On the Veranda: Jean Rhys’s Material Modernism

This chapter focuses on the veranda in Rhys’s writing as an architectural space that opens onto multiple stories, its material history embedded within five centuries of imperial conquest and conflict, the slave trade, the Middle Passage, the plantation, and the plantation’s legacies in city spaces of early 20th-century Europe. As a creolized architectural form, the veranda speaks also to global circuits stretching from its origins in West Africa and India through Europe and the Americas, with the Caribbean as a central point of transit. I analyse the veranda in Rhys’s writing – including several of the short stories and the novels Wide Sargasso Sea, Voyage in the Dark, and Good Morning, Midnight – as framing key characters, conflicts, and events within the transcontinental reach of this deep history. The layering of time and space, as built into the veranda, situates also the experimental prose of Rhys’s Caribbean modernism.

The Empire of Affect: Reading Rhys after Postcolonial Theory

This essay contributes to developing 21st-century readings of Rhys by exploring her work in relation to more recent theories of affect, particularly those associated with Brian Massumi. Massumi's work, including his influential concept of “the autonomy of affect,” is particularly intriguing in this regard because of its potential implications for postcolonial studies. Just as postcolonial studies has in the past decade sought to move beyond the center-periphery model that has dominated the discipline since its inception, readings of Rhys invite scholars to move beyond the focus on the purported (or failed) critique of Empire that has defined postcolonial Rhys scholarship. This chapter reads the two narrators of Wide Sargasso Sea, both of whom focus heavily on how their position within the British Empire is experienced on the level of emotions and affect. Rhys challenges the rigid distinctions between emotion and affect that underlie Massumi's theories, suggesting a more complex interplay between non-cognitive experiences and ideology.

The Discourses of Jean Rhys: Resistance, Ambivalence and Creole Indeterminacy

The complex depths of the creole figure in Caribbean literature and culture continue to demand further exploration, inflected as they are by the long and pervasive presence of colonialism in the region and its attendant corollaries of hierarchical social separation and ethnocultural difference inflected by perceptions of race. In the work of Jean Rhys, the complex patterns and performances of cultural identity that inform her multi-layered and multi-voiced narratives betray a deep-seated ambivalence towards England, the Caribbean, and their varied issues of identity. In her explorations of the various iterations and possibilities of the creole position in Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys compels us to confront the transactional relationship between colonizer and colonized and the uncharted variations of racial, cultural, and national identity.

Caribbean Formations in the Rhysian Corpus

In “What is an Author?” Michel Foucault reframes the author as an “author-function” that has historically been produced through its interaction with both the text and its audience. In this essay, I deploy Foucault’s unsettling of the author as origin and use it as a lens through which to make sense of the Rhys protagonist. Specifically, I examine what I call the “landscape function” in Rhys’s texts (to echo Foucault’s “author function”) in order to highlight the multiplicity of meanings through which the category “human” is produced in the Rhysian corpus. This Foucaultian reading thus reveals the extent to which neither character nor the environment pre-exist their narrativisation in the diegetic logic of the text but are actually produced through their mutual imbrication in narrative.

Introduction: The Haunting of Jean Rhys

In her unfinished autobiography, Jean Rhys (1890–1979) describes the birth of her writing career as a quasi-memorial for herself as a person: buying some black exercise books and the red, blue, green and yellow quill pens to ‘cheer up’ her table and banish its bareness, Rhys represents her writing out of her unhappy first love affair as a compulsive purgation of the experience, but one that left her bereft in the recognition that something in her had died. ‘I filled three exercise books and half another, 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.’...

‘The feelings are always mine’: Chronic Shame and Humiliated Rage in Jean Rhys’s Fiction

In an interview with Mary Cantwell in 1975, Jean Rhys denied that her fiction was thinly veiled autobiography, although, she added, “the feelings are always mine.” This essay argues that many of the feelings that Rhys explores in her fiction constellate around the shame affect, an affect that references not just feelings of embarrassment and humiliation, but more broadly feelings of being out of place, alienated and estranged, found contemptible and unworthy by the very people from whom the protagonists had come to expect intimacy, love, and respect. This chronic and pervasive state of shame engenders profound despair, leading the protagonists to wonder if they have any worth at all, or if others’ rejection, abandonment, and betrayal of them somehow speaks to who or what they truly are. What is more, though, shame feeds into the sadness and anger that function as emotional substitutes for the more totalizing eradication of self that shame involves, thereby concealing the painful recognition of being shamed; sadness and anger in turn develop into the depression and rage that are hallmarks of the Rhysian protagonist.

Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield Writing the ‘sixth act’

Jean Rhys (1890-1979) and Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) were born within two years of each other in what were then British colonies under the New Imperialism. Rhys’s relative longevity and the fact that her first publication, the story ‘Vienne’ appeared in 1924 have obscured their contemporaneousness. Both wrote about failed love and affairs in England, Rhys in diaries she wrote in the 1910s, which would be reworked as ‘Triple Sec’, an unpublished 1924 novel, and revised as Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Mansfield in the manuscript stories ‘Juliet’ (begun in 1906) and ‘A Little Episode’ (1909), recently unearthed in the King’s College Library. The epigragh to ‘A Little Episode’ is from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray; Rhys alludes to the same two sentences in the opening sentence of Voyage in the Dark. This chapter draws out the resonances of their allusions to Wilde, and locates the texts as engagements with literary decadence.

‘Upholstered Ghosts’: Jean Rhys’s Posthuman Imaginary

Each of Jean Rhys’s novels written during the modernist period presents a world in which her female protagonists are besieged by poverty, exile, loneliness, and abasement at the hands of men and women who consistently treat them with contempt. In the face of such antipathy, Rhys’s heroines demonstrate a pronounced identification with inanimate objects, ghosts, and animals, as though to escape or at least extend their subjectivities beyond the limits of their own imperilled bodies. This outsourcing of identity to machines, mirrors, mannequins, dolls, kittens, zombies, and so forth, may be in part a defence mechanism against the oppressive conditions under which they live, but one effect of Rhys’s portraiture is that she pushes the boundaries of the body and of the subject in directions only recently explored by theories of the posthuman. This chapter examines the enmeshment of Rhys’s protagonists with material and spectral elements in order to understand her distinct representation of the affective flows of modern subjectivity.

‘From Black to Red’: Jean Rhys’s Use of Dress in Wide Sargasso Sea

This essay discusses the cultural work performed by dress in Wide Sargasso Sea which is largely to situate the white creole woman within European racial hierarchies. Drawing on both fashion theory (Alison Bancroft’s work on Fashion and Psychoanalysis [2012]) and postcolonial theorists (Mary Lou Emery and others), I show how Rhys retains and develops her earlier interest in clothing as an indicator of women’s subjectivity, visceral longings, day dreams and fantasies, and how dress articulates the protagonist Antoinette’s contradictory desires. Furthermore, dress carries the freight of Rhys’s concern with racial hierarchy, with the relationship between the colonizer and colonized, and is accentuated as a marker of Caribbean identity. The chapter focuses on the importance of Antoinette’s red dress which is used to interrogate and refuse English cultural norms.

Jean Rhys’s Environmental Language: Oppositions, Dialogues and Silences

Postcolonial ecocriticism is a new and rapidly growing field, characterized by a consciousness of the simultaneous depredation of subordinated people and land both during and after formal colonialism (see Huggin and Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, 2010; eds. Deloughrey and Handley, Postcolonial Ecologies, 2011). Rhys is somewhat of a complicated case with regard to placement in colonial and postcolonial contexts, coming as she did from the plantocracy in Dominica, but living most of her adult life in economically straitened circumstances in Britain. In Rhys’s fictional world, nature is not a benevolent being or attractive ornament. It often aids and abets amoral power, but also when given the chance to escape the particularly British desire to turn wilderness into dependent, subservient gardens, nature can become a kind of parallel to Rhys’s anarchistic (if often outgunned and outlawed) protagonists. Rhys’s awareness of power disparities extends to her awareness of environment, and reading her work through the lens of ecocriticism allows us to see this clearly.