She would ask me to read the different versions [of work on the autobiography], she would choose what she thought the best, and then tell me to tear up the others. . . . She seemed to get satisfaction from this, as if getting rid of something was a great clarification.
MANY STRAIGHTFORWARD statements concerning the composition of Voyage in the Dark can be found in Rhys’s autobiographical writing and in interviews she gave late in her life. The notebooks in which she wrote a diary when she was not quite twenty years old, and from which Voyage was later to be composed, were bought on impulse to cheer up her grim room and its ugly table:
It was after supper that night [. . .] that it happened. [. . .] I pulled a chair up to the table, opened an exercise book, and wrote This is my Diary. But it wasn’t a diary. I remembered everything that happened to me in the last year and a half. I remembered what he’d said, what I’d felt. I wrote on until late into the night, till I was so tired that I couldn’t go on, and I fell into bed and slept.
Next morning I remembered at once, and my only thought was to go on with the writing. [. . .]
I filled three exercise books and half another [“They were not at all like exercise books are now. They were twice the thickness, the stiff black covers were shiny, the spine and the edges were red, and the pages were ruled” (Plante, p. 248)], then I wrote: “Oh God, I’m only twenty and I’ll have to go on living, and living and living.” I knew then that it was finished and that there was no more to say. I put the exercise books at the bottom of my suitcase and piled my underclothes on them. After that whenever I moved I took the exercise books but I never looked at them again for seven years.1
In this scene Rhys shows us a girl or young woman, like the autobiographical heroine of Voyage in the Dark, at a time equivalent to that immediately after the period described in Voyage. The passivity of the heroine-narrator of the novel is pushed aside in the cause of the writer’s assertions of her experience in the diaries that were to form the basis for the novel. The peculiar “naming” of the diary—“This is my Diary”—can be seen as an accession to self by language-distancing; Rhys herself immediately disavows its commonplace function in the sentence that follows its naming.
The activity of writing furnished the heroine-writer Anna/Rhys with a sufficient sense of her own need to say what she wanted and to do as she needed: to write the diaries that became Voyage in the Dark, Rhys’s favorite among her novels:
I wrote it because it relieved me. I never wrote for money at the start. I wrote the makings of Voyage in the Dark long, long ago. I wrote it in several exercise books and then I put it away for years. . . . Then, twenty years later, fate had it that I tackle it again. I hadn’t really written a book; it was more or less a jumble of facts. From the notes I’d done ages before I managed to put together Voyage in the Dark.
And is it still your favorite? [the interviewer asked]
I suppose so. Because it came easiest.2
In the same interview, Rhys remarked that “there’s very little invention in my books”: “What came first with most of them was the wish to get rid of this awful sadness that weighed me down. I found when I was a child that if I could put the hurt into words, it would go. It leaves a sort of melancholy behind and then it goes. ... I would write to forget, to get rid of sad moments. Once they were written down, they were gone.”3
Rhys’s published novels and short stories, however, her public work, were not merely personal musings, even if they afforded her “relief.” Full relief obviously came from her presentation to the world of her considered version of the world.
