5 Narrative Discourse in Jean Rhys’ Fiction
This chapter focuses on Jean Rhys’ narrative strategies, which help portray marginal
women, who are exiled, both culturally and sexually. Being displaced from their
native Caribbean, the trespassers on masculine territory walk the streets, yet living
on the edges of respectability, sanity and dignity. Their fragmented perceptions and
disjointed voices present the modern experience of exile and the decentered self.
However, they do not omit to dissect the ways and means of power, money and sex.
This is the more so since the need to sustain an artificial order gives rise to a
psychic fragmentation, which is typical of the decentered self. By depicting such char­
acters, Rhys criticizes modernity’s tendency to order reality by constructing binary
oppositions, which reduce people to homogeneous categories. She shows how this
view is mistaken and destructive and highlights the heterogeneity of human existence
and exposes the provisionality of truth and the instability of meaning by employing
multi-vocality, irony, parody and images of doubles.
While incorporating modern and postmodern devices of fragmentation, Rhys
relies on Romantic notions of sublimity, passion, and the supernatural. On the other
hand, the social isolation, faced by Rhys’ characters, develops the unique forms of
interior monologue and of a fragmented style that, to borrow Wallace Stevens’ words,
created a “violent order (in) disorder”.
Rhys’ novels use languages other than English, with a powerful connection to
the language debate in postcolonial literature. She is able to get the clichés of the
English language from the past, and to reject much of the language of the empire,
colonialism, class, and bourgeois morality by constructing a new discourse based
on inner dialogue, indirect speech, letters and dreams, remnants of conversations,
songs, poetry, quotes from books and prayers.
Moreover, deep-rooted in the literary concerns of the mid-twentieth century, her
novels feature a web of symbols and images that underlies plot and informs their
fragments of dialogue. In short, plunging into the psyche of her principal characters,
Rhys examines their fragmented identities and unconscious fears, focusing on an
inner world that mirrors the impressions of an evocative physical landscape.
On the other hand, the Creole demi-world illuminates a complex but overlooked
genealogical moment in twentieth century literature: the point when the exhausted
limits of modernist form revealed the line of postcolonial fiction. Rhys’ semi-canon­
ical tale of a chorus-girl turned prostitute, Anna Morgan, the émigré narrator of Jean
Rhys’ Voyage in the Dark, will thus become a novel of female flânerie, or one among
the author’s several fictions of feminine self-destruction.
In the following subchapter, I will try to reveal the complex transnationality of
Jean Rhys’ fiction – the contrapuntal geography that oscillates between England and
the West Indies – which gives rise to their transitional literary quality and produces
a new geopolitics that challenges the continued relevance of the modernist narrative
strategies.
© 2014 Cristina-Georgiana Voicu
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5.1 (Power-)Text
My analysis begins with Charles Sanders Pierce’s contribution to semiotic paradigm,
also due to Seymour Chatman’s narratology, providing a common basis for the semi­
otic analysis of cultural identity. Semiotics is usually defined as the study of signs
and symbols and their transmission within cultures and between cultures. I will also
analyze the relationship not only between the sign and what it represents, but also
the manner in which the connection took place between the represented object and
this particular sign because this sign is certainly a sign.
In his semiotic writings from the late nineteenth century, Charles S. Peirce describes
the signifying process, or semiosis, as a dynamic relation between three elements: a
sign, an object and an interpretant. Peirce describes the relation this way: “A sign,
or representamen, is something, which stands to somebody for something in some
respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person
an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign, which it creates, I call
the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for
that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have some­
times called the ground of the representamen. The sign can, in principle, be anything
– a gesture, a logo, an advertisement, a slogan, a product, a package, a narrative, a
written text, a set of behaviors, or even an entire persuasive campaign. The object,
which the sign stands for, is sometimes also called the referent – an equivalent to the
notion of the world as it “is” in itself” (Peirce, 5). The relation between these three
elements in the signifying process is illustrated in Figure 5.1.
interpretant
sign
emio
sign
sign
referent/object
Object
interpretant
s
Ground
semiosis
sis
representamen
object
Fig. 5.1: Peirce’s Interpretation of the Semiotic Triad
The middle figure shows the relation of a sign. The difference from the first figure
is that the interpreter, sign and object are linked to “ground.” In Peirce’s theory
“ground” is a sort of idea in which the sign stand for its object. It stands for that
object, not in all respects, but in reference to this idea. We shall, as we did in figure
5.1., also here replace “interpreter” with “agent.” The categories used are part of the
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88 Narrative Discourse in Jean Rhys’ Fiction
“ground” itself. To make an interpretation is to understand how this “ground” works
in giving meaning to specific subjects and observations. In an interpretation process,
we can analyze the same “object” or observation as located in different meaning con­
texts by different agents and in different situations.
