Ford Madox
Ford’s important “Preface” to
The Left Bank confirmed Rhys’s place at the modernist table. Subsequent early criticism demonstrates that his sense of her as a stylist
was recognized by reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic.
1 Her work was seriously reviewed in important literary and cultural magazines and serious newspapers such as the
New Statesman,
Spectator,
Nation and Atheneum and
Times Literary Supplement in Britain and
New Republic and the
New York Times Book Review in the USA. She was compared to Katherine Mansfield.
2 Her first stories appealed to those who delighted in exploring literary techniques, even though her subject matter was already
a problem for some readers.
3 Some reviewers, such as D. B. Wyndham–Lewis, saw her stories as “purely French,” following Ford’s comments in his preface
on how much she had been influenced by young French writers in Paris, though the French connection did not please all reviewers.
4Rhys published steadily between 1927 and 1939, so that critics were able to watch her development over a fairly short period
of time.
Quartet received very positive reviews for its economical style and the powerful use to which Rhys put it for the development of
character.
5 The bleakness of
After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie was noticed by reviewers who nonetheless felt Rhys’s style was outstanding.
6 The writer Rebecca West found the novel “superb.”
7 In 1931, a review in the
Saturday Review of Literature remarked on the relation of Rhys’s style to poetry.
8 In 1935, an American review of
Voyage in the Dark compared Rhys’s style to Imagist poetry: “Put into words the thing itself … Out of that will come new, original beauty …”
9 The leading cultural and literary critic Cyril Connolly, thirteen years Rhys’s junior, listed
Voyage in the Dark among a few books he recommended to readers.
10 As with the earlier
novels,
Good Morning, Midnight once again drew high praise from reviewers for its style, but a good deal of complaint over its subject matter. A review
of it in the
Times Literary Supplement had a strong feeling of revulsion towards Sasha, the protagonist, even whilst admiring much about the novel.
11 Another review of it, in the
Spectator, criticized Rhys’s dependency “on dots,” and much else about the style.
12In the same year, 1939, Jean Lenglet wrote the first overview of her fiction under his pen name of Edouard de Nève, by which
he intended to introduce her to French readers to whom she was unknown.
13 He described her as outside all literary groups, working alone, a modernist with a brutally honest reading of the world of
those outside society’s norms. In 1946, John Hampson praised Rhys’s clarity of style, whilst noting that she wrote about prostitutes
with intelligence who usually drink too much.
14 In 1949, Alec Waugh connected her homeland Dominica (for him a place for those who could not fit in anywhere else) with Rhys’s
outcast characters.
15 These two strains of criticism, locating her in Europe or locating her in the Caribbean, both with some concern as to where
she could belong, framed her work from early on.
A writer doing something different and doing it well needs an insightful critic to guide his or her new readers. Rhys was
to have highly gifted and influential critics introduce her work later on, but in 1939, when
Good Morning, Midnight appeared, she was little known. She was never a member of any literary coterie, and did not promote her own work. So she
was very fortunate to have a champion in the sensitive and influential Francis Wyndham, who wrote an important essay on her
in 1950, before he had been able even to read most of her work. He was perceptive enough to see
Good Morning, Midnight as her best work (this was of course before
Wide Sargasso Sea appeared, which tended to obscure the achievement of
Good Morning, Midnight for critics). He wrote about her work several times. In 1956 he thought she was dead, and her work too little known. In 1963,
he again emphasized that she deserved to be far better appreciated. Then, in 1964, Wyndham wrote an introduction for the publication
of a part of
Wide Sargasso Sea and said, rightly, that the Rhys of the pre-1960s had been ahead of her time.
16That she was, in her life and in the details of the style of her work, pretty much of a loner means that even some feminist
literary history of the 1980s, seeking to provide a sense of female modernists, did not include her. She is not mentioned
in
Writing for Their Lives: The Modernist Women, 1910–1940. The authors, Hanscombe and Smyers, argue that “(m)odernism, for its women, was not just a question of style; it was a way
of life,” and that, because
the radicalism of early twentieth-century women writers was a “simultaneous breaking with both literary and social conventions,”
this led to the making of a network.
