, claiming he knows Trinidad, Cuba, Jamaica. Then he stereotypes the Welsh as heavy drinkers (Morgan like
Rhys is a Welsh name), saying he knew her father: “Taffy Morgan … didn’t he lift the elbow too” (V:125). Anna is very conscious of who might be Jewish. She buys clothes from the Misses Cohen, she asks Maudie if her man Viv
is a Jew, and Maudie responds quickly, “Of course he isn’t” (V:16), suggesting the pervasive casual anti-Semitism of English culture at the time. Anna thinks Joe is “very Jewish-looking.
You would have known he was a Jew wherever you saw him, but I wasn’t sure about Carl” (V:113). Clearly locating every individual with regard to ethnic or racial origin is a part of Anna’s world in England, the
still very imperial, hierarchical, self-defining racially homogenous culture of the early twentieth century.
The novel’s representation of sex is chilling. When Anna reads
Nana, we have no sense that she realizes that Zola is trying to portray the existence of
a prostitute, but Maudie knows “it’s about a tart,” and likely to be full of lies, since it is written by a man (
V:10). Anna’s fantasies about race are also deeply intertwined with her sexual role-playing for Walter. She tells Walter that
she always wanted to be black as a child (
V:52), and that she remembers seeing old slave lists, with the name of Maillotte Boyd, an eighteen-year-old house slave. Walter’s
response to her memories is that he doesn’t like hot places. There is a moment at their first private meeting when Walter
admires Anna’s teeth, recalling the way planters looked at slaves. During sex Anna imagines being dead, lying stiffly with
her arms by her side and her eyes shut. She asks for the light to be out. Then she thinks of Maillotte Boyd. The words that
follow, “
But I like it like this. I don’t want it any other way but this” (
V:56), suggest Walter has sex with her as if she is a commodity, in the way the master would have had sex with the slave. He
comments afterwards that she lay so still he thought she was asleep, something Anna thinks of as the after-sex moment called
“
the Little Death” (
V:56), after orgasm. But the conflation of a young slave girl with Anna Morgan, the descendant of the slave owner, is troubling,
suggesting how deep and problematic Anna’s fantasies run.
References to performance link the chorus-girl experience of Anna with her childhood witness of Carnival. Related to this
are references to disguises and costumes (masks, makeup, hair dye). But sometimes gender signals are ambiguous. Vincent has
“curled-up eyelashes like a girl’s” (V:80). Class is also a performance, managed through the semiotics of clothes, such as Laurie’s squirrel coat, or the distinctly
up-market coat, dress and hat that Anna buys with Walter’s money from the Misses Cohen on Shaftesbury Avenue in London, who
sell clothing with an “insolence that was only a mask” (V:27). But the irony is that the good clothes, which Anna wears back to her rented room, are spotted by her landlady as proof
positive that she is a prostitute or a kept woman. The landlady is working class, but she claims superior status as a respectable
woman: “I don’t want no tarts in my house” (V:30). This is the second working-class landlady to respond negatively to Anna and her chorus-girl friends. The first was in
Southsea, where “good rooms” went along with the landlady at first saying “I don’t let to professionals,” invoking the old
association between girls on the stage and prostitutes, and later on demanding that the girls not come downstairs unless they
are “decent,” that is, respectably dressed. Respectability must be properly performed.
The role of sex in the story is also linked to role-playing. Early in the affair with Anna, Walter chillingly mentions her
“predecessor” as “certainly born knowing her way about,” which lets the reader know Anna has no future
with him (
V:51). He is generous but cautious (he hails a taxi in the street near his house in the middle of the night so that no-one
will know who he is or where he lives). Anna hopes for love, but her fellow chorus girls know sex and youth are a tool a woman
can use for only so long, hopefully to snag a husband, a piece of real estate, or, at the least, a good fur coat. It is a
short distance from that to Laurie’s work as a call-girl: she is quite clear about the separation of profitable sex and love.
But Walter at times confuses them for Anna (one of his letters says “I love you so much”), and she is young enough to believe
him. Thus, for Anna, sex is about becoming protected, loved and cherished. On the basis of Walter’s apparent affection, she
drops out of the chorus (and therefore her only steady income). But then he pulls back into his protected life.
This novel’s chronology is very precise. It begins in October, when Anna meets Walter. Her birthday is in January, on a Sunday,
a day when Walter is never in town (V:40). Hester comes to London on February 1 and again in mid-March. At the height of a hot summer, Walter pulls away. At the
beginning of October Anna gets the devastating letter from Vincent, telling her that it would be better if she didn’t see
Walter “just now.” By November (which is unusually warm), Anna has been associating with Laurie, and then moves in with Ethel.
A letter from Ethel to Laurie complaining about Anna is dated March 26, 1914. Anna is pregnant and, according to Ethel, three
months gone, and the novel ends with the aftermath of the abortion.
Geography signifies once more. Though Anna’s memories of Dominica are for the most part less specific in terms of precise
locations (though she does mention Market Street and the Bay), the houses Rhys knew as a child are evoked in detail. The house
in which Anna Morgan grew up is described as in much the same place in relation to the sea as Rhys’s own childhood home in
Roseau. The house Rhys grew up in in Roseau is still there, and is clearly the basis for Anna’s childhood home, with its upstairs
bedrooms with the jalousies, the stable-yard, the garden with a huge mango tree and a damp bathroom with a large stone bath.
Constance Estate, with the ruins of an old house surrounded by a garden run wild, recalls Rhys’s mother’s family property
of Geneva. Morgan’s Rest, with a favorite hammock on the verandah and a view of the ocean, resembles Rhys’s father’s holiday
house of Bona Vista.
Within two pages of the opening, Anna’s memory of Roseau (and the sea) is juxtaposed with memories of the English coastal
town of Southsea. We know her island is Dominica partly because of the longitude and latitude provided, and also because she
eventually names Dominican “mountains,” such as Morne Diablatin. There is general reference to streets and theaters in
seaside resorts like Southsea and Eastbourne where Anna’s touring company performs. Anna meets Walter in Southsea (raising
the question of what a rich gentleman like Walter was doing on “the front” (the walkway looking onto the beach). Maybe he
is slumming, looking for working-class girls. Hester lives in Yorkshire but travels to London for sales, showing she knows
how to make the most of her money as well as enjoying it. She has relatives in Cambridge which may suggest a connection to
the intellectual upper middle class. Walter takes Anna out of the city by car during the summer to Savernake. Anna breaks
her unhappiness over him by going to Minehead for three weeks, which is far from London, on the north coast of Somerset.
But London is where most of the present-time action occurs. Anna takes a room in Judd Street just before her first dinner
with Walter. This is a main street near Euston and St. Pancras stations, marking the need for economy. The chorus girls’ hostel
(the “Cats’ Home”) is in Maple Street, not far away, off Tottenham Court Road. The restaurant where Walter first takes her
is in Hanover Square, near Soho, a colorful and cosmopolitan area. When Walter gives her money, she goes to Shaftesbury Avenue
to shop, in the heart of the expensive West End, near Piccadilly Circus. Walter’s house is in Green Street, in the most affluent
and exclusive part of London, Mayfair, near Park Lane. Anna moves to Adelaide Road, not far from Chalk Farm tube station,
after her landlady evicts her. This runs between Camden Town and Swiss Cottage, to the north of central London, but not so
far away that she could not get to and from Walter’s house. Hester stays in Bayswater, signifying her shabby-genteel status
(like that of Uncle Griffiths in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie). In the summer, Anna goes to Primrose Hill (an extension of Regent’s Park). A wonderful view of central London can be seen
from there and it is also near an area associated with a number of famous writers, including W. B. Yeats, Friedrich Engels
and H. G. Wells. It is also quite close to Camden, where Anna lives. When Walter returns to London from his overseas trip,
they meet at a hotel in Marylebone Road, near Regent’s Park, at his suggestion: it is equidistant from both of the places
where they live, and therefore neutral ground. Anna changes addresses partly to stop Walter from knowing where she is, but
stays in Camden Town, which is where she and Ethel go to see a film together. Ethel lives in Bird Street, and Rhys adds the
detail, “just off Oxford Street, at the back of Selfridges,” (the famous department store), right in the heart of central
London (V:111–12).
Asked to get out of her rented room so it can be cleaned, Anna goes to Tottenham Court Road tube station and along Oxford
Street, where she runs into Laurie, who lives on Berners Street, not far from Oxford Circus. She and Ethel both ply their
trade in an area of high commercial traffic of all kinds,
where a man can be anonymous. After an evening out, Laurie’s client Carl goes off by himself to Clarges Street, to the southern
end of Mayfair. This reference is no further explained, but is an area where an upscale club could have been located. The
men Laurie knows can also rent rooms in hotels where the staff turn a blind eye to girls they bring in for sex. However, it
is a different story for women: when Anna has a quarrel with Ethel she is tempted to go to a hotel in Berners Street but knows
she will not be allowed to book a room without luggage (
V:147). When she moves in with Laurie after leaving Ethel’s flat, Anna tells Vincent she has found another place in Langham
Street, not far from Regent Street, still in central London: Walter will pay for this “(v)ery swanky” place (
V:179). In one of Walter’s old letters is an invitation for Anna to be in a taxi “at the corner of Hay Hill and Dover Street
at eleven” (
V:174). This is right at the southern end of Mayfair, where Walter could collect her without having her come to his house,
and that was even at the height of his attraction to her. So geography is just as key in this text as it was in Rhys’s earlier
fiction: it had become a deliberate and effective part of her fictional strategy.
There are many connections with the other novels, so much so that it is helpful to think of Rhys’s fiction as like a series
of long poems, each different, but requiring the reader to remember other texts to fully understand the individual identity
of each one. Once again, there are many ellipses and filmic scene shifts. Mirrors are once more key, as when Anna walks into
the bedroom off the private dining room on her first evening with Walter to find that her reflection in a “looking-glass”
makes her feel that she is “looking at somebody else” (
V:23). She stares at this image for a long time, making us aware of her immature narcissism (though each of Rhys’s protagonists
looks into mirrors with her own individual hopes or fears). When Anna goes to spend Walter’s money on new clothes, there are
two long mirrors in the shop. When she looks at herself in her lovely new outfit, she sees that her face looks “small and
frightened” (
V:28). A little later, Anna finds the streets look different, “just as a reflection in the looking-glass is different from
the real thing” (
V:29). She mentions twice how much she dislikes the mirror in Walter’s bedroom, because it makes her look “so thin and pale”
(an ominous detail;
V:40). There are a few references to prison and confinement, recalling
Quartet, but only to mark this novel’s different mood. The sea is important in Anna’s memories of Dominica, whereas the sea-coast
or rivers are important elements in the first two novels. In this novel, animal images are few and confined to dogs: Vincent
calls Walter a “dirty dog” for his relationship with the much younger Anna (
V:86), and dogs are closely associated with the England Anna so dislikes. Even as a child she told her stepmother
Hester that she hated dogs, but Hester warned her that to say that in England would make people strongly dislike her (
V:71).
Alcohol once more plays a key role, first as enabler and then as emotional anaesthetic for Anna. It is clearly a socially
acceptable element in British culture, of whatever class. Maudie and Anna share port with Walter and his friend (and he refills
Anna’s glass). Walter questions the quality of a bottle of wine to impress her as he prepares to seduce her. They have two
bottles of wine followed by a liqueur: Anna refuses both a second liqueur and sex. When he brings her nurturing food because
she is sick, he also brings a bottle of burgundy. Anna is weak after being ill but thinks she sees the streets “as if I were
drunk” (V: 35). After the first sex with Walter, in the middle of the night, she asks for a whisky and soda – Walter suggests she “have
some more wine” instead so we know they were drinking earlier in the evening (V:38). On another evening, she tells Walter how liking drink too much runs in her family, and eventually realizes the whisky
is fueling her stories about her childhood, to which Walter listens with some politeness and encouragement but not much interest.