Concerning her “singular instinct for form,” as Ford Madox Ford called it,4 Rhys said: “The things you remember have no form. When you write about them, you have to give them a beginning, a middle, and an end. To give life shape—that is what a writer does. That is what is so difficult.”5 David Plante relates, concerning similar remarks, “Jean often talked of the ‘shape’ of her books: she imagined a shape, and everything that fit into the shape she put in, everything that didn’t she left out.”6 Concerning both of these impulses—the “relief” Rhys got from “ridding herself” of “sad” feelings, and the “shaping” that she was looking for—Plante tells us that, in working on her autobiographical writing,
She would ask me to read the different versions, she would choose what she thought the best, and then tell me to tear up the others. I tore up wastepaper baskets full. . . . (And, in fact, she told me that to her writing was a way of getting rid of something, something unpleasant especially. She asked me once to write down for her a short poem that was going round and round her head. “Two hells have I/Dark Devon and Grey London—/one Purgatory: the past”—And after I wrote it down she said, “Thank God, now I can forget that.”)7
In her “real life” she can “forget”; writing does the remembering for her. She doesn’t actually abdicate, as she seems to here. As she says elsewhere, in a “confession,” “I have plenty to say [and] I am bound to say it. [. . .] I must write.”8
Voyage in the Dark was a re-presentation of a part of Rhys’s life in words, a re-vision of the dialogue that constituted the affair and is its central drama. What she is “shaping” is “life”—her own life—the better to present what seemed to her fundamental to its expression. In writing that life in her diary she “remembered” what he said and what she felt; however, in re-viewing it as a reader of her own life in order to shape the novel, what Rhys accomplishes is the re-constitution of the self that was and the constitution of the self that now writes the life. This constitution of self interweaves the two into a “shared text,” and it is the text that expresses their continuous present. Both are present in the process and the result of that self-constitution. In writing the novel Rhys “remembers” not only what “he said,” but also what she said and didn’t say, in a remembering that, indeed, itself expresses what she felt. She says it—for both “selves”—in her writing. She had not yet, however, effected the presentation of the interweaving of selves so that we see the likeness, as we do in Wide Sargasso Sea.
In an interview Elizabeth Vreeland said to Rhys, “You wrote that you have such a great memory . . . that you can shut your eyes and remember conversations.” Rhys answered, “That’s what I’ve tried to do, but it’s a very long time ago now.”9 The conversations that make up the greater part of Voyage in the Dark were written down, or at least noted, one assumes, almost immediately after they happened, when Rhys was not quite twenty. The affair in which “Anna Morgan” was engaged was one involving Rhys and her own “Walter Jeffries.”
In fairness, since Rhys herself was concerned to get the record straight, we can infer only so much. But we can suppose or infer some things. We can suppose that Rhys is telling us some things we can believe, as well as interpret: (1) She remembered conversations with great accuracy; (2) the conversations recorded in Voyage in the Dark convey what he “said,” what she “felt,”—the implicit framework for the “fundamental conversation” between them; and (3) the conversations related in Voyage are in all likelihood accurate representations of actual conversations. These conversations are the basis for the novel’s shape, which, in Rhys’s words, gives “form” to “life.”
Sections of the unfinished autobiography Smile Please can be read as a gloss on, or a continuation of, Voyage in the Dark. The section called “Interval” picks up the heroine-narrator after the end of the affair recounted in Voyage:
When my first love affair came to an end I wrote this poem:
I didn’t know
I didn’t know
I didn’t know. (p. 92)
This “poem” echoes negatively the heroine-narrator Anna Morgan’s defensive-aggressive question repeated three times in the climactic Chapter Nine of Part I of the novel: “D’you think I don’t know [. . .] D’you think I don’t know [. . .] D’you think I don’t know?” (Voyage, pp. 84-85).
“Then I settled down to be miserable,” she continues.
But it still annoys me when my first object of worship is supposed to be a villain. Or perhaps the real idea at the back of this is that his class was oppressing mine. He had money. I had none.
On the contrary, I realise now what a very kind man he must have been. I was an ignorant girl, a shy girl. And when I read novels describing present-day love-making I realise I was also a passive, dull girl. Though I couldn’t control my hammering heart when he touched me, I was too shy to say, “I love you.” It would be too much, too important. I couldn’t claim so much.
When I first met this man I rather disliked him, and why I came to worship him I don’t quite know. I loved his voice, the way he walked. He was like all the men in all the books I had ever read about London, (p. 92)
Concerning the question “Do books ‘lie’ or not?” Rhys seems, in some ways, to think not, especially in relation to a man’s placing of himself in relation to the world and to the women in it. Just as the man with whom she had her first affair was “like all the men in all the books I had ever read about London,” so the heroine-narrator in Voyage discovers that what “everybody says” and what “you read ... in all books” is true to her experience of the man with whom she has her affair. “Everybody says the man’s bound to get tired and you read it in all books” (Voyage, p. 65). The “men in all the books,” the men in her own books, and the men in her own early life would seem to be cut from the same pattern, as revealed by their mutually reinforcing presentation of themselves in “their” world and in “their” books. Rhys, however, allows men to continue to define themselves in her books, a prerogative generally disallowed women in the masculine text of self-constitution in or out of books.