17 But in Rhys’s case the most radical aspect of her life was in her work, and she didn’t join networks. Another aspect of her
marginalization was that she wrote in English but preferred association with France, yet despite her inclusion in Shari Benstock’s
Women of the Left Bank,
18 as if she could be seen as contributing to modernism in Paris, her work did not begin to appear in French until the early
1970’s.
But, as Angier points out, if Rhys had been in France or Russia, she might not have found early resistance to her work: Anglo-Saxon
readers were less prepared to face “the realities of sex and money than the French.”
19 Rhys unflinchingly wrote about self-destructive women whose fates were a combination of their own weaknesses and those of
the men they encountered, which did not endear her to readers who expected a moral compass to be provided by contemporary
literature, especially if written by a woman. F. R. Leavis (1895–78), the enormously influential moralist English literary
critic, was beginning his career as Rhys began to publish but, despite his championship of emerging male modernists contemporary
with her (such as Eliot, Pound and D. H. Lawrence), he did not notice her at all. Thomas Staley gives an account of the emphasis
on the “moral, social and realistic” content of art as key for English writers in the 1930s,
20 something which Rhys of course ignored.
The mid-sixties in Europe and America was the time of the Civil Rights struggle in the USA, the emergence of the feminist
movement, student protests at the state of culture and politics and an emerging consciousness of the postcolonial world. Social
prohibitions against drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, abortion and promiscuity relaxed considerably in this counter-cultural moment.
This meant that what had shocked or repelled earlier critics in Rhys works not only did not pose a problem to many later ones,
but actually made Rhys seem as current as if she had been a young writer starting out. In addition her style still remained
impressive to critics. In 1967 Neville Braybrooke said that, “her books and stories show the assured touch of a master.”
21 Reviews of her earlier work, reprinted after
Wide Sargasso Sea, show that, by the 1960s, Rhys’s work was being read by more critics who were able to understand what she was doing.
22Wide Sargasso Sea came out in 1966 and was generally praised by reviewers, but there was an immediate concern that it might be too close to
Jane Eyre. Though most reviewers thought that it stood, alone, Walter Allen, an influential voice, argued in the
New York Times Book Review that, despite much that was effective in the novel, “Rochester” is not sufficiently clearly drawn as a character, and the
novel is too dependent on Brontë.
23 This was an anxiety in the sixties but, as postcolonial criticism began to seriously notice the way postcolonial writers
were “writing back” to British canonical texts, Rhys once more found herself praised in a new era for what she had been doing
ahead of her time. John Thieme, in an essay published in 1979, the year of Rhys’s death, concluded that Rhys had done a good
job of “writing back” to Charlotte Brontë, even to the extent of reflecting the imagery of
Jane Eyre.
24 In 1993 David Cowart found Rhys’s gloss on
Jane Eyre a “displacing myth” (and therefore modernist), but also “symbiotic,” and therefore postmodern as well.
25 Of course this means that the reader who has not read
Jane Eyre will miss a good deal of Rhys’s purpose in
Wide Sargasso Sea.
After the huge success of
Wide Sargasso Sea, and the media spin that mythologized Rhys (as a “dead” writer come to life, a siren, an exotic), the volume of Rhys criticism
grew enormously. Neville Braybrooke, whose response to Rhys was consistently positive and insightful, reviewed
Wide Sargasso Sea very favorably, and a few years later (1970) wrote an essay in
Caribbean Quarterly that related her characterization of women to the nature of white Creoles in Caribbean society. In 1972, he did a piece on
her for a book on recent novelists.
26 The same year, Laurence Cole brought back the old objection to her themes, arguing they would keep her readers limited.