An icon is a sign that has certain qualities in common with the object it stands
for, for example, similarity. A picture of a person, thus, has iconic qualities because
it is a sign that refers to that particular person through some degree of resemblance.
An index is a sign that refers to its object because it is being affected by that object
in some real way. The relation between an index and its object is, in other words,
based on causality or physical connection. As it appears, both icons and indices are
to some degree ‘motivated’ by their objects or referents. By contrast, a symbol is a
sign with only conventional associations to the object it stands for. Although most
signs have both iconic, indexical and symbolic qualities, language is mainly sym­
bolic, that is, related to its object through conventions or, as Peirce puts it “by virtue
of a law, usually an association of general ideas which operates to cause the symbol
to be interpreted as referring to that object” (Peirce, 8). In this subchapter, I will apply
these concepts and principles to the notions of image and identity.
The interpretation scheme of the Peircean semiotic model is as follows:
1. the representamen, or the sign-vehicle;
2. the (immediate) object, which is a semiotic projection of the external or repre­
sented reality (i.e., of the dynamical object);
3. the interpretant – the element which belongs to the realm of thought, mediation,
cognition. This third correlate of the sign – the interpretant – is the meaning of
the sign (Kalaga, 1997, p. 25).
The interpretant is described by Peirce as “the proper significate effect” of the sign.
According to the semiotic triad, this “proper significate effect” may be conventional
“meaning” as in the sense Saussure gives to the signified; or a feeling, which Peirce
calls an “emotional interpretant”; or it may be an action, which he calls an “energetic
interpretant,” as in the “flight or fight” impulse (Colapietro, 1989, p. 35).
First, I would like to analyze the relation between self and object. Peirce consid­
ered that “during any given moment of its life, the self is first and foremost a process
in which some species of meaning is evolving” (Colapietro, 1989, p. 92). Peirce insists
that the self is constituted within dialogue. Whether intra- or interpersonal, this
process is such that the subject is in a condition of “always becoming” between the
two sides of a conversation, between the two sides of semiosis. Although the “action
of signs usually occurs between two parties,” the utterer and the interpreter as the
representamen and interpretant need not at all be persons, “for a chameleon and
many kinds of insects and even plants make their livings by uttering signs, and lying
signs, at that” (Peirce, cited in Colapietro, 1989, p. 22). There is nothing necessarily
“mental about either this quasi-utterer (‘a source from which a sign springs’) or this
quasi-interpreter (‘a form into which a sign grows’)” (Colapietro, 1989, p. 19).
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What must be noted about Peirce’s triadic model is that his notion of the
object-sign-interpretant relation corresponds in no way to Saussure’s sign-signifi­
er-signified relation. Undoubtedly, the relation is not mentioned in the way that Saus­
sure describes the relation between the signifier and the signified, and “in particular,
the object is deliberately not characterised as being necessarily something that is rep­
resented or stood for by the sign” (Colapietro, 1989, p. 7).
For Peirce, there is a particular relation of substitution between the repre­
sentamen and the interpretant in which interpretants are continuously transformed
into representamens. In this case, Peirce’s position is that:
“The meaning of a representation can be nothing but a representation. In fact, it is nothing but
the representation itself conceived as stripped of irrelevant clothing. But this clothing can never
be stripped off; it is only changed for something more diaphanous. So there is an infinite regres­
sion here. Finally, the interpretant is nothing more but another representation to which the torch
of truth is handed along; and as representation, it has its interpretant again. Lo, another infinite
series”. (Peirce, 1985, p. 339)
An important implication of “unlimited semiosis” for the self would seem what Derrida
saw later in the notion of the “trace.” Peirce proposes that within every utterance there
are echoes of the utterances of others: the self is never simply a speaker: “There is no
intuition or cognition, not determined by previous cognitions” Peirce, 1985, p. 284).