He does notice she is getting usefully drunk and it is time to go upstairs: he finds “champagne and whisky is a great mixture”
– presumably for getting young women into bed. But much of the time Anna is happy with him alcohol isn’t mentioned. As stress
creeps in, on an outing outside London, Walter orders whisky and sodas for them for lunch. Once Walter leaves her, she turns
to drink.
We see her at the outset of Part Two with a whole bottle of vermouth and a soda siphon (then she drinks the vermouth without
the soda). Visiting the room of Ethel, who lives on the floor above, Anna asks for a drink and Ethel gives them both gin:
gin makes Anna sick so she can’t touch it at first but later she drinks it and it makes everything “seem rather comical” (V:111). Later another friend, Laurie, invites her for a drink (whiskies and sodas). Again, when she goes out with Laurie and
two men, they drink Chateau d’Yquem and liqueurs, and Anna gets drunk. When they go on to a hotel, with one of the men who
rents two rooms, there are more whiskies and sodas. Anna gets nauseous, and fails to have the expected sex. She finally moves
in with Ethel, who greets her with plebeian bread, cheese and Guinness beer. On a slow day, Ethel drinks whisky and soda,
becoming an enabler of Anna’s drinking. Carl, who becomes Anna’s casual lover, notices the effects and asks if she has been
taking ether or something, “because your eyes look like it.” Ethel leaves two bottles of champagne visible for the use of
Carl and Anna when they come back to the flat to have sex. Then there are other men, but as long as there are drinks, “it
was better.”
During one drunken session, Anna suddenly feels sick. It is the clear sign of pregnancy. Even then, visiting an artistic friend
of Laurie’s, she has wine, and is offered brandy as well. She drinks (whisky and soda) with Walter’s nephew Vincent from whom
she hopes to receive money for an abortion. Brandy is given to Anna before the abortion (which induces a later miscarriage).
When the miscarriage comes Anna asks for gin, despite Laurie thinking she should have champagne. The alcohol makes sexual
experience bearable but emotionally inert, and also brings Anna’s rage to the surface and removes her inhibitions about expressing
it. Rhys again is a master at conveying the influence of alcohol on Anna and other characters.
As in earlier fiction, the protagonist has strained relations with her family: this time through bereavement and its consequences.
Anna remembers both parents with love, though her affection for her mother has to be inferred from her love of Constance Estate,
her “mother’s family’s place,” which sounds as if Rhys based it on Geneva, the beautiful estate her mother’s family owned.
30 Anna’s mother is clearly a faint memory, and her planter father a strong one. The main family drama in this novel revolves
around inheritance. Anna tells Walter that, when Hester married her father, he sold a larger country estate and eventually
bought a smaller one. Hester has a voice that Anna hears as saying, “I’m a lady … I’m an English gentlewoman. I have my doubts
about you” (
V:57). Hester wants Anna to go back to the protection of Uncle Ramsay (Bo), and proposes to pay half her passage (to which
Uncle Ramsay responds “where’s the other half going to come from?” –
V:60). Ramsay accuses Hester of having taken Anna’s inheritance (a house that her father bought when he married Hester, sold
after his death, called Morgan’s Rest). But Hester argues that Anna’s father paid too much for it and it was sold for far
less than he paid, and that she has a small income and cannot afford to maintain Anna. Walter is both first lover and ironic
father-figure, twenty years older, and therefore a potential provider. Though the first evening does not go well, Anna later
likes him because he is kind when she is ill and gives her food and money. But Maudie worries he might be “the cautious sort”
(
V:45), which is not a good sign. When he tries to push Anna into taking her theatrical career seriously through his and Vincent’s
help, it is a self-interested mockery of fatherly protection: he betrays Anna the “child.” There is also another seductive
“father,” d’Adhémar, called “Daddy” teasingly by Laurie. He speaks French, just as does one of the lovers Anna imagines in
her semi-conscious rambling at the end of the novel.
Voyage in the Dark, like
Wide Sargasso Sea, has little excuse to play English and French against each other, unlike the novels set in Paris, but there are
moments when Rhys’s characteristic multilingual fictional world manifests itself. Maudie speaks in a cockney accent, just
as Francine speaks in Dominican patois. Mrs Robinson, the abortionist, is Swiss-French. Rhys does not translate the few French
sentences she speaks. Germaine, Vincent’s girlfriend, is half-French and lives in France, and has decided views on the failings
of English men, quoting a Frenchman who said “there were pretty girls in England, but very few pretty women” (
V:81), because “most Englishmen don’t care a damn about women” (
V:82). Anna remembers her father’s house in Dominica and the way “the grass on the crête was burnt brown by the sun (
V: 69): a subtle opposition of her own affiliation to the majority French Creole culture of Dominica as opposed to her stepmother’s
colonial English identity.
Rhys went on in her next novel to construct an extremely complex multilingual world, in which language is both functional
and entirely meaningless by turns.
Good Morning, Midnight (1939)
This novel is her masterpiece, mordantly funny and at times highly satirical, very stylized and brilliantly observed, but
it has generally been far less noticed and definitely far less loved than her two novels of tragic love for young women, Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea. This is not a story with immediate appeal: Good Morning, Midnight is about a woman falling into self-destructive middle age, and abandoning even the will to survive. The ending is emotionally
heightened, as is true of all of Rhys’s fiction, but whereas Quartet had a disturbing and even somewhat melodramatic ending, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie’s close predicted future emotional crisis for Julia, and Voyage in the Dark concluded tragically and with unconvincing hope, Good Morning, Midnight leaves the reader simply shocked and even terrified. This is Rhys’s bleakest novel, bleak as the year in which it appeared,
1939, when the Second World War broke out. Sasha, the first-person narrator, is also far more challenging to comprehend than
previous Rhys protagonists, although she is amusing and intellectually interesting.
There is less plot in
Good Morning, Midnight than in any other of Rhys’s novels. Sasha wanders Paris, notices people and things, meets strangers, goes back to her rented
room, shops, eats, and drinks: ordinary activities. But she is often reminded of her past. Even with minimal plotting, Rhys
clearly found her previous experience in structuring novels had served her well, because this novel is once again carefully
divided and subdivided. There are
four parts, as in
Voyage in the Dark, divided into unnumbered subsections demarcated by a large asterisk: further divisions are indicated just by a gap in the
text. This is organized very much like
Quartet. The four parts, respectively, have 81, 28, 36 and 42 pages, divided into 9, 2, 15 and 5 subsections: there is no pattern
to the number of subsections in each narrative, but rather they are driven by the nature of the part of the story being told.
The first and longest part sees Sasha settling into her stay in Paris and meeting a gigolo; in the second she reaches out
to the artistic Russians Delmar and Serge; in the third, made up of many short memories, she tells the story of her early
marriage to Enno; and the fourth builds inexorably to the devastating ending. Parts One and Two begin in the present, but
go back and forth between present and past; Part Three goes back to the past; and Part Four stays in the present. Even when
Sasha goes back to the past, the present tense is dominant in her telling of her story and this gives the narrative an urgent
immediacy. Not everyone thought all this worked: one reviewer in 1939 commented that the novel was so “very modish” as to
be “already out of date”
31. But
Good Morning, Midnight has lasted well, and now, in our postmodern age, Sasha’s elaborately disrupted consciousness is not at all dated.
Though Rhys once again repeats certain motifs and stylistic elements from her previous work, the new note here is a sustained
mordant irony. Irony is a particularly effective weapon for those denied social power or authority, and forced to conform
on the surface to the expectations and orders of those who rule them: it is an important tool for postcolonial writers. Rhys
made it her own in this text.
“Good Morning, Midnight” is the first line of an untitled poem by Emily Dickinson.
32 The first half of the poem is printed at the beginning of Rhys’s text, so no reader can fail to recognize the novel’s title
(and Rhys would naturally expect the reader to look for and read the whole poem). It is one of Dickinson’s most chillingly
playful poems, the parable of a “little Girl” who complains that the Day she loves “got tired of Me – How could I – of Him.”
So though Midnight is “not so fair,” she appeals to be taken in by him. Rhys’s protagonist is, then, to be read alongside
the pitiful choice of Dickinson’s persona, and the reader is thus warned from the outset that this novel is likely to have
a bleak emotional landscape.
The protagonist is self-named Sasha (her given name is Sophie, which conjures up a pretty, amenable character, something Sasha
is not). This first-person voice is very different from that of the young Anna: Sasha is ageing badly and has tried to kill
herself with drink. Rhys wrote that
Voyage in the Dark was written “almost entirely in words of one syllable. Like a kitten mewing perhaps” (
L:24), to capture Anna’s emotional immaturity. Sasha is
neither attractive nor admirable, and has not matured well, but she is Rhys’s only intellectual, writerly protagonist. She
tells René, the gigolo, that she is “no use to anybody” because she is a “
cérébrale” (
GMM:161), a thinker. She imagines a hilarious book titled “Just a Cérébrale or You Can’t Stop Me From Dreaming,” but, to be believed,
it would have to be written by a man. René thinks this is “rather stupid,” because he judges that she feels better than she
thinks. For him a
cérébrale “is a woman who doesn’t like men or need them” (nor women either), and “likes nothing and nobody except herself and her own
damned brain or what she thinks is her brain” (
GMM:162). Sasha immediately links the reception of a woman trying to be intellectual to the attempt of an exploited child to
please his oppressors: “So pleased with herself, like a little black boy in a top hat” (
GMM:162). For Sasha, gender and race are closely connected, both deeply about exploitation.
In short, Sasha is too clever by half, and lives in a pre-feminist world in which women are still confined within many stereotypes
and conventions. She is unfulfilled, a very female talent trapped in an old fur coat, and she has a much more developed self-scrutiny
than Rhys’s other protagonists. She lives in the 1930s, when women were supposed to gain social standing through marriage
to a man (preferably of means), or, if they remained single, to hold onto respectability even in hard times. The solicitor
who writes cheques to her as the income from a legacy asks her why she did not drown herself in the Seine (GMM:42).
As a character, she neither appealed to the pre-feminist reader (in 1939) nor, in her refusal to stop hurting herself, to
the feminist reader (in the 1960s and 1970s), but she seems very much in tune with our postfeminist, postmodern time. In Sasha,
Rhys offers an uncomfortable insight into the damage endured by people treated with contempt not only by those in power but
by those ordinarily middle-class people capable of taking good care of themselves. Sasha is the first to see her failures
clearly and cruelly, and yet she never loses her ability to strike out with thoughtful aggression against those who would
destroy her. She is Rhys’s most brilliant and chilling creation, because she demonstrates what actually happens to people
who are not able to be the fittest who survive in a Darwinian world: Rhys herself was enormously strong through all manner
of crises because she worked at her writing constantly. She withholds the bedrock of hard work from Sasha, source of sanity
and satisfaction for Rhys herself. Though Sasha does have great skill with words, her only paid work as a writer has been
to ghost for a talentless rich woman. The way she uses, thinks about and responds to language is the core of the novel. Sasha
can sound absurdist. In absurdist literature (important after the Second World War but with roots in earlier
aesthetic movements such as Dada and expressionism in the 1930s), language can sound perfectly meaningful at the level of
the sentence but there is a disconnection between language and action.
33 Furthermore, Rhys seems to uncannily predict postmodernism’s recognition of the inability of language to have stable meaning.
Sasha struggles to communicate and, more than any other of Rhys’s protagonists, lives in a multilingual world in which at
times no language makes sense.
The young Sasha, a receptionist in Paris, needs to prove her multiple language skills to the London manager, Mr. Blank. But
she even denies that she knows French well. She thinks, “when I am a bit drunk and am talking to someone I like and know,
I speak French very fluently indeed (GMM:20). Then she finds she can’t remember the “little German” she knows. So she hilariously imagines a speech of disconnected
German phrases that tail off into absolute nonsense, such as the musical scale, “doh ré mi fah soh la ti doh” (GMM:24). Then she misreads his instruction to her about an errand because of his terrible French accent which makes “caisse” (cashier) sound like “kise” which she cannot fathom. So in revenge she silently composes a highly ironical speech to him.