27 Elgin Mellown proposed (also in 1972) that all her protagonists are essentially the same woman, an argument that would haunt
Rhys criticism for a long time.
28 V. S. Naipaul, the eminent West Indian writer, argued that she was far ahead of her time when he reviewed the reprint of
After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie in 1972. His support was important to Rhys herself because he was, like her, a transnational writer, with Caribbean origins.
29Two years later, in 1974, three major strands of Rhys criticism were becoming evident. A. Alvarez’s famous summation in the
influential
New York Times Book Review that Rhys was the best living English novelist ignored her Caribbean identity, which made her rather a fiction writer who
worked in English.
30 The Jamaican novelist John Hearne declared Wilson Harris and Jean Rhys to be the two most important West Indian writers of
fiction.
31 This was a bold choice, since George Lamming, Austin Clarke,
Samuel Selvon or V. S. Naipaul (to say nothing of Paule Marshall, from the diaspora) might also have been given such a title.
By naming Rhys, Hearne gave her important Caribbean literary approval. This was the more significant since her absence from
the region for so many years, and her choice of London or Paris as locales for all but two of her novels, meant that some
in the region felt she was not really a Caribbean novelist at all. On the feminist side, Nancy J. Casey’s exploration of the
“liberated woman” in “Temps Perdi” and “I Spy a Stranger” read Rhys as engaged with male domination of women and women betraying
other women, both important political foci of what was called the “women’s liberation movement” in the 1970’s.
32 In 1976, Judith Thurman’s essay in the feminist magazine
MS considered the nature of Rhys’s female protagonists, and is interesting in preferring
Good Morning, Midnight over
Wide Sargasso Sea, on feminist grounds.
33Postcolonial interest in Rhys also began in the late 1970’s. The Indian writer Eunice de Souza preferred Rhys to Ruth Prawer
Jhabwala because Rhys, “though English herself,” did not seek to find favor with the English by caricaturing other races.
34 Helen Tiffin argued that Rhys’s female/male, West Indian/English dichotomies reflect a master/slave and colonist/colonized
relationship. This claim is somewhat like Gayatri Spivak’s, in 1985, that Rhys’s
Wide Sargasso Sea is allegorical, telling the story of the violent relation between colonizer and colonized. Though both are early postcolonial
readings of Rhys in tune with the concerns of the late seventies, they now seem very reductive.
35 Postcolonial criticism and theory, whilst offering important overviews of an enormously complicated and various world impacted
by colonialism, has at times been tempted to create broad schema that dissolve the intricate interrelation of a particular
text with its specific cultural location in space and time.
36Late 1970’s criticism was also continuing to try to place Rhys’s work in relation to modernism and other literary currents
of the early twentieth century. In this regard, Todd Bender’s article on Rhys and impressionism (1978) is particularly interesting.
37 This thought about Ford Madox Ford’s 1924 reading of Conrad as a structural guide for Rhys as she was starting out. The innovative
perspective here was the idea that Rhys learned to use deliberately ambiguous tactics to draw in the reader to fill in the
gaps (such as narration which could not be trusted or which switched points of view). Bender is correct in pointing out how
much Rhys depends on the careful reader who picks up nuances in the telling of the tale and deliberately considers them.
Books on Rhys began to appear in 1978. Louis James’s study of Rhys was written at the suggestion of Jamaican poet and critic
Mervyn Morris.
38 Like
several early Rhys critics, James clearly accepted Rhys’s version of her birthdate (he says Rhys was sixteen in 1910, when
she was actually twenty). From that error, he calculates that she left Dominica for London in 1910 (she actually left in 1907).
He also states that her first husband was Max Hamer, an error repeated twice.
39 But, brief as this book is, James does give a good sense of Rhys’s origins in Dominica and her key creative contexts, such
as Paris. He also realized the important of the music hall in her work:“She took over its juxtaposition of fantasy and tawdry
reality: she used its motifs and rhythms to orchestrate her fiction.”