Descriptions of Rhys’s reading in childhood and adolescence provide an explanation of her seeming generosity toward male characters. When her nurse tried to frighten her, the young Rhys was reading a “bowdlerized version of The Arabian Nights” (p. 21), an illicit book whose heroine saves her life by her telling of tales. Rhys recalled: “No one ever advised me what to read or forbade me to read something. I even looked at the rare and curious shelf [in the library, “a new Carnegie Library”] but I don’t remember any of it making much impression. I liked books about prostitutes, there were a good many then, and vividly recollect a novel called The Sands of Pleasure written by a man named Filson Young” (pp. 50-51).
However, Rhys tells us, “The older I grew the more things there were to worry about”:
Religion was then as important as politics are now. [. . .] There was the business of black, white [. . .] coloured. [. . .]
There was also the business about ladies and gentlemen and that was terribly complicated and very important. [. . .] “Nature’s gentlemen” existed, but apparently no “Nature’s ladies.” That was probably right.
So as soon as I could I lost myself in the immense world of books, and tried to blot out the real world which was so puzzling to me. Even then I had a vague, persistent feeling that I’d always be lost in it, defeated.
We can recall that for Rhys even earlier, “Before I could read, almost a baby, I imagined that God, this strange thing or person I heard about, was a book. Sometimes it was a large book standing upright and half open and I could see the print inside but it made no sense to me” (p. 20). The “real world” and “God,” one of whose halves was the father-book whose print she could see but which, like the world, “made no sense” to her, “were all about the same thing.” She could accept “it,” the “real” world and the puzzlement—“in books.” From books, “fatally,” she tells us, “I got most of my ideas.” To rearrange the world, Rhys would write her own books, rewrite her life, try to write away that part of it that was inimical to her. But she could not, of course, write in “their” language, the language of the father-text.
To write her own books Rhys looked to the mother-book, the other half of the book that was “God,” for a model. She could not write in “their” language, just as she does not “speak” it. Another section of Smile Please seems to carry forward the story of Anna Morgan after the close of the novel Voyage in the Dark. Rhys writes that her ex-lover sent her a Christmas gift, a tree with gifts attached; it was delivered to her room, where she was going to spend Christmas alone. She did not want the tree and the gifts. She writes, “The star at the top. I don’t want that either. I don’t know what I want. And if I did I couldn’t say it, for I don’t speak their language and I never will” (p. 100).
Other incidents described by Rhys in later life concern her time in England before the affair, while she was still at the Academy of Dramatic Art, and immediately following, when she was an actress with the touring company. Still others foreshadow her adult view of language and of “them.” Concerning her aspirations as an “actress,” Rhys told Elizabeth Vreeland, “It seems as if I was fated to write . . . which is horrible. But I can only do one thing. I’m rather useless, but perhaps not as useless as everyone thinks. I tried to be an actress—a chorus girl—and the whole thing ended when I was handed a line to say: ‘Oh Lottie, don’t be so epigrammatic’ But, when the cue came, the words just disappeared. That was that.”10 Elsewhere Rhys mentions that, in response to something she wanted to deny, she “didn’t know whether to answer ‘It isn’t true!’ or ‘We didn’t do that!’” So, as usual, she “said nothing” (p. 46). Saying what she did not say out loud in the “real world” was what her writing was; and in Voyage in the Dark there is a representation of that very cross-hatching of saying and not-saying.
