I BEGAN THIS STUDY with a basic assumption derived in part intuitively and confirmed often enough to arouse my further interest in verifying its general application: more often than not, women’s novels in this century seemed to be more directly autobiographical than are men’s novels. I wondered why this might be, and what effect it might have on a woman’s writing practice itself (not simply on the content of the novel), and on another woman’s reading response to that practice. My immediate background was in critical and rhetorical theory within the framework of feminist theory; my compelling interest, the practical effect of writing on both writer and reader. In particular I wanted to satisfy my curiosity as to how we respond to our “rhetorical situation” in our aesthetic practices. The “rhetorical situation,” as Lloyd Bitzer defined it almost twenty years ago in an influential essay, is “a complex of persons, events, objects and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence.”1 Bitzer seems to assume that a community of people tends to introduce rhetoric, “discourse,” into a specific situation primarily to stabilize it; even more, to maintain the general cultural equilibrium implicit in the phrase “the status quo.” This phrase predicates a maintenance of the dominant culture and its idiom through a reinvocation of its conventions and the terms in which it sees itself. In Bitzer’s development of his definition of a situation that is perceived by the community as “real” and to which it responds to rid itself collectively of a “defect” or “obstacle,”2 we see that the definition of the “rhetorical situation” for white Western European men becomes a description of one of the ways they maintain control over other groups within the society that their culture dominates. For women in such a society, the maintenance of “their” culture cannot be seen as a response to our “rhetorical situation,” the exigencies of which are, as a matter of course, not the same. Our “situational context”3 (to use another phrase that connotes a configuration similar to Bitzer’s, but with a difference allowing some expansion in our thinking) is of a different nature. Our rhetorical context, the situational context in which we find ourselves, is made up of a different “complex of persons, events, objects and relations”; therefore the “actual or potential exigence” we discern is not, and cannot be, construed to correspond to that of the dominant culture. Their “rhetorical situation” has often explicitly, as well as inferentially, demanded our capitulation to their more pressing needs, the “exigencies” of their situational context. The status quo is precisely what does not answer or respond to the exigencies of our situation.
In a literary context, audience-oriented theories and analyses that concern themselves with reader response offer a route toward possible answers to my original question.4 Indeed, the framework of inquiry that readership or reader-response theories emphasize is one into which I have settled myself, but without direct recourse to most of the specific formalizations of the concept. My reasons for eschewing their specific aid are twofold.
A radical split separates how women theorists and men in the same profession see the possibilities of the relationship between reader and writer.5 This difference itself seems clearly to mark our realizations of what for each group constitutes its “rhetorical situation” and the “exigencies” it identifies there. What for most masculine critics (and readers perhaps?) is an “implied or ‘intended’ reader” (Wolfgang Iser), which or who is correspondent with the “implied author” (Wayne Booth), who “sets himself out with a different air depending on the needs of particular works”6 would indeed seem to be a “fiction” when compared to the way a woman reader identifies herself in relation to what and who she reads. In an essay entitled “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction,” Walter Ong observes that, from the critic’s point of view, such a reader “has to play the role in which the author has cast him, which seldom coincides with his role in the rest of actual life.”7 The masculine theorists who are working with these ideas are looking for “critical tools,” as one of them has put it.8 For the analyst who is a feminist (possibly and simply a woman), the audience for a woman writer’s work, and their (her) response to it, is no more a “fiction” than is the woman herself—writer or reader. In particular, the effect of the woman’s work is not merely an aesthetic one, wanting only critical tools to release its full implications. A woman’s view of the reading-writing relationship is more practical and more political than that.