40Early scholars of Rhys were all led astray by her declaration of her date of birth, even when they were careful in other respects.
Thomas Staley (whose book on Rhys appeared in the year of her death) was the agency who made possible the acquisition of the
Rhys papers for the University of Tulsa. He repeats the errors of the 1894 birthdate and the 1910 leaving of Dominica, and
dismisses the music hall as proving a “tawdry show-business world of the also-rans” for Rhys
41 This judgment ignores the strong characters she drew from it, such as Maudie and Laurie in
Voyage in the Dark, as well as the role of popular song in her work overall. But he pays close attention to the development of Rhys as a modernist
and his sense of what Rhys brought to her contemporary literary world (or ignored in it) is acute. He is aware of the way
Rhys introduced something new by depicting women outside the protected world of the middle class so central, for example,
to the work of Virginia Woolf, and he makes a thoughtful comparison between Rhys and the French writer Colette, finding it
hard to see a direct influence from Colette but also rightly seeing the two as productively read together. Peter Wolfe (1980)
tries to link Rhys’s life and work (something not easy to do well, and Wolfe had limited biographical resources). He repeats
the same errors of fact with regard to her birthdate and date of leaving Dominica and also says that in
Wide Sargasso Sea Pierre is killed as the house burns, whereas he died on the journey away from the burning house.
42 Arnold Davidson (1985) rested a good deal on a biographical reading of Rhys, but got her birthdate and the date she left
Dominica correct.
43 He thinks
Wide Sargasso Sea is her “socially most important book,”
44 but he does understand the complexity of
Good Morning, Midnight.
Opening a decade in which much feminist criticism on Rhys appeared, Helen Nebeker’s
Jean Rhys: Woman in Passage (1981) uses mythology and psychology. But it forces Rhys into a side-current of feminist politics: Nebeker reads the name
Anna in
Voyage in the Dark quite wrong-headedly as reflective of Sumerian, Graeco-Roman, Celtic and Hebrew constructions of a powerful goddess/priestess,
something Nebeker says shows Rhys “subliminally
playing upon unconscious racial memories.”
45 She also accepted the common assumption that Rhys was born in 1894. Elizabeth Baer’s essay on the “sisterhood” of Jane Eyre
and Antoinette Cosway takes a key feminist concept and uses it interestingly to read the madwoman Bertha’s warning to Jane
Eyre from the attic as the reason Eyre defers marriage to Rochester until he no longer is her superior. She also offers an
excellent reading of the three dreams Antoinette has in
Wide Sargasso Sea.
46 Whilst responsible and interesting, Nancy Harrison’s
Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text seems dated now in its desire to define a female-authored text as requiring a female audience (now the complicated nature
of gender is far more likely to inform close readings that think about cultural politics around sexually determined role-playing).
But she has a thought-provoking chapter on “Rochester” ’s narrative in
Wide Sargasso Sea. In this she extends an argument made earlier in the book about the role of a “mother-text” in Rhys’s fiction to the idea
of a “father-text” as well. She reads “Rochester” ’s story as suppressing his mother, and therefore his own “mother-text.”
47 In
The Unspeakable Mother, Deborah Kelly Kloepfer, compares Rhys to the remarkable modernist poet H. D. in productive and groundbreaking ways.
48 Kloepfer also writes out of the moment when French and English feminist theory was frequently opposed, French being generally
defined as theoretical and English as politically activist. She references Julia Kristeva’s work on the mother as ambiguous
symbol to centrally inform her work on Rhys, beginning from the important fact of Rhys’s tensions with her own mother from
childhood on. Other feminist studies from this era that include Rhys include Judith Kegan Gardiner’s
Rhys, Stead, Lessing and the Politics of Empathy, which is again interested in the mother in Rhys’s work, and Molly Hite’s
The Other Side of the Story.