In Dominica, when she was still a child, Rhys’s mother told her, “You are a very peculiar child [...]. There are times when I am very anxious about you. I can’t imagine what will happen if you don’t learn to behave more like other people” (p. 75). Hester, the “stepmother” in Voyage, puts it more aggressively, specifically in terms of language and of race and/or class: “I tried to teach you to talk like a lady and behave like a lady and not like a nigger and of course I couldn’t do it” (Voyage, p. 56). As the adult Rhys puts it: “I don’t speak their language and I never will” (p. 100).
In Rhys’s next book, Good Morning, Midnight, this opposition is presented in the first paragraph. We hear the “speaking” voice of the room that is like so many others in which Rhys and the heroine-narrator have lived:
“Quite like old times,” the room says. “Yes? No?”
There are two beds, a big one for madame and a smaller one on the opposite side for monsieur. The wash-basin is shut off by a curtain. It is a large room, the smell of cheap hotels faint, almost imperceptible. The street outside is narrow, cobble-stoned, going sharply uphill and ending in a flight of steps. What they call an impasse. (Midnight, p. 9)
Outside belongs to them, to “monsieur,” whose bed is the smaller: he doesn’t need the larger (or even the smaller) bed for the short duration of his stay in the room; her bed is his. He speaks to her in the voice of the structure that constrains her, the “large room.” Were she to leave the room, break the constraints, and travel “sharply uphill” to take that “flight of steps,” she would encounter “what they call an impasse.” This is the result when the two idioms clash: an impasse, for the woman at least.
IN 1980 V. S. Pritchett, reviewing Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, observed (accurately, I think) that, for Rhys, “Autobiography was a special torture. Not because she thought her private life was her own business but because she had already written it out in her very autobiographical novels and stories. She was being asked to winnow away her remarkable art and reveal, if she could remember them, the ‘real’ facts in a continuous narrative.”11 “Her private life” had already been “written . . . out” in her work. Yet to put the record straight was a cliché next to impossible for an artist who had been, as Pritchett calls Rhys, “instinctive.” Pritchett’s statement seems to suggest that Rhys was writing of her self and from her self, with little artistic distance and shaping. If we consider the self on display in Rhys’s novels, some comment on a psychological approach to the writing would give a further understanding of the women’s self that Rhys displays in her novels when they are viewed as art.
Psychological, specifically schizophrenic, analogues are found by many readers of much important women’s fiction. Doris Lessing’s work, for example, is often analyzed this way. The schizoid response to one’s surroundings—a duality of perception, an objectifying of oneself—readily offers the kind of presentation that leads male commentators especially to characterize the style of a successfully achieved woman’s work as “detached” or “indifferent.” On the other hand, as Elizabeth Abel points out in “Women and Schizophrenia: The Fiction of Jean Rhys,” such a doubleness of perception and thus of presentation is an appropriate response to situations in which women often find themselves. Abel stresses “Laing’s insistence that schizophrenia is a legitimate and not uncommon response to certain interpersonal interactions”; this insistence or observation provides “a clue to understanding Rhys’s heroines and thus the nucleus of Rhys’s fiction” (as it can also help us with Doris Lessing’s).12
Laing’s paradigm of the divided self [which consists of “a real internal self and a false external one that complies mechanically with the desires of others”] is particularly useful in analyzing the behavior of Rhys’s heroines in her middle novels, in which Rhys moves from the third-person narration of her first two novels to first-person narration by the heroines themselves, with a consequent new emphasis on the heroines’ subjective lives. In Voyage in the Dark (1934) Rhys suggests that her heroine suffers from a sense of internal division between a responsive but covert inner self and a mechanical external one. This split is not identical to that which Laing describes: Anna Morgan’s real self is the product of a happy childhood and not an escape from parental demands. Once this self is formed, however, Anna can find no way of confirming it in the England to which she moves, and it retreats within the mechanical being she becomes in response to her daily life. It is the relationship of these two selves within the person of Anna Morgan that constitutes the psychological interest of this novel, whose tale of unrequited love seems almost intentionally banal.13
This duality of response indeed marks a “responsive but covert inner self and a mechanical external one.” But the “selves” (the self) we are talking about remain, preeminently the speaking subject (that “first-person” narrator). It is not the “relationship of. . . two selves” which, for me, “constitutes the . . . interest”—not even the psychological interest—of the novel. The interest and the drama are achieved in the presentation of the Idiom, the language, of this “responsive but covert inner self.” What is crucial is the “real. . . self,” in contrast to and in conflict with the language of the so-called external world, that is, a world that is not part of us or under our control. In my view, there is no such entity as the “external self.” There is one self (“oneself”) and what is external to it. This is not to say there is no relationship or interaction between this self and the external world, that oneself is not versionalized according to context and circumstance.