Jane Gallop brings many aspects of this view into focus in a response to a special issue of Critical Inquiry—“Writing and Sexual Difference.”9 Gallop cites editor Elizabeth Abel’s endorsement of Gayatri Spivak’s “unsettling” contribution to the issue, a translation of the short story “Draupadi” by Mahasveta Devi: “With this story the volume shifts from West to East, from criticism to fiction, from implicit to explicit political perspective.”10 “Yet what is perhaps most unsettling about this text,” Gallop responds, “is not the shift from metaphor to fact but rather that the switch to an explicit political perspective corresponds to a switch from nonfiction to fiction.” She points out that the epigraph, a quotation from Barbara Johnson’s The Critical Difference that stresses literary concerns, and the final entry, “Draupadi,” could be said to represent “the two allegiances between which ‘this moment of feminist inquiry’ is torn: the literary and the political.”11 The “critical difference” in feminist inquiry, Gallop suggests in her conclusion, is that “in her inheritance from both feminism and criticism,” the feminist critic “lives the at once enabling and disabling tension of a difference within.”12 As Gallop explains it, the “difference within” identifies the literary enterprise with the father and with masculine norms; the fictive—and the feminist political—identifies it with the mother.
This tension can be seen as both “enabling and disabling” insofar as we understand “inquiry” to mean the making of theory and the formal reading and analysis of texts, particularly literary ones. My own position is that, if we look to our fiction itself for some of the answers to our formal inquiries, we rightly identify and place those answers as formal answers to formal inquiry, derived from an “explicitly political perspective.” As people interested in literature, if we attempt to read our literature—women’s fiction—as “common readers” first and foremost, keeping our later critical eye on that first reading, we can minimize, avoid, even eliminate (not merely ignore or only “resist,” as Judith Fetterley helpfully suggests we do)13 the disabling effects of the father-text of literary criticism. In reading a woman’s novel and recognizing that it is a novel we can call a “woman’s novel”—one that is gender specific and shows itself to be—we can find a realization that enables us without disabling us at the same time. Such a response is exemplified in this volume by the work of Jean Rhys and by the response she invites from us. This response is political, if I may use the word generally. Such a “politics” is what women writers and readers are making clear to one another, not in the dialogue with men that Kate Millett describes in Sexual Politics,14 but in the dialogue among ourselves. We even say the word political in discussion of our literary inquiries, as instanced by Gallop’s review of the issues sketched above. In theoretical literary discussion in the more pervasively masculine arena, the word is rarely used except in dialogue concerning or including Marxist criticism or theory, or, increasingly, feminist criticism. Discussion in conventional settings seems to be firmly couched within traditions so politically entrenched and taken for granted as to need no specific mention. Indeed, the transparency (conversely the opacity) of the politics is not even “semi-transparent,” as Virginia Woolf’s “envelope” of life would have it; rather, it is the informing and enveloping medium through which they conduct their academically “objective” (and, by implication, non-political) discussions.
In recognizing the connection between the subjective, particular instance and the political conduct of our own kinds of discussion, we only name what we, and they, already know. Literature is political. For women, at least, “literary” analysis can no longer pretend to find itself in opposition to “real life.” Rejecting Walter Ong’s idea that “the role in which the author has cast [the reader] . . . seldom coincides with [the reader’s] role in the rest of actual life,” the woman reader (or the feminist reader of either sex) recognizes that a novel we can call “a woman’s novel” most particularly does have to do with “the rest of actual life.” In a woman’s novel we readily see our own concerns. It is “political” in this general sense of a move from the individual to the collective. Indeed, I see, as Gallop does, that the “critical difference” between male and female readings is to be found in some combination of the “literary” and the real or the actual, which is to say, the political. The tension that results need not be thought of, or experienced, as disabling. On the contrary, our fiction itself, and our responses to it, can be enabling to our other enterprises, as the response to “Draupadi” shows. Our response can be put to both pragmatic and theoretical use. Such a realization thrusts our literary analytical concerns not out into the cold, but into the embrace of a thoroughly enabling meeting of our reading and our politics.
“The shift from West to East, from criticism to fiction, from implicit to explicit political perspective” mirrors the move in which the “critical difference” in our inquiries becomes enabling, without the disabling dilution or constraint of the other half of our dual heritage.