49 Hite begins by noting that, in the eighties, feminist critics replaced the formalist emphasis of 1970’s work on Rhys by integrating
discussion of Rhys’s life and her work, and usefully insists that Rhys’s work resists ideological readings because of the
destabilizing marginality of her protagonists.
Culture wars were going on in the Caribbean just as Rhys’s
Wide Sargasso Sea became well known and she gradually became a metaphor in important defining debates. In 1968, Wally Look Lai discussed the
importance of
Wide Sargasso Sea as a West Indian novel. He read the ending, as Antoinette dreams of jumping from the roof of the burning house, calling Tia’s
name, a return home.
50 The Trinidadian critic Kenneth Ramchand included Rhys in his seminal
The West Indian Novel and Its Background, in a chapter on white Creoles organized around Fanon’s “terrified consciousness.”
51 The 1970’s were a period of turbulence in the Caribbean, where positions on race, culture
and the direction the region should go were intensely debated. The major critic and historian Kamau Brathwaite published his
theory of Caribbean culture in the mid-seventies. In this he explained that “creolization is a process that relates to dominant
and sub-dominant groups.” He noted that metropolitan critics had been impressed with
Wide Sargasso Sea, that Ramchand had called white fear “universal,” and that Look Lai had emphasized the relation between Creole and metropole.
All these affirmed for Brathwaite that Rhys as a white Creole writer was accepted by the dominant racial group, whites, in
Britain.
52 But, for Brathwaite, whatever Antoinette hopes and dreams in the last moments of her life, she could not actually jump to
join Tia because, given the racial history of the region, that could only be fantasy. He thought both Look Lai and Ramchand
projected an optimistic/universalistic view with regard to Rhys.
53 Brathwaite’s position provoked a number of responses and discussions, such as O’Callaghan’s defense of early white women
writers in the Caribbean.
54 In an exchange with Peter Hulme on the same topic, in the mid-1990’s, Brathwaite inventively called Rhys “The Helen of our
Wars.”
55 The theme of race in Rhys criticism also appears in the work of Maggie Humm and Jean d’Costa.
56A number of detailed and nuanced Caribbean-centered studies emerged in the 1990s, such as the work of Veronica Gregg and Judith
Raiskin.
57 Gregg, a Jamaican critic, thoughtfully considers the culture wars around Rhys and points out that Rhys’s imagination is “profoundly
racialized, even racist,”
58 but also that her Creole identity has to be examined not only in terms of “reading” but in terms of Rhys’s performance of
Creole writing. Raiskin argues that Rhys’s white Creole perspective “challenges the geneticist concept of race by exploring
the relationship of racial categories to power and culture.”
59 Karin Williamson (1986) offers a careful comparison of the two significant white female Creole Dominican writers, Rhys and
Phyllis Shand Allfrey, which establishes a number of interesting textual correlations.
60 Carolyn Vellenga Berman more recently (2006) begins from a reading of the English domestic novel, in the context of the battle
to end slavery. Her chapter on
Wide Sargasso Sea affirms that Rhys’s project is to vindicate Creoles (by which Rhys means white West Indians).
61Wilson Harris, the major Guyanese writer, delivered a lecture in 1980 called “Carnival of Psyche: Jean Rhys’s
Wide Sargasso Sea,” in which he offered a reading of Rhys in the frame of his own theory of Caribbean (and Americas) culture, which is highly
mytho-poetic and deeply innovative.
62 He takes as his starting point Antoinette’s vision of the “tree of life in flames” at the end of
Wide Sargasso Sea: this is the flamboyant tree which is key in Amerindian legend in the Caribbean.
Rhys has also been fortunate to have meticulous scholars investigate key details in her work. Of recent postcolonial perspectives,
Peter Hulme’s scholarship on Carib culture in Dominica, as well as his painstaking work on Rhys’s adaptation of the dates
of the story of Bertha in
Jane Eyre and her use of her own family history in the novel, offer fascinating insights into Rhys’s likely imaginative sources and
her process.