What is “mechanical” or “false” is a person’s attempt to speak exclusively in a language or idiom that is not her or his own; worse, to be forced by circumstances to speak in that language rather than in her own. For a person to reject her own language is tantamount to rejecting herself. As Elizabeth Abel points out, the problem Rhys explores is that “Once this self is formed [Anna’s “real” self] . . . Anna can find no way of confirming it in the England to which she moves.”14 Unquestionably, Anna’s problem of self-constitution is originally based in literal context, but that is only a beginning.
In Voyage in the Dark Rhys’s presentation of the problem highlights the conflict in terms of language context. The conflict, the opposition, is real enough, and it is not internal, as the novel reveals it to us. Pressure is brought to bear from the outside. Dialogue, both spoken and unspoken, reveals the “real self” in conversation with this “external” world, which is not the world itself, but others in it—men and their agents, specifically. The narrator does not desert her task or her self; she carries on the dialogue even if it is unspoken. And Rhys gives this “unspoken” dialogue a place of its own in her writing.
In the opening paragraph of Good Morning, Midnight the act of writing is established immediately as a revelation of the speech context that is a metaphor and an instrument of oppression and power. One notes the constraining quality of the “speaking” room, which is like all the others in which the heroine-narrator has found herself—the rooms “going on endlessly” just as the words on the (masculine) page do. It is a context Rhys intends to disrupt if she can by writing it “out.” She outlines its structures for us on the page, interjecting her own voice into the seemingly uninterruptible flow and structure of “their” context, which speaks here in the “voice” of the room.
Is this paradigmatic schizophrenia? It is difficult to think so. The schizoid personality may fit the woman’s situation, and understandably so; the girl-child is brought up to respond, at least externally, to other people’s desires. Working out of this “Olympia complex” is part of the business of a thoughtful woman’s growing up, but a residue remains in the form of automatic language responses that a woman sheds incompletely and only with deliberate, considered action. However, the woman’s idiom that remains was schooled in this “dual mode of response,”15 and her language, her native idiom, is forever marked by its initial displacement. What she chooses to make of it, literally and figuratively, is preeminently a woman’s choice, subject not only to the residual effects of the complex through which her language comes to be identified as her own, but also to the laws and conventions of its making, which she discovers are held in common with other women.
As Elizabeth Abel has observed, some of the heroine-narrator Sasha’s “tenderest feelings” in Good Morning, Midnight are for women. Sasha “suggests in her relationship to her midwife a fundamental contact that endures between women and communicates more fully than the novel’s slippery verbal labels: ‘She speaks to me in a language that is no language. But I understand it. . . . Speaking her old, old language of words that are not words.’”16 Whereas some might reject the evident sentimentality in the stereotype of a woman giving birth and the midwife’s possession of almost magical qualities, we recognize that the impulse is accurate. It is accurate because even though Rhys describes this language as language, its “words”—the stuff of which it is made—are “not words,” not, apparently, like that “endless procession of words.” Something else is happening in the language women speak. However, she goes no further here in suggesting what that “something else” might be; the exploration is confined to the dialogue between the dominant and the oppressed idioms. Only in Wide Sargasso Sea is the dialogue expanded to show us what a woman’s language is made of, what its structure is like, and how it works—how it can be used to speak to men as well as to other women.