For the shift is located precisely in that move from an emphasis on criticism to a centering in fiction. I see a move that not only shifts our attention to fiction itself but also reinforces our sense of where our fiction and our politics come from. Just as our fiction moves us into an explicitly political sphere, so the fiction itself emerges from an implicitly political situation—the experience of our individual lives. The move from what is implicit to what we can see, in our recognition of it, as explicit, and thereby (and not paradoxically) implicitly political, is what I hope to show in my exploration of the work of Jean Rhys. Virginia Woolf said it, as she first said so many other things for us: “I sometimes think only autobiography is literature—novels are what we peel off, and come at last to the core, which is only you or me.”15
MY INQUIRY begins in an exploratory mode. I make assumptions and assertions in order to set a course that might allow me to answer my original question: Is a woman’s writing different from a man’s? We seem to think so, but there has been little examination of how the writing practice itself enacts the theories that we, and European (especially French) women theorists, have posited. In the United States, description, especially thematic description (mythological, archetypal, and sociological categorization, for example), and discussion of the content of our novels have been extensive. In France, there has been little or no attendant examination of an actual woman’s writing; suggestions remain hypothetical. Our response to the woman writer’s presentation of her novel and of herself in that novel as it is revealed in her writing practice—what the French call Vecriture—has been all but missing. Here I offer not only an Interpretation of Jean Rhys’s work but also a description of what she does when she writes. The two exemplary novels, Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea, themselves reveal how the woman, Jean Rhys, writes. Each novel’s structure itself makes overt display of the process in its correspondence with, and as it corresponds to, the fictive “actual life” of Rhys’s heroine-narrator. The structure of the novel in each instance itself serves as illustration of what it is “about.”
I also want to show how Rhys’s reader responds to this writing practice—how we respond not only to the novel’s thematic content, but also to how it is put together; moreover, how we can apply what we see and recognize in her work to our own lives. I would call her novels political in the most basic sense, as I also call them [autobiographical. By [auto]biography, I mean the principle of women’s fiction in which the “author” steps, not down, but away from the centrist position of authority, effectively bracketing out her “self,” the autobiographical “I,” to share the writing of her text with her readers.
I had first asked, “How does a woman’s novel differ from a man’s?” The further questions I asked of myself and of the novels I read became the demand, “Show me.” I looked for the woman’s work that seemed to do that with the greatest force and precision. I found that quality in Rhys’s novels. Following my own admonition concerning women’s writing—that it is in a basic constitutive sense “autobiographical”—I have attempted to recapitulate as much as possible my own thinking in arriving at the conclusions offered here.
My presentation reflects my feeling of the way toward the goal I set myself, beginning with the questions I pose, and reaching the exemplary illustration. I intend such an approach to be of some use to the reader, who I hope derives a use of her own from the itinerary I trace. At the outset, I do not attempt to posit a theory; I wanted the theory, if it was there, to present itself to me. Only after I have moved far enough into the process of my own exploration of what I am doing, and why, do I feel it appropriate to pose the example and to posit the theory. As the exploratory aspects of my discussion lead us to firmer ground, that offered by the concrete example of the writing of Jean Rhys, I hope the general reader, as well as the more theoretically versed reader, will be satisfied with my critical analysis and theoretical description of Rhys’s work, and with the broader application that formulation implies.
I begin, then, on a note both overly assertive and rife with generalized assumptions, using my own naivete, both actual and assumed, as a method of immediate self-exposure. “Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot,” Jane Eyre says to Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s novel.16 One and a quarter centuries later, the poet Adrienne Rich writes, “a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle.”17 I attempt to overstep both of those boundaries. But first I plant my own foot within the circle I know and choose, to show the reader the place from which I take my first steps. The discussion that follows will, I hope, warrant the initial posture of hesitancy and presumption.