63 The work of Mary Lou Emery (1990) meticulously and subtly explores the cultural spaces in Rhys’s texts. Moira Ferguson (1993)
reads
Wide Sargasso Sea in conjunction with other women writers, including Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen, in an important exploration of gender
and colonialism.
64 Sue Thomas’s
The Worlding of Jean Rhys thoroughly examines Rhys’s engagement with social currents around her, paying close attention to Rhys’s fictional process
from notebooks to finished texts. Thomas discusses social issues which Rhys indirectly challenged or addressed in her work.
Amongst these are the “panic” in Britain about “amateur prostitution” in the early twentieth century and the anxiety around
obeah in the Dominica of Rhys’s childhood.
65 More recently, Carine Mardorossian answers the charge, by Gregg and others, that Rhys marginalizes black subjectivity in
her work by calling on Edouard Glissant’s idea of “opacity” (the reluctance of anti-colonial culture to facilitate colonial
knowledge of it) and by reading it alongside Maryse Condé’s
Windward Heights (1998).
66Coral Ann Howells (1991) stressed three constructions of Rhys’s writerly identity as being connected; woman, colonial, modernist.
67 My own
Jean Rhys, seven years after Howells, sought to demonstrate how deeply the Caribbean informs all of her work, and inevitably also stressed
the cultural and political complexity of it.
68 More recently, Carol Dell’Amico’s
Colonialism and the Modern Movement in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys connects the colonial and the modern in her work.
69Rhys is now canonical. There are overviews of her work and anthologies of Rhys criticism,
70 and both a reader’s guide to criticism on
Wide Sargasso Sea and the Norton edition of
Wide Sargasso Sea.
71 Helen Carr’s useful profile is a title in a series, Writers and their Work.
72 The journal
Jean Rhys Review became a resource for scholars from 1987, founded by Nora Gaines.
73 Rhys’s work is a staple in literature courses in tertiary education. Like Hemmerecht’s structuralist study, others, such
as those of Le Gallez and Burrowes, began as doctoral dissertations.
74 Bibliographical resources, most notably Mellown (1984) and Paravisini-Gebert and Torres-Seda (1993) facilitate Rhys research,
though there is a constant need of updating.
75Carole Angier’s biography,
Jean Rhys, is a mixed blessing, but undeniably useful. Rhys left instructions that no biography of her was to be written.
Though Angier irresponsibly often used the work to read gaps in the life, for which she received justifiable negative criticism,
she also did an excellent job of dismissing some persistent Rhys myths. Her access to key figures in Rhys’s life was in the
nick of time, given their age, and though her research into Dominica and Paris could have been much stronger, her careful
exploration of Rhys’s lost years in Britain is particularly useful. Other biographical sources include the self-admitted memoirish
books by former
Granta editor and friend of Rhys Alexis Lykiard,
Jean Rhys Revisited and
Jean Rhys Afterwards.
76But it is important to note that, when there is extensive interest in a writer, there is also likely to be hasty, inaccurate
and misleading criticism. Rhys has attracted, for the most part, outstanding critics, but the reader should be also be careful.
For example, she is included in the opportunistic
Great Women Writers (1990), an ambitious anthology intended for women’s studies survey courses.
77 Among the numerous errors in the essay on Rhys, 1894 is given as her birthdate (unforgivable in 1994); and it is claimed
that she played “a noteworthy role in the Left Bank literary scene” (she was always a loner), that her mother was “part-Creole”
and Rhys was thought “colored” in England, and that the growth of interest in her work came only from the feminist movement
(the rise of interest in postcolonial themes and her aesthetics has clearly been as important and will probably have more
longevity). In addition, an unexamined acceptance of
Wide Sargasso Sea as Rhys’s best work is hopefully unlikely to be made in the future. This judgment occurs in studies by both Arnold Davidson
(1985) and Sanford Sternlicht (1997).