She immediately knows he thinks she is “inefficient … slow in the uptake … slightly damaged in the fray,” therefore of little
market value, which gives him the right to exploit and harass her, even to the extent of “this mystical right to cut my legs
off.” But she denies him “the right to ridicule me afterwards because I am a cripple” (GMM:29). This is one of Rhys’s most powerful indictments of the rich and powerful whose money comes from systematically denying
the humanity of others, even to the extent of slavery. Sasha says, “Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought
I think is weighted with heavy weights” (GMM:106).
On another occasion, Sasha overhears the patron, patronne and two maids in her hotel having a conversation in French with friends. This consists of repeated phrases and sentences,
“Tu n’oses pas … je n’ose pas? … Tu vas voir si je n’ose pas” (You don’t dare, I don’t dare? You will see if I don’t dare;
GMM:36). The pointless repetitive jollity marks their complicity and community and Sasha as outsider. When the painter Serge
speaks to his Russian compatriot Delmar, Sasha thinks he “says something in Russian. At least, I suppose it’s Russian” (GMM:98). She teaches English to Russian clients (so she should know something of what Russian sounds like).
Rhys’s use of stream of consciousness in this novel is far more complex than in
Voyage in the Dark because Sasha is older, more worldly and more intellectual than Anna. Sasha’s memory is bound to be impacted by her many
years of heavy drinking. She lives a great deal in the past, but her often
vivid memories are scattered. From the opening paragraph, she is mercilessly frank but also highly unreliable and her story
is convoluted. Even more than in her earlier fiction, Rhys confronts the reader with an impossible choice: identify with the
dysfunctional protagonist, and her substance abuse, sexual promiscuousness and emotional dysfunction, or take the side of
Sasha’s respectable enemies, and become the mouthpiece of that culpable smug middle-class world that Sasha exposes.
Moreover, the reader must work at compiling a coherent narrative for Sasha as her memories take her back and forth in time,
especially as she drinks too much and too often. Like other Rhys protagonists, Sasha is clear-sighted about her addiction.
She thinks she can use alcohol to remove herself from time: “I shan’t know whether it’s yesterday, today or tomorrow” (GMM:145). Sasha breaks two social expectations (as other Rhys heroines do): that women should not drink strong drinks (she likes
Pernod), and that they shouldn’t drink alone. But she has been doing both a long time. She remembers, long ago, drinking absinthe
with her husband Enno, becoming “quarrelsome” and then not sure if she had yelled at Enno and their companions or not. (GMM:122). She is much further along into addiction and its consequences than Rhys’s previous protagonists: she has had the idea
of “drinking myself to death” with “whisky, rum, gin, sherry, vermouth, wine …”(GMM:43). Her face is “gradually breaking up,” though she wants to think of it as just a “tortured and tormented mask” (GMM:43). Of course, she is drinking as she imagines this. Rhys is once more extremely good at portraying the effect of alcohol
on thought processes. When drinking, Sasha is unreasonable, self-pitying, aggressive and yet peculiarly aware of how she looks
and acts to others. As she gets drunk on more Pernod, she thinks everyone knows she has come into the bar to get drunk. Women
who do that “start crying silently. And then they go into the lavabo and then they come out – powdered, but with hollow eyes
– and, head down, slink into the street” (GMM:107). Before and after seeing a film alone, she drinks Pernod, plans a bottle of Bordeaux for dinner, and then adds whisky.
Very drunk, she looks out of the window and sees a man singing in the gutter and looking at her with two heads and two faces.
The odd and interesting thing is that Sasha is both an entirely unreliable narrator (in reading the world through her drunken
paranoia) and one whom the reader can trust to see herself with brutal clarity. Rhys so often makes alcohol a crucial factor
in her novels: it is part violation of the normative codes of expectation for women, part a way to express the repressed inner
core of her characters’ emotional lives, liberated if distorted by the drug, and part story of the prevalence of drink in
the cultural spaces Rhys wrote about, as well as in her own life.
This novel has hilarious performances of stories, in music-hall fashion, as Sasha tells jokes (especially around unmentionable
subjects), does various (if often unnerving) pratfalls, and skewers people she does not like with apposite descriptions. The
young Sasha can sound like Anna, in her mocking thought about Walter and the waiter, “Bowler-hat, majestic trousers, oh-my-God
expression” (GMM:19). The older Sasha is not someone you would want to spend a lot of time with, even though she can be very, very funny in
an edgy way. Very early in the text, she gives a hilarious but also bitterly ironical mock lecture on public toilets for women
(claiming she has read a monograph on the subject; GMM:11). Public toilets for women are represented by Rhys as a series of culturally varied feminine underworlds, each reflecting
its national location. In London, there is the British passion for orderly waiting in turn (even if the need for the toilet
is desperate): “fifteen women in a queue, each clutching her penny” (GMM:11). At the time of the novel, public toilets cost a penny, which had to be put into the door of the stall to open it. In
Florence, a pretty, “fantastically-dressed” girl (GMM:11) brings cakes for the old attendant, whom she hugs, kisses and feeds (a daughter?). In Paris, the city of love, the attendant
sells drugs, “to heal a wounded heart” (GMM:11). René, the gigolo, sees toilets as demonstrating the vulgarity of the wealthy, “I’ve stayed in one so rich that when
you pulled the lavatory-plug it played a tune” (GMM:169).
But, more specifically, the lavatory has long been a haunt of Sasha when she feels frail or hunted. She remembers one long
ago, in her marriage to Enno, where she vomited and knew she was afraid she might be pregnant, because they had no money nor
a settled place to live (GMM:121). The familiar lavabo at the Pig and Lily, where Sasha goes with the gigolo René the night she pays for their dinners and drinks, is upstairs,
and “resplendent” (and thus a good bolt-hole for a nervous woman; GMM:155–6). She imagines the mirror there talks to her (she has had a few drinks). In another bar, after listening to René telling
new stories about himself, she excuses herself “primly” and goes to another lavatory she knows well, this time downstairs.
He comments that she is “always disappearing into the lavabo”: she retorts, “What do you expect? … I’m getting old” (GMM:170). Later, in a mood to reject René, she thinks bitterly of the “comic papers in the lavatory” (GMM:185).
Sasha says the unromantic, unsexy English enjoy their “ration of rose-leaves,” not because roses are about love, but because
the leaves are “a gentle laxative” (
GMM:157). Even a film that she watches has a character who manufactures “toilet articles”: when a woman who has been pursuing
him finally gives up the chase, she says, “Alors, bien, je te laisse à tes suppositoires”
(I leave you with your suppositories). Then Samuel, the ridiculous husband of the woman Sasha worked for as a writer in the
South of France, forgets to buy his “suppositoires” (
GMM:168). Though there is a tiny detail in
Voyage in the Dark about the toilet, when Vincent rudely says he thinks Anna is going upstairs to curl her hair and she retorts that she is
going to the lavatory, in
Good Morning, Midnight it is a fundamental integrating element in the text.
Related to the lavabo theme is the bitter humour about another unmentionable topic: women’s drawers (the 1930s term hardly ever associated now
with sexual activity). Sasha remembers a lively woman friend of Enno’s, Paulette, of whom she was a little jealous. One of
her lovers was a Count, who wanted to marry her but his family disapproved. One day, after lunching with the Count’s reluctant
mother. Paulette was walking out of the restaurant when her drawers fell off. Sasha had a similar experience. A man wanted
to have sex with her, asked her “can you resist it” (presumably his penis), and she answered “Yes, I can.” So he buttoned
up (his trousers), took her to the bus stop, and as they stood there waiting for the bus, “(m)y drawers fall off ” (GMM:136). Sasha goes on: “I look down at them, step out of them neatly, pick them up, roll them into a little parcel, and put
them into my handbag” (GMM:136). She gets on the bus presumably a little freer, not only of the unlovely would-be lover: drawers were not the most secure
of garments and perhaps many women knew how to handle this sort of thing.
But now Sasha is getting older, needing better clothes, more comfortable shoes, taking longer to dress to face the world,
but still damaging herself with strong drink. She has been sent to Paris because she is drinking so much she looks bad. A
strange young man in a bar there refers to her there as “
la vieille,” the old lady (
GMM:41). Sasha hopes dyeing her hair will make her appear less old. She is wittily philosophical about the process of removing
one color before adding another: this makes “educated hair” (the removal of original identity to make way for what is approved
by the system). She remembers an old lady she saw long ago calmly facing a mirror, trying to put hair ornaments on her bald
head. An old woman asks Sasha for money, and “looks straight into my eyes with an ironical expression” (
GMM:49), presumably seeing Sasha heading for the same fate. In an ironic revisioning of the happy idea of a young, sexual woman
as an attractive “kitten” (such as Anna was called), Sasha remembers a doomed kitten she saw once in London, and then thinks
her eyes and the kitten’s are alike (
GMM:56). She frets about the poor light in her rented room which prevents her seeing properly to put on her makeup. Even as a
young woman, she was capable of being horrified at her reflection in a mirror (
GMM:122); but she is willing to watch
a girl putting on makeup at a window across the street until the girl notices and Sasha closes the window because she fears
being watched herself (
GMM:34). She is acutely aware of the pressure to conform. She spends three hours to choose a hat and an hour and a half every
morning “trying to make myself look like everybody else” (
GMM:106). She worries that her old fur coat marks her as a woman who once might have had some elegance and means, but now needs
to buy sex or affection.
Geography is again important but this time refracted within Sasha’s often befuddled mind. Early in the narrative, staying
in Paris, Sasha is haunted by memories of years ago (1923 or 1924, or maybe 1926 or 1927), when she lived “round the corner,
in the Rue Victor-Cousin” (GMM:12). Victor-Cousin is in the same neighborhood near the Jardin Luxembourg and the Sorbonne, which Rhys used so often for
Paris locales key to her plots. Sasha drinks on Avenue de l’Observatoire, (where the Heidlers lived in Quartet), and sees a film on the Champs-Elysées (GMM:16).There she remembers going to work via the Rond-Point Métro station, walking along the Avenue Marigny: this is because
the Champs-Elysées is close to the Avenue Marigny, both lying across the Seine from Montparnasse. The fake “olde English tavern”
she enjoys (GMM:39), the Pig and Lily, is at the back of the Montparnasse station. She walks along the Boulevard St. Michel, close to her
hotel, sits in the nearby Luxembourg Gardens, stands up a new acquaintance she is supposed to meet at the Dôme (so associated
with Ford and part of the important geography of Quartet). She knows Montparnasse and the Latin Quarter are “side by side and oh, so different” (GMM:65), connoting her long acquaintance with these neighborhoods. Going to buy a hat, she thinks of a hat-shop she used to know
years ago in the Rue Vavin, near the Luxembourg Gardens, but, not feeling confident, she wanders back streets. Later, lifted
by a new hat and hairdo, she feels confident enough to go to the famous Place de l’Odéon, and to the Dôme (GMM:71). Her walks take in the Paris Panthéon, shrine to famous French male luminaries. René lives near the Gare d’Orsay, near
Les Invalides, outside Sasha’s favorite Paris locales.
She remembers being a terrible tour guide, standing in the middle of the Place de l’Opéra and failing to remember how to get
to the Rue de la Paix: Rhys assumes her readers know that you only have to cross the Boulevard des Capucines, the main street
the Place de L’Opéra faces, so it is very close. She later manages to take her clients to the nearby Place de la Madeleine.
Going to meet Serge, who lives just off the Avenue d’Orléans, walking distance for her, she insists on a taxi. Delmar, her
companion, has it drop them at the Place Denfert-Rochereau, the Métro station, near where Serge lives,
because he doesn’t know the name of the exact street, but she also notices he is very anxious about the meter, and offers
to pay. She says she would have “dropped dead” if she took that walk (
GMM:86). She is clearly not the easiest of friends.