In the early novels, especially in Voyage in the Dark, Rhys demonstrates the problematical dialogue with men rather than the other-directed dialogue that engages women writing today. What is valuable for us in Rhys’s early presentation is the identification of the locus of our speech. Rhys’s placing of speech helps us enunciate what we now have to say and helps us understand the dynamics of our past and present responses to the “dominant” idiom.
I WANT to make only a few observations concerning After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, the novel written and published after Quartet, the first. I point to two representative incidents that end on the same note, incidents in which the heroine, Julia Martin, is dismissed from the minds and lives of two other characters—Mr. Horsfield, an Englishman with whom she has been having an affair; and her sister’s friend and household companion, Wyatt, a suggestively masculine, perhaps lesbian, partner to her sister Norah.
After their mother’s death, Norah shows some concern for the sister to whom she is not close. Wyatt assures her that everything is as it should be:
Norah was sitting up on the sofa. She said, “Where’s Julia?”
“She’s gone home,” answered Miss Wyatt. “Much better for her.”
“Oh, no,” said Norah in a hysterical voice. “We can’t send her away like that. I don’t believe she’s got any money.”
“My dear,” said Miss Wyatt, “just you lie down and keep yourself still. Your sister’s going to write.”
“Oh,” said Norah.
“Of course,” said Miss Wyatt with contempt. “She’ll write.”17
This is Mr. Horsfield after he’s gotten rid of Julia:
On his way home Mr Horsfield tried to put Julia entirely out of his mind.
As he was opening the door of his house he thought: “Well, that’s all over, anyway.” And then he wondered how he should send money to her if she did not write. “But, of course, she will write,” he told himself.
He shut the door and sighed. It was as if he had altogether shut out the thought of Julia. (Mackenzie, p. 127)
Writing is the end of all communication—the logical result of the attempt to communicate that erases all the talk and certainly any communication that went before. Just as Rhys has told us: “I found when I was a child that if I could put the hurt into words it would go. ... I would write to forget, to get rid of sad moments. Once they were written down, they were gone.”
That is what writing was for Rhys, a halting of the “endless procession of words [that] gave me a curious feeling—sad, excited and frightened. It wasn’t what I was reading, it was the look of the dark, blurred words going on endlessly that gave me that feeling” (Voyage, p. 9). Anna/Rhys is here reading a man’s book. In following her own “book,” her own reading of herself and others, fixing her language on the page in contrast to his, structuring the frame, displaying the “real” and the unspoken dialogue, Rhys wrote her own. And, indeed, in doing so she clarifies the “blur” that is the masculine language context.
The “sad moments” for Rhys are fixed most particularly in the words people say and don’t say to others, as well as in their looks and evaluative stares. From her own “watching” and “listening” she chooses words finally—if they are written—as the instrument, the signal, and the marking of the oppression perpetrated on a person if she is a member of an underclass, or if she is, rather, seemingly classless. The most pervasive of such markings are those that have historically classed women as a group without a right to speak, effectively muting—even silencing—them in the society in which they move and attempt to speak. The writing down of the words, both spoken and unspoken, in the repressive pattern within which Rhys has experienced them, accomplishes two things. First, it gives her access to the power words have, especially the written word; it allows her the stage upon which to speak. At the same time, it allows her dangerous access to the means of killing that structure on the page—through writing. She exploits this structural system, a structure and a system which itself has exploited and used her in “real life,” on the page.