Peirce describes his system as being one in which “the object determines the sign
and, in turn, the sign determines the interpretant” (qtd. in Colapietro, 1989, p. 14), but
he also stresses the possibility that a sign may become active in relation to the object,
in some way determining the object. This is because the object can in fact have two
forms: the immediate object and the dynamical object. The first one “is the object as
the sign itself represents the object, and whose Being is thus dependent on the rep­
resentation of it in the sign. This is how the object can be thought of as being deter­
mined by the sign” (qtd. in Colapietro, 1989, p. 15). On the other hand, the second type
of object, “is the Reality which by some means contrives to determine the sign to its
Representation” (qtd. in Colapietro, 1989, p. 15).
According to Colapietro, Peirce regarded the embodied self as “a perfect example
of… a perfect sign” (Colapietro, 1989, p. 58). Peirce asserted that, like the self, “the
perfect sign is perpetually being acted upon by its object, from which it is perpetually
receiving the accretions of new signs… In addition, the perfect sign never ceases to
undergo change” (qtd. in qtd. in Colapietro, 1989, p. 58). The object within this model –
identity – is discrete and discontinuous for every cycle of the function of semiosis: in
each cycle it must be remade in some sense, in each cycle posited as a new (similar or
dissimilar) object-identity. That is, each moment of interpretation becomes yet another
representamen, the triangulation of the sign implies the object’s reconstruction. In
what concerns the self, the dynamical object is seen, as “something apart from being
represented” (Colapietro, 1989, p. 15). On the other hand, the immediate object is the
sense of self or that identity that is attributed to the concept of the body-as-sign.
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90 Narrative Discourse in Jean Rhys’ Fiction
Peirce’s model provides a model that explains the sense of the self’s continuity.
It is a model in which the sense of continuity is relational. Peirce’s conclusion is that
there is a tendency to admit a personal self, but he asserts that they “will admit a
personal self in the same sense in which a snark exists; that is, there is a phenom­
enon to which that name is given. […] It is an illusory phenomenon; but still it is a
phenomenon” (qtd. in Colapietro, 1989, p. 63). Peirce’s metaphor for the object as the
“ground” of the sign, then, becomes somewhat pointed, because it must now be seen
as a ground upon which the self may never be touched: a discomforting condition for
Cartesianism’s self to realize itself in.
In understanding Jean Rhys’ narrative, I shall start from Seymour Chatman’s
position who finds that narrative is a combination of “a what and a way,” where the
what is the story of a narrative, and the way is its discourse. He also pushes for an
idea of narrative as semiotic, meaningful structure in its own right, suggesting that
“narrative structure imparts meanings […] precisely because it can endow an other­
wise meaningless text with eventhood, characterhood, and settinghood, in a normal
one-to-one standing-for relationship” (Chatman, 1978, p. 25). Chatman continues to
outline Roman Ingarden’s distinction between the ‘real object’ and the ‘aesthetic
object’, a useful way to think of story and discourse. Instead of asking what the
author should or should not do, we should ask: What are the ways we recognize the
presence or absence of a narrator? What is plot? Character? Setting? Point of view?
(fig.5.2.). Another aspect is Chatman’s stress on the distinction between the narrator
and the author. The narrator might or might not be present in the narrative while the
author is – he or she is instead the real person behind the work and is always there.
In this respect, he analyzes the structure of a short narrative using a list of constitu­
ents: stasis, process, events, actions, happenings, character, setting, etc. He also indi­
cates how the reader makes inferences from what he sees, and thereby constructs the
story: the mode of telling (mediating, presenting, diegetic), and the mode of showing
(unmediated, exposing, mimesis).
Relevant to the macrostructure of the story are such concepts as types of plots.
Events make up the things that happen, and this is the content, but the arrangement
of these events as presented to the reader is a matter of discourse. The presentation of
sequence implicitly conveys causality. Readers interpret consecutive events as caus­
ally related.
The first topic on the subject of discourse is the narrative spectrum, which is
largely pulled from Wayne Booth. The essence of this spectrum revolves around the
conflict between showing and telling, or presentation versus mediated narration, or
mimesis and diegesis. As we come to recognize a narrator as distinct from a character,
we see that Ethos can apply in fiction to the narrator only.