Her memories sometimes conflate London and Paris. In a dream she is in London, trying to find an “Exhibition” (there was a
famous World Exhibition in Paris in 1937, to which Sasha goes with René).
34 In a particularly chronologically layered moment, Sasha remembers a hotel in the Rue Lamartine where she stayed with Enno,
her husband when she was young. Sasha once rented a room “just off the Gray’s Inn Road,” in the rather scruffy St. Pancras
area of London. Both Sasha and her friend Serge once lived in Notting Hill Gate in London. A client to whom Sasha taught English
during her marriage to Enno was on his way to Oxford. There are other places briefly mentioned, associated with the emotional
ups and downs of Sasha’s marriage to Enno, many years before: Delft, Amsterdam and Brussels (where Marya goes with Stephan
also in
Quartet). These sparse details deepen our sense of Sasha’s past.
She is of dubious nationality, by her own account, when we meet her. But there are many references to nationality, race and
ethnicity in this novel, as in previous Rhys fiction. Some are vague, as when characters are said to be “dark” (
GMM:9), but many are specific. Sasha’s Paris is very cosmopolitan (with English, German, Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Italian and
Chinese people among the French). A “Turk,” Alfred, befriends Sasha and Enno, though he is contradictory, both encouraging
Sasha to give English lessons and then saying he would never let his wife work for another man (
GMM:127). Rhys’s text subtly emphasizes Sasha’s awareness of outsiders, those who are different in their own sense of themselves
or that of other people. She notices that Serge, the Russian painter, is Jewish: “He has that mocking look of the Jew, the
look that can be so hateful, that can be so attractive, that can be so sad” (
GMM:91). In other words, Serge has much the same repertoire of looks as does Sasha herself. Interestingly, he makes fake African
masks (“straight from the Congo,” he ironically describes them;
GMM:91). African art was of course an important influence on European modernists, but in this case Serge is faking a product.
He is aware of the Caribbean, for he likes Martinique music, and is aware of “Negro music” in Paris, and a Cuban club in Montmartre.
He tells the story of a “mulatto” woman he met in London, from Martinique. She lived with an Englishman who did not appear
to love her. She was very hurt by the insults of white English children. The gigolo, René, is of mysterious origin (he claims
to be French-Canadian, Sasha thinks he is Spanish American and he ultimately admits to being Moroccan,
therefore likely of mixed race). He is probably an illegal immigrant, who has come to France and to Paris without papers and
has to use his wits to survive. He refuses to talk about Morocco. But he also proves that not all the marginalized stick together.
He is highly dismissive of the Russians Sasha has met: “Russians in Paris! Everybody knows what they are – Jews and poor whites.
The most boring people in the world. Terrible people” (
GMM:163). A Hindu assistant in a bookstore insists Sasha buy a “very beautiful” book she does not want, on the white slave trade
(
GMM:132). Conflating race and gender, Sasha remarks that the desire in “some men to get you to swill as much as you can hold”
whereas others “try to stop you” has to be “something racial,” the result of some profound instinct (
GMM:179).
As in previous novels, rooms are important here. Sasha finds that all hotel rooms seem the same. Sasha’s room in Paris speaks
to her: “Quite like old times … ”, showing how she is recurrently trapped in anonymous spaces (GMM:9). She is aware that rooms cost more because of the way she appears: “One look at me and the prices go up” (GMM:34). This first one she secures is large, though faintly smelling of cheap hotel, and outside the street ends in a flight
of steps, an impasse, suggesting that Sasha’s life is also at an impasse. There are many kinds of rooms that are important in the novel. These
include the “large white-and-gold room” (GMM:17) where Sasha remembers her work as a vendeuse of expensive clothes, “(t)he showrooms, the fitting rooms, the mannequins’ room”(GMM:25), the cockroach-infested bathroom in a rooming house (GMM:33), the “nice room” someone is looking for to rent (GMM:34). Serge the painter has an “empty, cold” room (GMM:91); Sasha gets drunk in a bar which she calls a room (GMM:107); Sasha and Enno stay in the “room at the Steens ’” (GMM:113); Sasha remembers a room she was glad to leave in London (GMM:113); Sasha and Enno stay in an Amsterdam room after their marriage (GMM:116). Then is the room in a Brussels hotel (GMM:118), the room in a hotel in the Rue Lamartine which has to be fumigated (GMM:125), and a hotel room near the Place de la Madeleine, with a lot of flies (GMM: 143).
As in Rhys’s other novels, a room can be a shelter or a prison. A young dishwasher works in a foul-smelling, tiny room which
is a “coffin” (GMM:105). Details of decoration in rooms are less evident than in previous fiction, but the same connection between emotional
experience and wallpaper is clear in Sasha’s memory of the room where she was happy with Enno, many years ago, which had “rose-patterned
wallpaper” (GMM:116).
Houses also carry emotional baggage: one briefly sheltered Sasha’s doomed baby (GMM:139). Houses can be dark and “sneering,” and they can crush, As Sasha says, “Rooms, streets, streets, rooms …”
Though climate is not as key as in Voyage in the Dark, the weather impacts Sasha’s mood. She marries Enno on a cold and wet day, and adds to the gloom by wearing grey and carrying
lilies of the valley (white). Sasha is happy with Enno at first, “tuned up to top pitch” by love, which makes her notice the
lovely colors in the sky or of lights on water (GMM:18). She is heavily pregnant in a hot summer. After the baby dies, Sasha sees the dark red, dirty carpet in their hotel room
as a “dark wall in the hot sun”, at the time of day when “everything stands still,” a subtle but definite recollection of
the Caribbean (GMM:140).
Popular culture is again interestingly detailed. Cinemas and films offer Sasha an escape from the real world but she worries
about her “film-mind,” because lurid fantasies torment her imagination. A French singer who performs at La Scala joins Enno,
a former singer, in celebrating the marriage to Sasha, the Frenchman singing in English and Enno in French. Even Sasha sings,
in English. A song sung by a man in the gutter is about being young and loving (GMM:185).
If Voyage in the Dark is about the cruel robbing of illusion from a childlike young woman, Good Morning Midnight is about a life sinking deeper and deeper into bitterness, self-destructiveness and the embrace of nothingness. Even a chance
of affection is lost because of emotional damage. Sasha meets René on a night when her hair is newly done and she has a new
hat and she treats herself to an expensive bar after dinner: he preys on solitary older women who seem to have the means to
take care of their looks and therefore might be assumed to be willing to pay for a bit of sexual interest. But she has lost
too many important emotional connections: her parents and family, Enno and her baby. Two tiny details give away that she once
had the capacity for affection: she felt love for Enno when he looked anxious one day (GMM:129), and she called God “a devil” because of the loss of the baby (GMM:140). As the novel progresses, she loses the last chance of affection with René, who seems to care for her genuinely, and
in a quasi-paternal protective way.
But, as in
Voyage in the Dark, some women in
Good Morning, Midnight are good at using men for what they need without being traumatized. The young Sasha admires Lise, the well-turned-out French
woman, sentimental and self-dramatizing but a good friend. Paulette is more worrying, successful at using her body to extract
money from men and close to Enno just as Sasha is hugely pregnant. Sasha is not good at getting what she wants. Enno soon
complains she is boring, passive and lazy in love-making. He demands that Sasha serve him an orange: she obeys because he
has come home with money. Enno forgets to cancel a client who was to come for an English lesson with Sasha, so she receives
him sitting in bed as she is heavily pregnant. They
read Oscar Wilde’s play
Lady Windermere’s Fan together, a demure choice, but Sasha thinks he imagines she wants to seduce him.
35 This is never explained. Clearly Enno is careless, Sasha is heavily pregnant, yet sex hovers in the air between her and her
student. Rhys’s protagonists are not exactly innocents, but they are hopeless at manipulating a situation for their own gain.
Because Sasha is so inept at manipulating men for money, it is a huge irony that she begins a connection to René, who successfully
gets women to pay him for sex. He boasts that he will do well in England, because it is not a woman’s country: “Unhappy as
a dog in Turkey or a woman in London.” There, he says, it’s a case of “(a)t least fifty per cent of the men homosexual and
the others not liking it so much as all that. And the poor Englishwomen just gasping for it, oh boy!” (GMM:157). Sasha thinks he is a fool to imagine he can work London successfully, “he’ll find out he will be up against racial,
not sexual, characteristics. Love is a stern virtue in England,” and a “matter of hygiene” (GMM:157). René is curious about her sexuality (perhaps because she resists him). He has tried boys “in Morocco” but “it was no
use. I like women” (GMM:160). Sasha is bitterly ironical about that: “Then you ought to be worth your weight in gold” (in England, where by implication,
there are few straight men; GMM:160). He asks her if she has ever been interested in women and she confesses that she once saw a girl she could have loved,
“in a bordel” (GMM:160). But of course she never pursued it.
Part Four brilliantly intertwines threads established earlier in the novel, and culminates in a stream of consciousness (Rhys
did something similar in Voyage in the Dark). This novel has again three important male characters, this time Enno, René, and the commis, a sinister man who stays in the room next to Sasha. Enno, who is important in Part Three, vanishes from Part Four, a sign
that Sasha’s hopeful youth has entirely gone. It is René and the commis who are important in this last section.
The commis appears one day in the corridor of the rooming house where Sasha is staying, in an “immaculately white” dressing gown, looking
“like a priest … of some obscene, half-understood religion” (GMM:35). He has two dressing gowns, the white one and a blue one, and he is “like the ghost of the landing,” almost like a zombi,
a living-dead person. He is furious to find that René visits Sasha in her hotel room.
Rhys exploits the ironies of gender conventions when she has Sasha notice the gigolo’s beautiful teeth (so reminiscent of
evaluating people as chattels, and of Walter’s appraisal of Anna in
Voyage in the Dark). This is a sign that Sasha has put down heavy defensive protection against any feelings for the gigolo (the subtle reference
to slavery indicates this well). The last interactions of Sasha and René are directed by Sasha’s terror of intimacy. René
can’t quite work out why she is so afraid, and wonders if she might fear he will harm her (in fact when she thinks about that
idea, she imagines she would agree to let him kill her). Her suppressed emotion is evident when her throat hurts and she cannot
speak, and, when she does regain speech, she is violently angry, but expresses fear of people. Clearly there is some trauma
underneath all this, which seems indicated by a sudden memory of “a misery of utter darkness.” It takes her away from the
present moment, so that, when she returns to consciousness of René, he is “looking sad.” Perhaps because he wants to let her
know he too has his scars from the past, he shows her a literal one, across his throat. Rhys captures the emotional chaos
in Sasha by a series of small details: her feeling she has “screamed, shouted, cursed, cried” (
GMM:174), her image of “the little grimacing devil in my head” (
GMM:175), who wears a top hat reminiscent of the “little black boy” mentioned earlier. She also recalls a sadomasochistic fantasy
of being forced to serve a man and other women, and of being ill-treated and betrayed by the man. This seems a version of
the Mr. Howard material in Rhys’s Black Exercise Book: here it is a very effective way of indicating how deep Sasha’s sexual
and emotional damage goes, so that even when René makes her feel young and happy it cannot last.
Of course she uses alcohol, and relies on a cynical humor, “I bet nobody’s ever thought of that way of bridging the gap before”
(GMM:178); she tells René to go to hell when he tries to stop her drinking. He keeps trying to find a way to get close to her,
telling her she loves playing a comedy and he wants to see it, but the more he tries, the more she is afraid (that he will
laugh at her, see her as old). Then he becomes irritable and frustrated and they struggle on the bed, with him trying to physically
break into her, and trying to shock her with a story about how in Morocco you can have a woman easily by getting “four comrades
to help you … They each take their turn” (GMM:182). Though Sasha feels she is dead, she does eventually feel something and cries, though everything hurts, as a numb limb
might hurt coming back to life. But then she finally realizes the way to have him go: offer him money and reduce their relationship
to a transaction.