78 Another critical pitfall is making reductive and unreliable readings of Rhys’s intentions, such as Sternlicht’s unfortunate
assertion that alienation in
Good Morning, Midnight may be the way Rhys “surfaced her repressed anger” because she was ignored by the British
literati.
79 Psychoanalytic approaches to Rhys have drawn on Freud and Lacan, in terms of the family dramas in Rhys’s texts and the key
role of the mirror in her work. Anne Simpson’s recent study,
Territories of the Psyche, points out that Freudian analyses are generally male-centered but mother–child relations are central to Rhys’s texts. But
readers are warned that such approaches tend to make Rhys follow their own paradigms: Simpson disturbingly talks about what
she thinks Rhys may have gained therapeutically from writing her fiction.
80As for the present and future of Rhys studies, it looks as if new perspectives will continue to emerge. It is likely that
more European studies of her work will appear. Those already in print include Tarozzi (1984), Hemmerechts (
1987), Joubert (1997) and Yoris-Villasana (2004).
81Comparative studies of Rhys and other writers have helped complicate perceptions of her work and cultural location. Lorna
Sage’s
Women in the House of Fiction (
1992) examines French, British and US writers including Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison and Rhys: she calls Rhys
“the post-war writer as ghost.”
82 Ileana Rodriguez, in
House/Garden/Nation (
1994), discusses Rhys within her postcolonial reading of Latin American literature by women, in which she reads “Rochester” ’s
“derangement” in the context of magical realism.
83 Also comparative criticism of Caribbean writers often includes substantial discussion of Rhys. Belinda Edmondson, in
Making Men (
1999), thoughtfully combines gender and Caribbean-centered criticism and reads Rhys alongside Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid.
Margaret Paul Joseph, in
Caliban in Exile (
1992), explores Shakespeare’s Caliban as outsider in relation to Rhys, Selvon and Lamming. Leah Rosenberg’s
Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature (
2007) includes a chapter on Rhys’s work which locates her in relation to other Caribbean writers of the 1920s and 1930s and thoughtfully
comments on Rhys’s often problematic construction of race, as well as her complicated sense of her own racial and cultural
location. Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, in
Landscapes of Desire (
1990), read three of her novels (out of chronological order) in a volume alongside Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate
Chopin, Virginia Woolf and Margaret Atwood. Erica L. Johnson, in
Home, Maison, Casa (
2003) reads Rhys with Marguerite Dumas and Erminia Dell’Oro, with the theme of the “politics of location.”
84 It is also probable (and desirable) that Rhys should be compared to other women writers who were or are out of place, in
a sense, such as Ruth Prawer Jhabvala or Olive Schreiner (the latter comparison implicitly occurs in Raiskin’s
Snow on the Canefields). It is clear that studies of Rhys’s use of popular culture are a coming area of scholarly interest.
Rhys’s short stories have received much less attention than her novels, but comparative studies of her stories along with
those of other masters of this genre, such as Hemingway, Colette or Joyce, would enable valuable new readings of her short
fiction to emerge. Charles May never mentions Rhys in his recent survey of the short story.
85 But he points out that though the short story has ancient roots it came into its own as modernism developed in Europe, because
it is well suited to the portrayal of the outsider, reacting to or participating in a divided society. Rhys’s great theme
in her fiction is the outsider and her short stories are no exception. Nor do many of Rhys’s stories quite fit into the predominantly
realist (naturalistic and direct) tradition of the West Indian short story as defined by Stewart Brown, yet
she has an ability to make the gritty details of life’s material necessities a key part of even the most Gothic of her tales.
86Finally, a little-noted but important aspect of the reception of Rhys’s work lies in the numerous Caribbean writers who respect
and admire her work enough to let it influence theirs, as in Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s
The True History of Paradise (1999) or Robert Antoni’s
Blessed is the fruit (1997), or to make her a subject of it as Derek Walcott, Lorna Goodison and Olive Senior do in their poems.
87