Starting from the diagram above, Antoinette’s insanity in Wide Sargasso Sea becomes
the central narrative. The story progresses in widening circles of understanding as
the reader sees the action through the eyes of one or more witnesses. Thus, the reader
struggles with multiple, unreliable narrations in order to deduce the true state of
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colonizing subject
colonized ‘Other’
(Power-)Text “an encounter within the area of an utterance, between two different 91
linguistic consciousness, separated from one another by an epoch, by social
differentiation or by some other factor”
affairs. This is as much to say that the plot is open to multiple, contradictory inter­
pretations (fig. 5.3.). So, the questions that
arise through the novel are: Was Antoi­
‘intentional’
nette guilty of unchaste acts
with her cousin
Sandi? double
Or is shevoiced
mad and
(conscious,
dialogical,
) only imagining
such scenes? Is the voodoo charm of Christophine ‘really’ magic? Or is it, as Rochester
thinks, just poison? Fig. 2.4. Organic versus Intentional Hybridity
Actions
Events
Happenings
Form
=
of
Story
Existents
(Content)
Characters
Content
Settings
People, things, etc., as pre-
Substance
processed by the author’s
= of
cultural codes
Content
Narrative
Structure of
Form
narrative transmission
= of
Expression
Discourse
(Expression)
Manifestation
Verbal
Substance
Cinematic
= of
Balletic
Expression
Pantomimic
Fig. 5.2:Chatman’s Diagram of Narrative
Fig. 5.2. Chatman’s Diagram of Narrative
To conclude, Jean Rhys insists on literary allusions, multi-focality and on various
facets of the same reality, which stands for the disconnected form of the narrative
structure, and the casual reference to the intertextual relationships of her stories.
We can notice, as the story unfolds, that it follows the psychological process
of the speaker, revealing Antoinette as an incipient madwoman (fig. 5.4.). In other
words, the story shifts freely from fictive reality to fantasy. For example, at the end
of the novel, the madwoman Antoinette describes, in detail, aspects which corre­
sponds point for point to Brontë’s description: her setting fire to the house and per­
ishing in the flames despite Rochester’s efforts to save her. But now she knows what
she must do and within a few lines she takes up the candle to enact the vision she
has just “dreamed.” Thus, the reader is soon entangled in a hopelessly confused web
of shifting levels of “reality” in the tale.
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(Narrative
author
expression)
Discourse
Implied
Fig. 5.3:Chatman’s Diagram of Narrative Structure
Source:
Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse:
Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film.
London: Cornell University Press, 1978
author]
[Real
(“No” or Minimal narrator)
Unmediated transmission
for plot
Setting
Existents
content)
(Narrative
Story
significance
Degree of
(IS)
Stasis
(DOES)
Process
(Plot)
Events
Satellites
Necessity
Characters
Statements
Mediated transmission
Narrator
narratee
Kernels
Identity
audience]
audience
Mood
Quality
[Real
Implied
Happenings
Trait
Aspect
Agency
Actions
92 Narrative Discourse in Jean Rhys’ Fiction
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Through the structure of a past event reported in the fictive present by unreliable
dramatic speakers, the writer forces her audience into a constructive role, like a jury,
building up the story in their own mind. In other words, we could compare a reader of
fiction to a jury in a schematic way and see that where a jury tries to find “reality.” the
reader of fiction is forced to construct a second fiction (Tab. 5.1.):
Tab. 5.1: Chatman’s Representation of Fiction
Real Event
Real Reporter
Real Reader
1. Real accident
2. Witness
3. Decides whether
witness’report
matches event
Unstated Fiction
Stated Fiction
Constructed Fiction
1. Unstated fictional
event, the affair
2. “unreliable” narrators’
report
3. Audience constructs
what they imagine
unstated fiction to be
In reality, the reader’s judgment that a report is unreliable means that it does not
correspond to the real event. In fiction, the “unreliable” report means a story so con­
structed as to force the reader into a constructive activity, perhaps because the fiction
as stated has internal contradictions or seems incomplete.
5.2 (Pre-)Text
In her novels, Rhys reorders the fragmented elements of the Afrocentric identity. Het­
eroglosia and calypso permanently infuses her texts: interplay of voices, condensed
imagery, rhetorical processes on satire and interrogation, and themes of betrayal,
exploitation and oppression. In addition, she also chooses a marginal, ambiguous,
double language, therefore creating a modernist text. I tried to analyze more symbols
that define the identity of characters: dreams, visions, pictures, characters’ names,
place names, colors, fires, animals imaginary. So, using symbolism was a form of sub­
limation. By the extensive use of images and symbols, Rhys always tries to deepen
and expand her style.