Rhys writes Sasha’s extreme drunkenness effectively so that it adds a terribly tragic dimension to the whole scene. She hears
voices, one laughing, one crying, and knows that the laughing one isn’t her. The gigolo has not taken her money, for which
she is grateful. She remembers earlier experiences out of context: the “Russian’s face” and talk about “Madame Venus,” a flashback
to a scene earlier in the novel (GMM:186). Rhys used such flashbacks in the stream of consciousness she gave Anna in
Voyage in the Dark. She knows she believes in nothing. not Venus, Apollo or even Jesus.
All “that is left is an enormous machine made of white steel,” with arms and eyes at the end of them, “stiff with mascara”
(GMM:187). She is delusional, believing René can be reached by her will and made to come back, so she opens the door and takes
off her clothes and gets into bed. We discover it is not René by the conceit of the dressing gown: Sasha asks which one it
is. The
commis looks down at her meanly. She looks into his eyes and thinks she will “despise a poor devil of a human being for the last
time,” and she puts her arms around him and pulls him down onto the bed, at the last moment of the novel, saying “Yes–yes–yes,”
which, as Howells points out, is an ironical echo of the words of Molly Bloom at the end of Joyce’s
Ulysses.
36 This is a deeply disturbing conclusion, but very powerful: a surrender to the end of love, a female wasteland.
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
In a 1959 letter, written whilst she was working on Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys described her earlier novel, Voyage in the Dark, as expressing how “the West Indies started knocking at my heart.” She added: “That (the knocking) has never stopped” (L:171). She felt she could only write “for love” about two places, Paris and Dominica.
Wide Sargasso Sea is a departure from Rhys’s other full-length fiction. Firstly, the narrative is split between two first-person narrators,
Antoinette, who opens and closes the novel, and her unnamed husband. Telling a good deal of this story in a man’s consciousness
had a kind of rehearsal in Sasha’s appropriation of some aspects of sexual and emotional dysfunction associated conventionally
with maleness. Then the story is highly intertextual with Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre (1847). Rhys’s version is mostly a prequel, the story of the woman who is mad in the attic and Rochester when he was young,
but in the last part Antoinette dreams of setting fire to the house, which joins Rhys’s story to Brontë’s.
37 Rhys revisioned
Jane Eyre’s lurid description of the Creole wife, which reflected nineteenth-century British stereotypes about white Creoles, as well
as the role of dreams and ghosts and the colour red in
Jane Eyre. Brontë gave Rhys a wonderfully grand level of violence for her last protagonist: in Bronte’s novel, the house is destroyed
and Rochester is deeply scarred and loses his sight. The intertextuality with
Jane Eyre also means Rhys can merely reference this violence without having to repeat it. In
Wide Sargasso Sea the husband is not named, an effective retort by Rhys to the renaming or erasure of names performed by colonialists and planters:
I refer to him here as “Rochester.” The importance of
self-naming and the misnaming of others as an aspect of dominance reverberate often in Rhys’s fiction: after all, she renamed
herself.
This story also gave Rhys a vehicle to explore her difficult outsider relationship with England. As for Brontë’s novel, Rhys
said in a letter (L:262) that she had “brooded over Jane Eyre for years.” She was, she wrote, “Vexed at her portrait of the ‘paper tiger’ lunatic, the all wrong creole scenes, and above
all by the real cruelty of Mr Rochester.” She had reread Jane Eyre in 1957, when she felt she had nearly forgotten Creole. In 1958, she wrote: “It might be possible to unhitch the whole thing
from Charlotte Brontë’s novel, but I don’t want to do that … I have got a plausible story and a plausible way of telling it”
(L:153–4). She created a story full of Gothic romance, entirely different in tone and style from Good Morning, Midnight. Wide Sargasso Sea is a writing back to Jane Eyre done before such intertextuality became identified as a widespread postcolonial response to colonial literary canons. Rhys
also deftly structures parallels that weave together the new story and the old, her novel and Jane Eyre (most evidently, a mad woman confined in a house she will destroy).
The challenge Rhys faced was how to find a voice for her madwoman that would still facilitate a coherent story. She managed
this well. Antoinette’s two narratives are both lucid, and connected by her memory of her three dreams (two remembered in
the first narrative and the third the one that propels her to fire the house). We therefore assume this is one narrative,
interrupted by “Rochester” ’s story. Though the reader comprehends her, Antoinette is perceived as insane and violent in her
English confinement, and she tells even the first of her narratives out of that place. Rhys’s experience in Holloway prison,
being evaluated as to her sanity, might have given her a way into imagining that condition.
38But Rhys wisely avoided writing a whole novel in the voice of the victim figure Antoinette. She chose instead to rest a great
deal of the narrative on the unnamed husband, which meant making him human enough to carry a first-person narrative in the
crucial center of the novel. It is extraordinary that Rhys created a complex portrait of the kind of severely emotionally
damaged, upper-class Englishman who destroys a trusting young Caribbean woman (as she was damaged by her first important lover).
She finally imagined the inner life in youth of the kind of man who in maturity had so caused havoc not only for her previous
protagonists (Heidler, Mr. MacKenzie and Walter), but for herself (Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith). Her “Rochester” is quintessentially
English, unlike the male lovers in
Good Morning, Midnight (Enno, René, the
commis) who are all European. Rhys is at pains to show that though her male protagonist and narrator is afraid of passionate love,
he is,
in his way, also a victim of England’s implacable desire to raise upper-class men to make and keep money and take no emotional
risks. There was something in such a man that had once attracted the young Rhys.
Wide Sargasso Sea is about devastating betrayal of sexual trust. The story has faint and ironic echoes of Othello: a white Englishman marries a beautiful woman in a British Caribbean colony. They are happy until he believes malevolent
suggestions that she is insane and promiscuous, like her mother before her. We see her young and happy, but there are hints
that she herself accepts a certain emotional instability in white Creole women, when she remarks that her friend Germaine
is even-tempered, “unlike most Creole girls.” Later, Antoinette’s husband finds her eyes “disconcerting,” “(l)ong, sad, dark,
alien eyes” (WSS:67). These suggest she is quite different from any English girl, and they are also reminiscent of the eyes of other Rhys
protagonists alienated from their surroundings. He wonders about her Creole nature: “Creole of pure English descent she may
be, but they are not English or European either” (WSS:67). In Antoinette’s early days, she is full of life, but wild, like the nature that surrounds her. Rhys allowed herself
to be romantic about Antoinette: Jane Eyre is also romantic. It makes Rhys’s novel both seductive and disappointing, in the way of sugar on the tongue.
But she was writing at the top of her game in terms of sheer ability to organize and execute a narrative: this time there
are three uneven sections. The first section (61 pages) contains a enormous amount of scene-setting information: this is Antoinette’s
version (though we do not know her name for more than fifty pages). This is followed by her husband’s long account (108 pages);
Antoinette’s last narrative, which takes us to her dream of setting the fire, is short (just over 13 pages long). For one
section in the middle narrative the voice switches back to Antoinette, as she goes to visit Christophine, her surrogate mother,
to ask advice about the failing marriage. As with Rhys’s earlier fiction, the narrative is subdivided into smaller sections,
mostly simply designated by a gap in the text, although sometimes by asterisks. Asterisks mark the shift back and forth between
“Rochester” ’s voice and Antoinette’s voice in Part Two.
This novel is highly plotted, which makes it an appropriate prequel to the highly plotted
Jane Eyre. Rhys uses flashbacks again but this time in a more coherent manner, so the story is more suspenseful. The story begins just
after Emancipation, first in Jamaica (Coulibri Estate, the family seat of the Cosways). The female protagonist again loses
the protection of family (her father dies, her mother remarries, their house is burned by angry ex-slaves, the mother goes
mad and rejects her daughter). Once more an Englishman appears to offer love, but, as we understand from “Rochester” ’s story,
intense
sexual passion both pleases and disquiets him. His angst about it lets the troublemaker Daniel poison his mind. Antoinette
has lost one brother (Pierre) and Daniel’s claim to be her half-brother is only used to enable him to harm her. Antoinette
does have a surrogate mother in Christophine, but, since she was a slave and is a servant, she cannot protect very much, though
she tries.
Once again Rhys uses chains of references that connect significantly. At Coulibri, during the fire, a menacing man likens
Antoinette’s family to centipedes. Then Christophine says Amélie “creep and crawl like centipede” (WSS:102). Centipedes in the Caribbean can grow large and have a poisonous sting, sharply painful for unallergic adults and potentially
lethal for small babies: they are reputed to refuse to die unless they are cut up into pieces or entirely squashed.
The geography of this novel is broader.
Jane Eyre’s plot references is set in Jamaica, so Rhys also sets the beginning of the story there but describes Coulibri as if it were
her maternal family’s estate of Geneva in Dominica. Jamaica is a thousand miles or so from Dominica (and the fictional Granbois),
and “Rochester” speaks of the “interminable journey from Jamaica” (
WSS:66). They are said to be in “one of the Windward Islands, at a small estate which had belonged to Antoinette’s mother” (
WSS:66). The geography of Jamaica and Dominica is, however, somewhat detailed. Spanish Town is actually on the outskirts of Kingston.
Massacre is the actual village north of Roseau on the west coast of Dominica, from where Rhys and her family rode on horseback
up a trail to her father’s country estate of Bona Vista, which seems the model for Granbois. The story of Massacre is alluded
to vaguely by Antoinette, who explains it was not slaves who were massacred there long ago. In fact, as Lennox Honychurch
explains, in
The Dominica Story, the “whole truth of the matter will now never be known”; it is likely that many Dominican Caribs were killed by an English
expedition bent on securing settlements in the Eastern Caribbean.
39 Most of the landscape of the story is lushly romantic, a suitable backdrop for the story. Also the old Imperial Road, an
aborted project in Dominica at the turn of the twentieth century, is obliquely mentioned when Baptiste comes to rescue “Rochester”
from the forest. But when “Rochester” thinks he sees the remains of a road, Baptiste denies it (
WSS:105).
40The national and racial identities of major characters also represent regional history and geography. Antoinette’s mother
and her beloved nurse, Christophine, are both from Martinique. Tia, Antoinette’s childhood companion, is the daughter of Christophine’s
childhood friend. Antoinette’s stepfather is English: his son, Richard, is schooled in Barbados, but afterwards
in England. Though Mason has other West Indian properties, he is the new sort of planter, coming as slavery is ended, and
trying to industrialize the plantation. He is not interested in knowing or adapting to local culture: his family eats English
food. If the freed slaves are not keen to work for him, he plans to import labour from India (which of course happened extensively
in Trinidad and Guyana but not in Jamaica). This threat or idea is expressed in front of the servants, shortly before the
house is set alight. Antoinette’s Aunt Cora is related to her father’s family. She also married an Englishman, a common pattern
for white Creoles, and she and Mason clash over his assumption that he truly knows the local situation.
Rhys tells the story cleverly, so that the reader must pay close attention to discover all the details, and it helps to know
something of Caribbean history. Once again, money and sex are fatally connected. Sugar plantations were set up to make money,
and Mason clearly has done so, though the novel is set just after Emancipation, when planters like him were furious at losing
their control over slaves because it threatened their wealth. When he marries Annette, he acquires all her property through
the prevailing law at the time. He tries to be an affectionate father to Antoinette, often visiting her during her eighteen
months at the convent school and giving her presents. His idea of making her secure is to marry her off, using her mother’s
property and perhaps some of his money as a lure. “Rochester” is a younger son, whose elder brother will inherit everything
through primogeniture, the English upper-class tradition that protects family property from division, so he is interested
in marrying a girl he has never met in order to be secure. He will receive thirty thousand pounds, a fortune at the time of
the novel. Antoinette is not involved until the wedding is imminent. After Mason dies, his son Richard takes over the arrangements:
Antoinette resists. Much later in the novel, the reader learns that Aunt Cora quarreled with Richard over the absence of legal
settlement to protect Antoinette financially, which Cora believed that his father would have made, so she gave her niece two
rings to sell in an emergency. As he is taking Antoinette away from Granbois, “Rochester” remembers he had planned to give
it back to her, but he will now sell it (WSS:173).