Writing, for Rhys, is not a stoic thing, not that aesthetic achievement that reveals her “indifference” or “detachment.” It is a presentation of a body of language, the corpse of masculine discourse as she experiences it. Into the body of the masculine idiom she inserts her own, that “unspoken” half of the dialogue, the fundamental conversation as it is constantly, consistently, and perniciously carried on in “our” language. She brings her own idiom to bear upon the oppressor’s in preparation for the making of the woman’s text in her last novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys performs a verbal operation on the body of language that constitutes the male idiom, and her incisive craft results in the excision of the cover of the male idiom to expose its almost inflexible frame. This frame will later serve as the warp of the feminine text in Wide Sargasso Sea. The “other half” of the discourse, the weft of the “woman’s language”—all that is “not a continuation of their discourse” and that had heretofore “suffered silently” in the holes of that discourse—begins to move in the movement of the shuttle and becomes the dominant pattern in the weave of the text of Wide Sargasso Sea.
IN Smile Please Rhys recapitulates a series of interrogations and answers that she wrote in 1957, most of which is headed “The Trial of Jean Rhys.” She begins, “Someone told me that after long torture the patient, subject, prisoner, whatever the word is, answers every question with ‘I do not know’” (p. 129). Later, the interrogator reminds her, as if harking back to her original remark: “The phrase is not ‘I do not know’ but I have nothing to say’” (p. 132). She replies that she has plenty to say—“Not only that, but I am bound to say it.” “I must,” she says. “I must write.” The voice reminds her that it is dangerous to do so, “under the circumstances.” She insists, and the voice “says”: “All right, but be damned careful not to leave this book about” (p. 133).
Rhys of course did precisely that: she left her books “about.” She wrote and published the things she did not say, thus saying them irrevocably and ridding herself of them at the same time. She wrote her own books, “needle-sharp.” She wrote the “other book,” which was small and inside of which were “sharp, flashing things.” In this writing Rhys spoke to her idea of God by including and countering the father-book, while modeling her own on that of the mother. “Sad, excited and frightened” she may have been in her life, but she understood the dangerous enterprise of writing her own books to say the “unsaid things.”
Rhys did not rewrite men’s books. In her own books she rewrote conversations with men by interpolating her own unspoken words, writing those words as speech. She used the conventions of our public writing (quotation marks, speaker and addressee indicated) to record that speech in the fixative provided by masculine conventions of publishable discourse.
Likewise, by hewing closely to the subjective, even the heightened sense of oneself vis-à-vis other people that is labeled paranoid or schizoid, Rhys demonstrates the borders of her language and those of the dominant language structure. Rhys found this voice in Voyage in the Dark after she had used the third-person, so-called omniscient point of view in Quartet and After Leaving Mr Mackenzie. In Voyage she discovered that the otherness of a woman’s voice is best displayed by adhering to that otherness. In making this technical shift, Rhys gives us not only a portrait of the “victim,” as her heroines are often described, but also, and more importantly, a portrait of the victimized speaker. She is a speaker whose native language practices are in profound contrast to, and collusion with, those very language practices that are the instrument of her victimization.
In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie Mr. Horsfield, a man who picks up the heroine after she has been cast aside by MacKenzie, attempts to draw her out by asking her to talk about herself. She does so finally by talking about her attempt to “explain” herself to a woman some years before. Neither Horsfield nor the woman before understands what she is trying to say. But it is significant that she (Anna/Rhys) uses a description of an attempt to explain to a woman in order to explain her situation to a man, and presumably to her general audience as well.
The attempt is highlighted by a picture of a woman that Ruth, the woman to whom Julia was talking, “had on the wall”:
“And all the time I talked I was looking at a rum picture she had on the wall—a reproduction of a picture by a man called Modigliani. Have you ever heard of him? This picture is of a woman lying on a couch, a woman with a lovely, lovely body. Oh, utterly lovely. Anyhow, I thought so. A sort of proud body, like an utterly lovely proud animal. And a face like a mask, a long, dark face, and very big eyes. The eyes were blank, like a mask, but when you looked at it a bit it was as if you were looking at a real woman, a live woman. At least, that’s how it was with me.