The narrative structures of Jean Rhys’ fiction are made of an alternation of states
of consciousness, including daydreams, memories, fits of rage or madness, moments
of awakening, drunkenness, sexual ecstasy, and nightmares. Her novels rely upon a
variety of alternative narrative techniques to advance the plot, including letters and
book excerpts, overheard conversations and gossip, and perhaps most importantly,
multiple points-of-view in a juxtaposition of antithetical entities or the so-called
un-reconciled oppositions and contrasts: black / white, sun / shade, life / death, slave /
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Fig. 5.4: Lost in The Bermuda Triangle
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master, truth / fiction, day / night, past / present, sympathy / hatred, attraction / repul­
sion, knowledge / denial, familiar / strange, male / female, England / West Indies.
Referring to the novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys decides to begin her action with
Antoinette’s narration then to shift to Rochester’s and finally to close with Antoinette’s
disintegrating narration, introduced and contextualized by the voice of Grace Poole.
What is interesting about Antoinette’s narration is how desperately and ingeniously
she uses narrative techniques such as the “illusion of sequence” (Mitchell, 1981, p. 13)
and linear chronology to delay the final secret, climax, closure of her story, which is
her descent into madness and death.
For example, an earlier version of Part I had Antoinette commenting on her child­
hood: “I got used to a solitary life and began to distrust strangers…” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 8), which is an unnecessary commentary and whose signification is more
effectively revealed by Antoinette’s reactions to ensuing events. Similarly, the final
version cuts “but it was understood that she would not approve of Tia” (Rhys, Wide
Sargasso Sea, 9), leaving “My mother never asked me where I had been or what I had
done” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 13) to stand as an even more poignant indictment of
her mother’s neglect.
As it is quite clear from the above, the movement of the narration is determined
not by chronology but by associative memory. Antoinette has structured her narra­
tive deliberately and, although as we shall see, the sequence of events are connected
by associative memory rather than by temporality or causality, Antoinette’s narrative
is forcibly contained by a motif that determines her memories and her retelling of
them. Conversely as stated earlier, she, herself is held together by the act of narrating.
To measure time is a measure of how closely one is in touch with reality. Accord­
ingly, Antoinette makes an effort to measure time and to progress from childhood, to
school, to marriage. Rochester called her “a lunatic who always knows the time. But
never does” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 165).
In Part One, Antoinette begins her story with an oblique reference to the Emanci­
pation Act, “when trouble comes close ranks” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 17), contin­
ues with the anecdote of Mr. Luttrell’s suicide, then recounts the poisoned horse inci­
dent (each episode ‘marooning’ them further), and moves on to Pierre’s feebleness,
and a description of the wild garden. Like her mother, she is suffering a division of
the self where she undergoes what she calls the real death, the death of the mind, and
becomes blank, doll-like, and inhuman, in waiting for the second death, the death of
the body.
She succumbs to certain narrative habits that are revelatory of her present dis­
turbed mind. She repeats the adverbs ‘always’ and ‘never’. Within the opening pages,
Mr. Luttrell “was gone for always” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 9); Pierre’s doctor “never
came again” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 27); Antoinette “never went near” (Rhys, Wide
Sargasso Sea, 87) the orchid in the wild garden at Coulibri; “The Wilderness of Cou­
libri never saddened me” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 64); Christophine “never paid
them” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 78); “I never looked at any strange negro” (Rhys,
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96 Narrative Discourse in Jean Rhys’ Fiction
Wide Sargasso Sea, 87), “My mother never asked me where I had been or what I had
done” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 13). In one sense, the use of “always,” along with
the repetition of “still,” (“she still rode about every morning” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso
Sea, 21) and “sometimes” (“sometimes we left the bathing pool at midday, sometimes
we stayed till late afternoon” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 105) is iterative and durative,
implying continuity over a certain duration of time in the past.
In other words, the repetition of adverbs (whose very repetition would connote
iterativity) in fact implies the opposite – closure, a finality. The frequency and persis­
tence of repetition evokes this sense of finality and desperate sadness. With similar
effect, Rhys often resorts to the verbal auxiliary ‘would’. In reporting angry conver­
sations between her mother and Mr. Mason, Antoinette describes their dialogue by
reporting “he would say,” “she’d speak,”; ‘would’ is here used in the habitual mode.