As in her earlier work, Rhys constructs dramatic confrontations between strongly drawn characters. Christophine establishes
herself in the scene where she brings breakfast to the newlyweds Antoinette and her husband. Though she calls “Rochester”
master, with conventional politeness, she calls her coffee “bull’s blood” and the coffee which “the English madams drink,”
“yellow horse piss” (
WSS:85). She tells him she will send the girl to clear up “the mess you make with the frangipani” (the wreath of flowers left
on the
bed the previous evening to mark the wedding night, following Eastern Caribbean custom). “Rochester” is a nervous young man
at first, capable of being gentle, but after his marriage he gradually transforms into a controlling husband, greedy for the
pleasure his wife can give him, but increasingly indifferent to her needs because he is so absorbed in his own.
As in previous novels, Rhys depicts sexual experience both discreetly (in terms of the physical act) and exactly, in terms
of the way sex reflects the emotional quality of a relationship. Like Voyage in the Dark, this novel portrays the way a young woman is damaged by a self-centered Englishman, but Antoinette is far more passionate
than Anna. Also sex is described through a male consciousness. After the wedding, consummation of the marriage is postponed
by travel until they reach Granbois. “Rochester” appears somewhat straitlaced. On the wedding night, he overhears Antoinette
preventing Christophine from putting scent in her hair, because she knows he does not like that. He first realizes her beauty
during the highly staged ritual of their first night alone together, but she also appears to him to be a lonely child whom
he rocks and to whom he sings. She tells a childhood memory of two huge rats sitting on her bedroom windowsill at Granbois,
and how she was not afraid of them: they seem both a child’s innocent imagination of animals and a sinister suggestion. Antoinette
was also softened towards him before the wedding by his suggestion that she could hurt him. Rhys’s protagonists tend to be
attracted to male sensitivity or weakness.
After sex that night, he is affectionate, but, as their relationship continues, and Antoinette becomes “as eager for what’s
called loving as I was,” she also becomes “more lost and drowned afterwards” (
WSS:92). Displaying both the lust (abandonment of inhibitions) and eventual revulsion of an inhibited, colonially trained Englishman
lost beyond his own cultural fortress, he becomes “savage with desire” after seeing Antoinette’s dress discarded on the floor
of her bedroom. After exhausting himself with her, he turns and sleeps, “still without a word or caress,” despite which she
wakes him with “soft light kisses” and a caring desire to cover him against a cold breeze (
WSS:93). Rather like a younger version of Walter in
Voyage in the Dark he finds her a child, but at times “obstinate” (
WSS:94). Antoinette is devastated by his refusal to sleep with her after he receives Daniel’s letter, so she visits Christophine
to ask for a potion to make things right. But, ironically, he is feeling attracted to her again the night he drinks the potion
and has a terrible nightmare and sickness. On that evening, Antoinette has lit nine candles to make an atmosphere, and he
thinks she has never looked so “gay or so beautiful” (
WSS:136). Afraid and horrified, he cannot feel sexual attraction to her after he recovers from the potion, but he slakes his
sexual thirst and
need for power and reassurance with Amélie (who has just fed him as if he were a child, so offering him a kind of maternal
affection that makes him feel safe). But just before he takes a now mad Antoinette off to Jamaica, en route to England, he
imagines that she has a thirst for anyone, but not for him, “(s)he’ll moan and cry and give herself as no sane woman would
– or could” (
WSS:165).
Sex, violence and death are deeply connected. Antoinette provokes “Rochester” to tell her to die (literally), but he speaks
of her “dying” many times in the sense of orgasm, “my way, not hers” (WSS:92). Death is both metaphorical and real. Antoinette explains to “Rochester” that there are always two deaths: the real one
and the one people know about, and so her mother “died” when she was a child (WSS:128). Sexual passion can morph into violence quickly. Christophine notices the marks of violent sex on Antoinette’s body
and tells the story of a passionate couple she knew, and the wife’s injury at the hands of her husband who loved her.
Lush flora add to the sexual intensity of the period of the early honeymoon but also intensify “Rochester” ’s alienation from
Antoinette later on. Flowers are sexual. These include the river-flowers, which only open at night, and an orchid which “Rochester”
once took to Antoinette and later violently tramples on in his revulsion at her. There is a rich smell of cloves, cinnamon,
roses and orange blossom in the air when “Rochester” and Antoinette reach the “honeymoon house,” which he at that moment enjoys
(WSS:73).
Once more alcohol is a key element. Antoinette and “Rochester” drink champagne on their wedding night (a sign of Dominica’s
proximity to the “Paris of the West Indies,” St. Pierre, Martinique, from where Antoinette’s dress for the evening came).
But there is also wine on the night table when they retire, and they drink a glass each. This presumably helps both of these
near strangers overcome their shyness with one another. Daniel drinks rum before and during his meeting with “Rochester”:
a direct question, however, seems to sober him up. Antoinette’s husband drinks rum as he confronts Antoinette with what he
has heard from Daniel. He empties the decanter and fetches another bottle and, whereas Antoinette had refused wine, “now she
poured herself a drink,” though she scarcely touches it (
WSS:130). She remembers seeing her mother in confinement, being fed rum before one of her custodians kisses her on the lips.
Antoinette feeds the love potion she has begged from Christophine to “Rochester” in wine. After he sleeps with Amélie, Antoinette’s
servant, Antoinette sends the butler for rum for herself. “Rochester” finds a chest full of bottles of “the rum that kills
you in a hundred years, the brandy, the red and white wine smuggled, I suppose, from St. Pierre … ” (
WSS:144). He chooses to drink the rum. Both Antoinette
and Rochester are fueled by strong drink when they have a fierce quarrel, Antoinette drinking defiantly through it. When “Rochester”
snatches the bottle of rum (from which she has been drinking directly, without a glass), she bites him, and he drops the bottle,
which smashes. Antoinette smashes another bottle and threatens him with a piece of broken glass (
WSS:148). Even after all of this, “Rochester” looks for another bottle of rum and plans to have a strong drink before sleeping.
But then Christophine confronts him. Rhys writes “Rochester”’s thoughts as an echo effect of Christophine’s words, which cleverly
suggests he is befuddled by the drink: “ ‘But all you want is to break her up’. / (
Not the way you mean, I thought) / ‘But she hold out eh? She hold out’. / (
Yes, she held out. A pity)” (
WSS:153). Christophine admits she has been trying to heal Antoinette with her own medicine, as well as with simple kind care,
but when this seems to be failing, she gives her rum. The role of alcohol is similar in the lives of Rhys’s young protagonists:
it plays a role in first sexual experience, and becomes the drug of choice when heartbreak comes, only to be part of the reason
for further rejection. In the final narrative, Antoinette steals “the drink without colour” on a regular basis from her guardian,
the same Grace Poole as in Brontë’s
Jane Eyre. It is probably gin, this being nineteenth-century England. Though it is hard for her to drink down at first, showing she
had been without alcohol a very long time, it clearly enables her dreams, her violence and her memories and her intentions.
Race is a key element in this story. But it is complexly portrayed and tangled with gender, class and national identities
in Antoinette, and these designate her as different in complicated ways from those around her, just as Anna is different in
Voyage in the Dark. Rhys visited Dominica with her second husband in 1936. Her account of the visit in “The Imperial Road” shows she found hostility
to herself as a local white Creole, and was reminded strongly of the way race and racism informed her childhood. In the novel,
the Englishman’s gaze assigns racial characteristics according to how he feels. “Rochester” describes Antoinette as both “not
English” (
WSS:67) and as looking like “any pretty English girl” (
WSS:71). Under the influence of rum, as things between them go awry, he thinks she looks like the servant Amélie (
WSS:127). At first sight, he thought Amélie “a lovely little creature,” but “malignant perhaps” and “half-caste” (
WSS:65). After he sleeps with Amélie, he thinks her skin is darker and her lips “thicker” than he had thought (
WSS:140). Daniel (who significantly says his real name is Esau) claims to be Antoinette’s half-brother, by a slave woman her
father impregnated and then set free. Daniel claims his half-brother Alexander will not speak against white people, because
he has done so well from them. “Rochester” notices Daniel,
the loser, has a “thin yellow face” (
WSS:122). Amélie says some say yes, some say no, as to whether his father is the same as Antoinette’s, but that he lives like
a white person with one room just for sitting in, that he was once a preacher in Barbados, and that he has pictures of his
parents in his house, and they are “coloured” (
WSS:120). She says Alexander has made much money in Jamaica and married a fair-skinned woman: his son is Sandi, who looks like
a white man. She says she heard Antoinette and Sandi “get married,” but never believed it.
Antoinette understands race complexly. In many ways, racial issues and categories in Wide Sargasso Sea reverberate with those in Voyage in the Dark. Though white children benefit in her racially hierarchical culture, they do not feel in control if outside their fortress
houses and other institutions that protect them. When Antoinette goes to school from Aunt Cora’s house, she is intimidated
by two children, one, a boy, who is an albino, and the other, a girl, who is “very black.” They frighten her until she remembers
to hate them. Also racial barriers are constantly breached. Her “cousin” Sandi protects her, though she has been warned off
claiming him as kin because he is “coloured” (WSS:50). The nuns at her convent school are both white and “coloured,” as are the girls. She wants to find love, even across
forbidden boundaries. She hugs and kisses Christophine, whereas “Rochester” says he could not (WSS:91): “She trusted them and I did not” (WSS:89). Though she uses “they” like any colonial white to connote the specific cultural practices of black people – “They don’t
care about getting a dress dirty” (WSS:85) she wants to be thought an insider (this remark is made in explanation to the stranger “Rochester”). This is very much
like Anna’s comments to Hester in Voyage in the Dark about the “jumbie beads”: Antoinette knows exactly how Christophine wraps her head-tie, “handkerchief,” in the Martinique
fashion. In making a close childhood friendship with Tia, she comes (as Anna was said to do by Hester) to be able to speak
at will in what sounds to “Rochester” an imitation of a “negro’s voice” (WSS:129). She tells “Rochester” how her mother worried she was growing up a “white nigger” and shaming her (WSS:132). But she is also called a “white cockroach” as a child (WSS:23) and a “white nigger” by Tia, who declares, “black nigger better than white nigger” (WSS:24). Amélie calls Antoinette “white cockroach,” and Antoinette explains: “That’s what they call all of us who were here before
their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders. And I’ve heard English women call us white niggers. So between
you I often wonder who I am … ” (WSS:102).
In a letter to her close friend and editor, Francis Wyndham, Rhys said that after “Rochester” betrays Antoinette with her
maid, she has an affair
with her friend Sandi, “then with others. All coloured or black, which was, in those days, a
terrible thing for a white girl to do. Not to be forgiven” (
L:263). But she made this barely perceptible in the novel itself, perhaps because interracial sex was a controversial topic
in British publishing circles in the mid-twentieth century. When “Rochester” takes Antoinette back to Jamaica, before he takes
her to England, Sandi manages to find her, both when “Rochester” is out and when she goes out driving (
WSS:185). They kiss before parting for the last time, “the life and death kiss and you only know a long time afterwards what
it is, the life and death kiss” (
WSS:186). But, though intense, this love is almost entirely offstage.
This is the only Rhys novel saturated with the idea of an illicit and disturbing magic. That this novel’s elderly, frail and
addicted creator pulled it off seems like magic also. But to flirt with the supernatural risked exoticizing Caribbean culture.
We learn from Rhys’s letters that Diana Athill, Rhys’s faithful editor, suggested that the young couple must be happy for
a while at first (L:262). Rhys thought this was a good idea and added that wildly passionate love was described in Dominica, by “the black people”,
in terms of a spell: “she magic with him” (or vice versa; L:262), which becomes clear in the way “Rochester” first falls for Antoinette. Daniel also uses the idea of magic to plant
anxieties in “Rochester”’s mind about his wife. He mentions that Mason “was bewitch” by Antoinette’s mother.