“Well, all the time I was talking I had the feeling I was explaining things not only to Ruth—that was her name—but I was explaining them to myself too, and to the woman in the picture.” (Mackenzie, p. 40)
All this explanation is not what Horsfield wanted or expected: “It seemed to him that for a festive evening it had not been very festive” (Mackenzie, p. 43). For Rhys and for us, however, the scene represents something we do want and even expect: we see in the description the possibility of the beginnings of a conversation, not just between but among women, “real” women, “live” women, who have themselves taken off their masks.
As if realizing that trying to “explain” directly didn’t work well even for Rhys herself, in the next novel—Voyage in the Dark—she finds the technical means to say and to show what she wants us to see and to hear. The first-person narration, in which all that we hear is from a seemingly central, subjective point of view, expands that subjectivity: “All the time I was talking,” Rhys’s narrator says, “I was explaining things not only to Ruth [. . .] but to myself too, and to the woman in the picture,” the woman still caught in the frame of the masculine conception. Because of this strong narrative-structuring principle, we are disturbed when the heroine-narrator seems, as she does on occasion, to slip into another character’s mind. This is because she has focused our attention on the dialogue—spoken and unspoken—that we are following, not on the individual character’s response or reactions (which is what Rhys attempted to present in her first two novels). It is Rhys’s chorus of voices, under her single direction, to which we attend.
For the fundamental conversation to continue, we depend on all the voices being controlled by the single speaker, the writer as heroine-narrator. Paradoxically, if she deserts this role of conductor, the other voice seems wrong, discordant. Another voice jars, except in direct exchange (and except for the heroine-narrator’s “other” voice —that italicized “voice”). In Voyage, for example, when Walter Jeffries and Anna are talking, the narrator lapses into speculation concerning what Jeffries is thinking or feeling: “When he talked his eyes went away from mine and then he forced himself to look straight at me and he began to explain and I knew that he felt very strange with me and that he hated me, and it was funny sitting there and talking like that, knowing he hated me” (Voyage, p. 83).
Without the mediation/presentation of the writer’s record of what a character says, of what “they” say, such description loses life. In this sense, the “I” of the heroine-narrator is deleted. The spoken language, recorded for us in the writing, evokes our response. The structure we are following is created by the positing—through the heroine-narrator’s subjectivity—of multiple intersections at work in the constitution of self and language that begins here. The only voice we trust in the novel is rendered in the context of written dialogue. We believe what the writer has reported or recorded, not what the heroine thinks other people say or feel. We are responding to a visual medium that depends on words overheard or repeated by the reader/writer. The dialogue is, in the sense, concrete, especially as it is perceived, heard, and repeated to us through the consciousness of the heroine-narrator. When she departs from this structure, we feel that the writer has slipped. Rhys’s technique wavers when the narrator speculates outside the framework of reported dialogue and attempts to break into any consciousness other than her own, except as we discern the mechanics of it in reported speech. Rhys’s major structuring and narrative device—reported dialogue, both spoken and unspoken—commands our fullest attention.
Rhys responds to her interrogator in “The Trial” concerning her autobiographical writing: “I have plenty to say. Not only that, but I am bound to say it. [. . .] I must.” She repeats this injunction to herself: “I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is already that to other people. But it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death.” Her interrogator continues, “You are aware of course that what you are writing is childish, has been said before. Also it is dangerous under the circumstances.” “Yes,” she answers, “most of it is childish. But I have not written for so long that all I can force myself to do is to write, to write. I must trust that out of that will come the pattern, the clue that can be followed.”
“All right,” her interrogator concludes, “but be damned careful not to leave this book about” (p. 133). Rhys is Theseus here, as well as Ariadne. She follows the clue (the “clew,” the thread) to make her way through the labyrinth that constitutes the woman and achieves or finds her text. Rhys deliberately “left her books about,” as I have already emphasized. She was “bound to say” what she had to say, and the only way she could do so was to write. And in speaking she offers us the “pattern, the clue that can be followed,” in her own words. She places for us both her language and her life in that “dangerous” context in which a woman speaking can place our own language for us—in writing, that map showing the territories and borders of the particular place of our living that we call “language.”