The impression the reader receives is again iterative – this argument occurred over
and over again. Antoinette also creates this effect by remembering that “Mr. Mason
always said” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 32).
In Part II, Rochester reports one of the dialogues between him and his wife Antoi­
nette (“‘Now come for a walk,’ she said, ‘and I will tell you a story,’” Rhys, Wide
Sargasso Sea, 82) in which Antoinette describes her dream of watching rats and her
moonlight sleep to explain her present state of mind. Rochester’s narration of their
dialogues also becomes a mode for her clarification of sequence:
“… Is your mother alive?”
“No, she is dead, she died.”
“When?”
“Not long ago.”
“Then why did you tell me she died when you were a child?”
“Because they told me to say so and because it is true. She did die when I was a child. There are
always two deaths, the real one, and the one people know about.” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 124)
As she begins her final narrative, Antoinette/Bertha says: “In this room, I wake early and
lie shivering for it is very cold” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 146). The present tense indicates
that the judicious distance of her first narrative is obliterated. She has lost all sense of
measured time and place for she refuses to believe “this is England,” and of self for she
does not recognize the woman with streaming hair, surrounded by a gilt frame as herself.
Rhys uses different narrative techniques to present differing points of view, those
of both Rochester and Antoinette, encouraging the reader to analyze each character
and even to dispute their interpretations of events, while Brontë in Jane Eyre wishes
the reader to accept Jane Eyre’s account of her life without question. Wide Sargasso
Sea is a broader narrative than Jane Eyre, encompassing different cultures and races.
Rhys’ characters are shown to be shaped by many forces, while the influences of
Brontë’s characters are assumed to be known by the reader.
The madwoman in the attic, a stock character in the nineteenth century Gothic
fiction, is portrayed in terrifying but simplistic detail by Brontë, and disputed in Wide
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Sargasso Sea. Jane Eyre accepts Rochester’s interpretation of Antoinette’s sanity
because she has heard the screams and witnessed the psychotic episodes of arson
and attempted murder for herself, and knows nothing of Bertha’s personal history,
but Rhys encourages the reader to question the origins of this madness by explor­
ing how Antoinette lost her identity and sense of belonging. Antoinette’s actual state
of mental health is hard to determine accurately; it is interpreted by Rochester and
Daniel Cosway as madness, but Antoinette’s behavior and own narration reveal little.
Rochester assumes Antoinette is mad because she alternates periods of extreme
emotion with periods of blankness, and because he doesn’t accept the cultural and
racial differences between them. He defines sanity in terms of his own emotional
nature: “I was exhausted. All the mad conflicting emotions had gone and left me
wearied and empty. Sane” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 172). Rochester’s own sanity is
questioned by Rhys. He lived in Jamaica for a month before his wedding, three weeks
of which were spent in a debilitating and confusing fever. His sense of dislocation
at Granbois during his honeymoon is explicit: “As for my confused impression they
will never be written. There are blanks in my mind that cannot be filled up” (Rhys,
Wide Sargasso Sea, 145). Rhys’ use of circular narrative, flashbacks, and the altering
narration of Rochester and Antoinette contributes to the sense of fragmentation and
dislocation of both characters, suggesting that madness is a result of many complex
factors and cannot be ascribed to the facile Gothic novel explanation of heredity.
The issue of voice in other novels is a specific transition from free-indirect style
to stream of consciousness. In free-indirect discourse, the narration adopts the point
of view and mode of speaking of the character or world described, thereby giving a
sense of the perspectives through which life is viewed. Free-indirect style highlights
the specificity of point of view, but also shows the way we see the world through
received and conventional styles of speaking. There are not subjects who speak, but
manners or styles from which subjects or point of view are created.
The novel Good Morning, Midnight is paratactic. It opens with a paratactic descrip­
tion of Sasha’s hotel room in the present tense which, emphasizes that the simple
physical presence of the room combats and overpowers her emotions: “Now the room
springs out at me, laughing, triumphant. The big bed, the little bed, the table with the
tube of luminal, the glass and the bottle of Evian, the two books, the clock ticking on
the ledge, the menu…” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 178). The enumeration quality
reinforces Sasha’s sense that the objective world is antagonistic to the efforts of her
fragile consciousness. In contrast to this use of language to emphasize the fixity of
physical reality, Rhys uses wordplay to characterize the subjective side of Sasha’s
experience. A verbal world of sounds detached from references is constructed by
Sasha’s susceptability to the suggestive power of words.