Rhys explained that “Rochester” would remember everything from before drinking the potion offered him by his wife. In actual
obeah, she said, it is reported that the god possesses the person who drinks a special potion and when they come to they remember
very little. (
L:262). Obeah, a syncretic survival and recreation of traditions by African slaves from different cultures, is not a religion
(in the sense of having a community of believers), but a practice. Clients ask the practitioner to facilitate something, for
good or evil, and the means used may be traditional healing methods, rituals or the promise of powerful effects (including
the threat of death). The British saw it as a source of resistance to their authority, as well as superstition, and on both
counts discouraged it even to the point of making it illegal and its practitioners subject to arrest.
41 The general strength of belief in powerful spiritual signs is reflected in the world of
Wide Sargasso Sea when the rowdy crowd who threaten the family as the house burns begins to disperse after the family parrot dies in the flames,
because it is so unlucky to kill a parrot.
Rhys made obeah a mainspring of the plot. When Annette marries Mr Mason a guest remarks that it is “evidently useful to keep
a Martinique obeah woman on the premises” (
WSS:30). Rhys is careful to make the child Antoinette
imagine Christophine has the machinery of obeah (lurid details
suitable for a child’s ideas, “a dead man’s dried hand, white chicken feathers, a cock with its throat cut”;
WSS:31). But in response to Amélie’s provocations, Christophine threatens to give her “bellyache like you never see bellyache.
Perhaps you lie a long time with the bellyache I give you. Perhaps you don’t get up again with the bellyache I give you” (
WSS:102). “Rochester” learns from a book that untraceable poison is a tool of obeah (
WSS:107), probably a white planter terror about the possibility of slave revenge. When Antoinette begs Christophine for help,
Christophine denies that she has anything to do with obeah, “that tim-tim story,” and in any case that is “not for
béké,” whites (
WSS:112). Then Christophine does something that links her directly to African custom: she silently draws lines and circles in
the earth with a stick and rubs them out (
WSS:116). Antoinette notices a heap of chicken feathers in Christophine’s bedroom, which reminds the reader of her suspicions
of Christophine’s obeah when she was a child. Daniel tells “Rochester” that Christophine is an obeah woman and had to leave
Jamaica because she was put in jail for it (
WSS:124). Rhys raises the foreboding, so that when “Rochester,” feeling some empathy and attraction towards his wife, sees white
powder on her bedroom floor and Antoinette says it is to deal with cockroaches, the reader knows better (
WSS:136). “Rochester” gets confirmation from a magistrate in Jamaica with whom he stayed before the wedding that Christophine
was found guilty of the practice there and jailed, as well as an offer of help from him to set the local police on her. This
is the weapon he needs to separate Christophine from Antoinette.
The zombi image is also very prevalent in the novel.
42 A girl taunts Antoinette that her mother has “eyes like zombi and you have eyes like zombi too” (
WSS:50). The zombi is the living dead of sinister reputation in association with Haitian vodoun, which Rhys also employs to great
effect. After Daniel’s intervention, Amélie says that “Rochester” “look like he see zombi” when he looks at Antoinette (
WSS:100). Walking alone in the forest, “Rochester” comes across little bunches of flowers tied with grass, and laid under a tree
in a plantation run wild (
WSS:104), sees a child run away from him frightened, and feels he has to ask Baptiste, the butler who comes to find him, if there
is a “ghost, a zombi there?” (
WSS:106). The old book he found at Granbois defined a zombi as not only the living dead, but sometimes the spirit of a place,
needing propitiation by offerings (he thinks of the flower bunches he saw;
WSS:107). Christophine thinks Antoinette’s intense grief over “Rochester” gives her the look of, a
soucriant, and even a dead woman, something menacing and ghostly. After “Rochester” wakes feeling he has been buried alive (the zombi
theme again), he finds a bitter residue in his wine glass from the night before. After this, his vengeance on the woman
who made him love her beyond his sense of safety is to turn her into the living dead, in effect a zombi, resistant, with “(b)lank
lovely eyes” (
WSS:170). He thinks of her as a zombi as he takes her away: “they walk and talk and scream and try to kill (themselves or you)
if you laugh back at them. Yes, they’ve got to be watched” (
WSS:172).
Catholicism and obeah mingle and separate in Antoinette’s culture. Both as a child and an adult, she notices symbols of Catholic
faith such as religious pictures in Christophine’s room. The major cultural influence on Antoinette as she grows up after
the fire is the powerful Catholicism of her convent school, and there are many references to hell and devils in the novel.
Antoinette is never more of a spoiled white girl than in hurling a curse at Christophine as a “damned black devil from Hell”
(WSS:134), similar to Rhys’s account in Smile Please of her childhood anger at her nurse. “Rochester” on some level knows he might be “bound for hell,” which he prefers to “false
heavens” (WSS:170). Myra, the servant who betrays Pierre when Coulibri is set on fire, thinks everyone goes to hell, unless saved by her
particular religious sect (WSS:35). Antoinette calls the man who kisses her mother “black devil” (WSS:147).
Though this novel is in many ways an important departure from Rhys’s previous work, there are still significant connections.
Letters are crucially important, especially those from Daniel, who claims to be Antoinette’s half-brother and who betrays
her. Mirrors are also once again important. Antoinette’s mother perhaps “had to hope every time she passed a looking glass”
(WSS:18). When Tia throws a stone at Antoinette, Antoinette looks at Tia (who has tears on her face) “as if I saw myself. Like
in a looking glass” (WSS:45). In the convent, though there is no looking glass, a new young nun from Ireland looks into a cask of water and smiles
at herself. The bedroom in the “honeymoon house” has a large looking glass in it. As Antoinette tells the story of the rats,
she says, “I could see myself in the looking-glass on the other side of the room” (WSS:82). During her happiness with “Rochester,” she often smiles at herself in her looking glass (WSS:91). When “Rochester” overhears Antoinette and Amélie quarrelling, he sees them both via their reflection in the looking
glass in Antoinette’s bedroom (WSS:100). Antoinette talks about her mother’s anxious staring into a looking glass (WSS:130). It is important that Antoinette has no looking glass in her room in “Rochester” ’s English house. She remembers that,
when her husband refused to call her by her right name (he calls her Bertha now), she saw “Antoinette drifting out of the
window with her scents, her pretty clothes and her looking glass” (WSS:180). In her last dream, which predicts her torching of the house, Antoinette sees an image of herself as a ghost in a mirror
(WSS:188–9).
Also dreams, whilst present in other Rhys novels, are structurally crucial in this one. Antoinette has a dream three times.
The first is when she still feels safe at Coulibri, but the dream is terrifying: she is in a forest, pursued by a someone
who hates her, unable to protect herself (WSS:27).The second time this dream has vague but definitely terrifying sexual implications, as Antoinette sees her beautiful
long white dress soiled in the dirt as she follows a man who looks at her with a face ‘black with hatred” (WSS:60). She tries to hold onto a tree to save herself, but the tree rejects her. To a nun, she says she “dreamed I was in Hell,”
and is told the dream is evil (WSS:60). The third dream brings together all of her life and propels her to set the fire and leap from the roof of the house.
But the difference between reality and dream or fantasy is a consistent concern to the novel’s major characters. For “Rochester,”
reality is England, and Granbois becomes a “nightmare” from which he hopes he can wake (WSS:119). For Antoinette, England is a fantasy, like a dream (WSS:103), and one of her friends who went there to live said it was a “cold dark dream sometimes,” from which she wanted to wake
up (WSS:80). When “Rochester” first finds his wife appealing, he still thinks “this is unreal and like a dream” (WSS:81). When he rejects Antoinette, she sleeps badly – “And I dream” (WSS:113).
Performance and popular culture are key details here as in other Rhys novels. The novel’s title was, Rhys said in a letter
(L:253), taken from “a Creole song … written by a cousin of mine.” Amélie sings about the white cockroach (WSS:101). Literary references have subtle but important reverberations. “Rochester” finds and reads old books at Granbois, but
he also calls up vague memories of poetry he was taught, something he now hates. Two quotations are suggestive of what is
in “Rochester” ’s mind. “Pity is like a naked new-born babe striding the blast” is from a speech by Macbeth, debating the
likely outcome of killing the virtuous and venerable Duncan: a chilling suggestion of some guilt over his absolute lack of
pity and vengeful attitude to Antoinette. “Rose elle a vécu” comes into his mind as he touches a rose in a jug and the petals
fall: this is on the morning after the wedding night (WSS:86). This is a partial line from François de Malherbe’s poem on mortality, “Consolation à Monsieur Du Périer (gentilhomme
d’Aix-en-Provence) sur la mort de sa fille” (1598). Malherbe wrote this moving poem for a friend who had just lost his daughter.
The beauty of the dead girl has a brief life, just like that of a rose. So when the rose petals fall, they signify that fearful
brevity, and in this case are a premonition of the brevity of “Rochester” ’s happiness with his new wife.
There are commonalities between Rhys’s previous novels and this one, but each time she employs a strategy in a different text,
she makes it new.
Antoinette is seen as a ghost by girls in her husband’s house in England (
WSS:182). Popular art, whilst less common here than in previous novels, is represented by “The Miller’s Daughter” (
WSS:36). The parrot says “Qui est là” (“Who is there?”;
WSS:41), as Sasha did when surprised by René (
GMM:177). Baptiste retreats behind a “service mask” when “Rochester” asks him questions in the forest (
WSS:106): masks are important in earlier Rhys novels.
But Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark have the closest connections. Family losses in each heavily impact the protagonist and become a factor in her lack of protection
against what happens to her later on. Rhys calls up plantation history in both novels through white male relatives of her
protagonists who are casual about interracial sex (Cosway and Bo). Black servants in each novel have a close emotional tie
to the central character (Francine and Christophine). The colour red signifies (this is also related of course to Jane Eyre), there is a house in the hills (Morgan’s Rest and Granbois), and there is a strong sisterly connection between the white
female protagonist and a black slave or poor girl (Maillotte Boyd and Tia).
After Wide Sargasso Sea, in the collections of stories published in Rhys’s seventies and mid-eighties, she affirmed once more her ability to tell
stories in highly innovative ways.
Tigers Are Better-Looking (1968)
This collection of stories appeared two years after Rhys’s triumph with Wide Sargasso Sea. She was seventy-eight years old. All of these stories were previously published. The first half of the collection contains
eight stories, six from the early sixties and two from 1966–7, and the second is a reprint of ten out of the original twenty-two
in The Left Bank (1927). It was a master stroke by the publishers to bring those early stories back into availability just at the moment when
Rhys was gaining many new readers.
The stories from the 1960s show that Rhys continued to experiment with point of view and narrative voice. She used ellipses
in her longer stories as in her novels, for similar purposes, to indicate time passing, or to move the reader to a different
perspective. It is interesting that the central characters in two stories are writers, given that Rhys rarely wrote about
her own professional experience in her fiction.
The first three in the collection are told in the first person, the next three in the third, and then the last two, “A Solid
House” and “The Sound of the River,” use both in interesting ways. The first-person narrators are all female,
but of different ages and cultural identities and locations: “Till September Petronella” (1960) is told by a young woman on
a strained romantic weekend in England, “The Day They Burned the Books” (1960) by a young girl in the Caribbean, and “Let
Them Call It Jazz” (1962) by a mature Caribbean woman, Selina, living in London. Selina speaks in a light Creole, a bold move
by Rhys, who was an exile from Caribbean speech for so much of her adult life. The rest of the stories are told by third-person
narrators, “Tigers are Better-Looking” (1962, set in London), “Outside the Machine” (1960, in an English hospital near Versailles),
“The Lotus” (1967, London), “A Solid House” (1963, set during the Second World War in England) and “The Sound of the River”
(1966, set somewhere in the remote English countryside). All of the stories represent complexities of human interaction, caused
by misunderstandings, miscommunications and betrayals of love, fidelity, honesty, truthfulness or the protocols of civil society.