Thus, in Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight, there is a far more intense impersonal­
ity of voice. The first one for example is the dominant use of the noun-phrase: “The
Cinema Danton. Watching a good young man trying to rescue his employer from a
mercenary mistress” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 89). Here there is the descrip­
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tion without a subject who sees or who describes. Objects and scenes are listed as
though a camera or inhuman and impersonal eye surveyed the scene. Indeed, the
idea and image of the camera is crucial to Rhys’ style and imagery. Her central charac­
ter not only spends time in the cinema, watching films twice or leaving them early –
as though art did not have any form outside its mode of consumption – her fiction
operates like a cinematic eye: “At four o’clock next afternoon I am in a cinema on
the Champs-Elysees, according to programme. Laughing heartily in the right places.
It’s a very good show and I see it through twice” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 15).
Towards the end of the novel, she reflects on the way in which her mind is taken over
by the ‘film mind’ where the self is a spiritual automaton replaying cultural clichés.
More importantly, Good Morning, Midnight works with a cinematic time of triggered
flashbacks, with the past intruding not in any coherent or logical style but as though
scenes were cut and pasted in montage.
The novel Good Morning, Midnight opens with a disembodied voice attributed
to a room, and the language of things dominates the novel. The world is described,
not as it is before the viewing eye of a specific subject, but as already formed by the
jargon of hotel room marketing: “That’s the way it is, that’s the way it goes, that
was the way it went… A room. A nice room. A beautiful room. A beautiful room with
bath. A very beautiful room with bath. A bedroom and sitting-room with bath. Up to
the dizzy heights of the suite. Two bedrooms, sitting-room, bath and vestibule. (The
small bedroom is in case you don’t feel like me, or in case you meet somebody you
like better and come in late.) Anything you want brought up on the dinner-wagon.
(But, alas! the waiter has a louse on his collar. What is that on his collar?... Bitte
schon, mein herr, bitte schon. ...) Swing high. ... Now, slowly, down. A beautiful
room with a bath. A room with bath. A nice room. A room” (Rhys, Good Morning,
Midnight, 29).
Phrases and clichés from advertising, popular song and everyday life interrupt
the narration; such phrases are neither quoted nor attributed, and are repeated until
the end of the text. Where Rhys uses cinematic technology to create an impersonal
visual scene, she uses the disembodied voices or radio and telephones to create a
speech without a speaking subject – a language that says nothing and deadens life.
In other words, the ruthlessness, barbarism and fragmentation of modern life
are belied by a retreat into commodities, cliché, banality and fantasy. Rhys’ critique
of the nihilism of life is directly intertwined with a critique of capital. All time has
been reduced to the same; there is no tomorrow and no past that does not come in
other than as a trauma. The meaningless repetitive nature of urban life is a result of
the commodification of time: “Always the same stair, always the same room” (Rhys,
Good Morning, Midnight, 28); the art that might allow us to live – without a thought
for economy or efficiency are also enslaved to capital. “A white-haired American lady
and a girl who looks like her daughter are talking in the hall, “look here, look at this.
Here’s a portrait of Rimbaud. Rimbaud lived here, it says”. “And here’s Verlaine... Did
he live here too?’” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 33).
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In modernism, women become more and more associated with shopping, com­
modities and popular culture. Women are both commodities – the women she works
with can’t be distinguished from the mannequins: “the mannequins and saleswomen
are all mixed up” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 35); and they are also targeted as
the site where the desire for commodities can be manufactured. The narrator views
women buying clothes, hats, shoes and then reads a menu with pictures of women
asking to ‘spend more money’: “In spite of everything, the wires from Paris always
buzzing send more money” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 38). The despair in Good
Morning, Midnight opens the circulation of capital time through episodes of loss,
waste and non-profit: “And five weeks afterward there I am, with not one line, not one
wrinkle, not one crease. And there he is, lying with a ticket around his wrist because
he died in a hospital. And there I am looking down at him, without one line, without
one wrinkle, without one crease” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 52). However, there
are two key moments of hope in the text, when she first receives the painting that
she will then subsequently pay for: “I am surrounded by the pictures. It is aston­
ishing how vivid they are in this dim light. ... Now the room expands and the iron
band round my heart loosens. The miracle has happened. I am happy” (Rhys, Good
Morning, Midnight, 83) and when the gigolo refuses to take the money for the sexual
encounter that she later lives through only at the level of the imaginary: “Everything
in their whole bloody world is a cliché. Everything is born out of a cliché, rests on a
cliché, and survives by a cliché. And they believe in the clichés – there’s no hope”
(Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 36).