Some characters are emotionally or psychologically unhinged. The great central theme here is the same as the novels, emotional
damage from unhappy love.
In “Let Them Call It Jazz,” Rhys worked from her own experience of noisily quarreling with a neighbor when drunk, and being
taken to court and sent for psychiatric evaluation. Selina is confined in the women’s prison in London, Holloway, the same
place where Rhys was sent.
43 Much can be said about Rhys transposing that experience to a West Indian woman of color, because few West Indian women would
have drunk alcohol at all in the time the story is set, let alone to excess as Selina does. She knows some “Martinique patois”
(
CS:168), so like Rhys she grew up in a multilingual Caribbean world. But oddly, given the high priority of education in the
region and Selina’s mother’s financial contributions to her welfare, she did not go to school until she was twelve.
Rhys’s fictional practice in her novels is reflected here in a number of ways. The light Creole voice in which the story is
told is quite brilliantly executed. It was not Rhys’s own, but is highly reminiscent of Christophine’s voice in Wide Sargasso Sea: “She too cunning, and Satan don’t lie worse” (CS:158). Like other Rhys protagonists, Selina notices looking glasses (two are in the furnished flat she rents from Mr. Sims)
and did not have normal parental protection as she grew. Her father was a white man whom she scarcely remembers. Her mother
was a “fair coloured woman, fairer than I am they say,” and she left for Venezuela when Selina was “three-four.” As with Antoinette
in Wide Sargasso Sea, there was surrogate care: “It’s my grandmother take care of me. She’s quite dark” (CS:164).
Songs are important in other Rhys texts, but here they are central. Selina likes to sing and dance when she is drinking, including
a song her
grandmother taught her, “Don’t trouble me now,” about a man addressing a girl who abandoned him because he was poor but comes
back because now he has money: “You without honour, you without shame” (
CS:168). Selina thinks she sings better after drinking wine, but the story’s crisis is brought on by her drunken singing. Her
neighbors don’t just object to that, but have the racist white British reaction to a London becoming more multiethnic, “At
least the other tarts that crook installed here were
white girls” (
CS:167). This causes Selina to damage expensive property (a colored glass window).
44 The importance of song comes back when Selina is in prison, where she hears a song. After she is free, she whistles the song
at a party, where a man “plays the tune, jazzing it up” (
CS:175) and subsequently sends her five pounds to thank her. Selina first fears she let him take away “all I had” when he changed
the song, but in the end she concludes “let them call it jazz” (
WSS:175), because she still hears the song as it was in the prison. It is also important that Rhys makes Selina genuinely working
class, going to England to find a future, with the money her absent mother sent and her grandmother saved for her, though
her dress-making skills are in low demand.
The title story, “Tigers Are Better-Looking,” has a journalist as the central character. He lives in London and writes for
an Australian newspaper (giving him outsider cultural but insider racial status). The story opens with a letter (letters are
so often significant in Rhys’s work), in which he is addressed as “Mein Leib, Mein Cher, My Dear, Amigo” by his friend Hans,
who accuses Mr. Severn of being among a crowd of “timid tigers waiting to spring the moment anyone is in trouble or hasn’t
any money” (CS:176). But, he goes on, “tigers are better-looking, aren’t they” (CS:176). Hans stayed with Severn to heal a broken leg, but despises him, and has even drunk all the milk in the fridge before
leaving. He gives one last taunt, “write a swell article today, you tame grey mare” (CS176). The weekly article Severn is
working on is no good, because he can’t get “the cadence of the sentence,” otherwise known as “the swing’s the thing” (CS:177).
“On the rebound” from Hans, looking for distraction in a pub, he picks up two women. One he knows (Maidie) and one he doesn’t
(Heather). He identifies Heather as self-possessed. Though she suggests a last drink for the evening in an overpriced club,
she refuses more than a small amount of the whisky Severn buys.
Race is central to this story as it is to “Let Them Call It Jazz.” Speaking of Heather, Severn uses the casual racist slang
of mid-twentieth-century England for a person not completely white: “Disdainful, debonair and with a touch of the tarbrush
too, or I’m much mistaken” (
CS:181). He asks a drunken question of himself, why she isn’t white (
CS:181). The club has a
diverse clientele and musicians, a mulatto saxophonist, and a woman Severn associates with Brixton (which became predominantly
West Indian between the 1950s and 1960s), and imagines wants to work on a cruise ship going to South Africa (
CS:181).
45 The woman in a “lovely dark brown couple” is highly scornful of Bloomsbury (where Severn lives), saying in a “high, sharp,
clear and shattering” English accent, “I didn’t come to London to go to the slums” (
CS:181). Rhys clearly was depicting London becoming more multiethnic: when Maidie and Severn are arrested for drunken brawling,
Maudie describes a frightened, well-dressed, “very dark girl,” who was also being detained, and comments, “But it isn’t the
pretty ones who get on” (
CS:186). When Severn returns home, he finds the “tormenting phrases” that have haunted him are gone (such as Hans’s “tigers
are better-looking”), and that he now has the “cadence of the sentence” (
CS:188). This is a rare glimpse into Rhys’s sense of the challenge of writing well.
“The Sound of the River” is haunting. It begins with third-person narrative: a couple is in bed, talking, and we enter in
the middle of their conversation, just as the woman is expressing unfocused fear. It is a large fear, worse than the little
fears she can recognize and name. On their walk earlier, she worried that the river was too silent, as if it were full. Now,
lying in bed, she remembers her mother trying to teach her to deal with fear: “You’re not my daughter if you’re afraid of
a horse” (
CS:237). Her fear is persistent but vague. In the morning her husband is dead in bed. The doctor wants to know if she heard
anything in the night, but she says she thought “it was a dream” (
CS:240), and she admits she waited too long to go for help because of the sound of the river: it “got louder and closer and
it was in the room with me.” Rhys is very good at Gothic touches like this. This story was based on the circumstances of the
death of her second husband Leslie. Angier commented on the extraordinary willingness of Rhys to write such a self-critical
piece.
46In “The Day They Burned the Books” the narrator (who has clearly had to memorize Wordsworth’s daffodil poem along with so
many other colonial children) is a literary child who is friendly with Eddie, a boy whose hard-drinking English father, Mr
Sawyer, is agent for a small steamship line running between the islands and South America.
47 He calls Eddie’s mixed-race mother “the nigger” or the “gloomy half-caste” (
CS:152). Mrs. Sawyer is reported to react calmly on the surface but with “soucriant’s eyes” (
CS:152), but she stays, because of her material comfort. Mr. Sawyer buys many books from England.
After Mr. Sawyer suddenly dies (did Mrs Sawyer fix that?), the two childen enjoy the room of books. But then Mrs. Sawyer takes
a grim pleasure in
stripping it: she makes a pile to be sold and a pile to be burnt. The first pile has major male English poets (Milton, Byron),
to be sold, but a good edition of Christina Rossetti is to be burned. Mrs. Sawyer dislikes all writers but feels more negative
about women writers: men “could be mercifully shot; women must be tortured” (
CS:155). Commenting on the old accusation that fiction is lies, Eddie says his mother lies, but “can’t make up a story to save
her life” (
CS:156). The children steal a book each, a damaged copy of Kipling’s
Kim for him, a book that turns out to be in French,
Fort Comme La Mort, which “seemed dull,” for her.
48“Till September Petronella,” “Outside the Machine,” “The Lotus” and “A Solid House” are all centered on women struggling to
make their way in a difficult world. “Petronella,” like Quartet, has four characters, two men and two women, who perform an elaborate emotional dance during a weekend together. The men
are seriously engaged with the arts. Julian (Frankie’s man) is music critic for a daily paper and Marston is a painter. Frankie
is quite successful as a model and keen on opera. Petronella has a far less impressive background, as a former unsuccessful
chorus girl who is entirely ignorant of opera. She is also far less genuinely keen on Marston than he is on her, and develops
a futile attraction to Julian. The tensions between the four characters are finally disturbing enough that Petronella takes
herself off alone to get back to London.
In “Outside the Machine,” Inez is in an English clinic near Versailles. Machines are frequently referenced. It is important
that this is an English environment where Inez feels some women enjoy setting machines onto others to crush them, or identify
as parts of an efficient machine when at work. The machine represents the English class system. Inez worries that, because
she is outside it, she might be picked up by “a pair of huge iron tongs” and put “on the rubbish heap” (CS:193). The day Inez is to leave, she feels weak, as if she has to wait until “they came with the tongs to throw her out” (CS:208). But at the last moment a French woman hands her a handkerchief with money inside, sensing that Inez doesn’t have any
money or anywhere to go to recuperate. Despite this act of kindness, the last lines of the story are reminiscent of Sasha’s
view of the inevitability of self-destruction in Good Morning, Midnight: “Because you can’t die and come to life again for a few hundred francs. It takes more than that. It takes more, perhaps,
than anybody is ever willing to give” (CS:209).
“The Lotus” begins dramatically with dialogue: “ ‘Garland says she’s a tart’ ” (
CS:210). The woman, Lotus Heath, is a writer, trying to finish a novel about “a girl who gets seduced” (
CS:210). She drinks and smokes, is clumsily made up, grateful for any company, middle-aged, and generally considered
highly eccentric by her neighbors. This is a story about the worst that can be thought about a woman writer. Lotus declares
her cynical manifesto: “don’t be gloomy … don’t write about anything you know …” (
CS:212). Such things upset the middle-class readership. She also declares she dislikes the novel: “Only to make some money,
the novel is” (
CS:213). She prefers poetry and then insists on reciting a new poem. The man who invited her, Ronald, thinks she is “damned
comic … the funniest old relic” (
CS:215); whereas Christine, his wife, rages about the slum they live in and “this creature, who stinks of whisky” (
CS:215). As if determined to prove every wild accusation made about her, Lotus later runs up the street naked and is arrested.
The middle-class enclave is intruded upon by police trying to interview every resident in the building and so normality needs
to be restored, which is why Ronald finds his wife suddenly attractive because she can ignore what just happened (
CS:220). Lotus, on the other hand, has been carried off on a stretcher, out of sight.
“A Solid House” begins during an German air raid during World War II. It is set outside London in an unspecified place: “the
square outside was calm and indifferent, the trees cleaner than a London square” (
CS:222). Angier thinks this story is based in Rhys’s experience in Norwich, in 1941, recovering from some kind of breakdown.
49 Teresa, the central character, hides with the house’s caretaker, Miss Spearman, in the cellar as bombers fly over. This stress
isn’t helping her keep calm. Her fragile emotional and mental state is clear in her seeing the day as “glittering, glaring”
and “heartless … acid, like an unripe gooseberry,” with a “cold yellow light” (
CS:228); she sees a similar “hard, bright glitter” in Miss Spearman’s face. In her tortured imagination she wonders what would
happen “[i]f they were to laugh until their mouths met at the back and the tops of their heads fell off like some loathsome
over-ripe fruit” (
CS:230). She feels she really “died” at the time of her attempted suicide (
CS:230). Normal people are supposed to be “exactly like everyone else” (
CS:231; Sasha in
Good Morning, Midnight felt this pressure too). Practical, frugal and unimaginative Miss Spearman loves the occult and has a circle of people who
like to play with it. But Teresa finds horrors in even very peaceful environments, like the ornate sitting room full of pictures,
books, ornaments and furniture in quietly pretentious bad taste. Rhys captures a voice on the very edge of madness: “Heaven
will never, never lack the sense of superiority nor the disciplined reaction nor the proper way to snub nor the heart like
a rock nor the wrist surprisingly thick. Nor the flower of the flock to be sacrificed” (
CS:234). By the end of the story, Teresa has found a way to sleep so that the “crash in her head became fainter” (
CS:235).