The body movements have an important meaning for Sasha when she describes
her friend’s actions in order to understand her own identity within the city:
“Half-shutting her eyes and smiling the smile which means: ‘She’s getting to look old.
She drinks’” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 11). To Sasha, bodies are the place where
people in the city say things they can’t or won’t say aloud, and this fact is crucial.
Sasha is confused over her inheritance when it is presented to her, but she claims,
“When I saw the expression in his eyes I knew exactly why she did it” (Rhys, Good
Morning, Midnight, 42). Sasha can communicate only by reading bodies; only through
the body she can make a connection to another person. It is her trust on bodies to
determine her feelings towards people that reflects the status of bodies as the place
for developing relationships.
Looking at dolls in a shop Sasha thinks: “what a success they would have made
of their lives if they had been women. Satin skin, silk hair, velvet eyes, sawdust
heart – all complete” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 18). The dolls are the epitome
of successful womanhood not by any suggestion of their personality or accomplish­
ments, but because each part of their bodies – skin, hair, eyes, heart – is artificial.
What makes the body ‘complete’ and successful in the city, then, is being artifi­
cial. The city values such artificial bodies because they correspond to the city itself.
Unlike natural bodies, the city appears to go through changes but remains funda­
mentally the same.
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Towards the end of the novel, Sasha relates a vision of “the world” that seems to actu­
ally indicate ‘the city’, which is the only world presented in the novel. She claims that:
“All that is left in the world is an enormous machine, made of white steel. It has innumerable
flexible arms, made of steel. Long, thin arms. At the end of each arm is an eye, the eyelashes stiff
with mascara. When I look more closely I see that only some of the arms have those eyes – others
have lights. The arms that carry the eyes and the arms that carry the lights are all extraordinarily
beautiful. But the grey sky, which is in the background, terrifies me…” (Rhys, Good Morning,
Midnight, 187)
In what concerns the identity performance of the body in the narrative is that Sasha
teeters between two extremes: the deteriorating old women and the unchanged arti­
ficial dolls. Yet, just as her own body offers different readings to different people,
Sasha cannot read the bodies of others to determine her position, try as she might.
That Sasha herself is incorporated into this system of the city becomes clear when a
stranger tells her that “Englishwomen have melancholy expressions. It doesn’t mean
anything” (Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 47). The constructed nature of ideal bodies
in the city inhibits the ability of characters to confidently read each others bodies, and
thus threatens their relationships. Sasha ultimately refuses to accept the one human
relationship because she fears that it will change her body and betray her connec­
tion to the city. What has happened to Sasha is that she has attempted to let nothing
happen to her, to let no mark upon her body jeopardize her place in the city. The true
tragedy of the book is that Sasha fails even at this, unable to keep up with the harsh
standards the city sets. Ultimately, the novel suggests the only way to remain truly
unchanged is through death, and as long as the city promotes this ideal, people will
be no more than ghosts, and their relationships will not survive.
In After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, a technical tour de force and a brilliant evocation
of psychic disorientation and despair, Rhys works from the first-person narrator to the
third-person point of view, yet the narrative voices are so close to those of the protag­
onists that the limit between narrator and character inevitably becomes blurred. The
characters, dependent on the largesse of others, think but do not voice their critiques,
for which the narrative itself provides the only outlet. In this novel, the reader feels
as if he/she is in the presence of a writer, who is trying to tell it as it really was, to pull
back the curtain of social decorum and say: “Look! This is what we’re really like to one
another!” (Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 45)
Voyage in the Dark opens with a stark description of the split between Anna’s two
lives: “It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was
almost like being born again” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 9). Anna begins her narra­
tive with this statement of the discontinuity between her childhood self of the West
Indies and the new self born in England. She associates this side of her nature with
Francine and with being black; hence the conflict between her loyalty to Francine
and to her English stepmother Hester, each representing the spiritual mother of one
of Anna’s sides.
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Moreover, the conflict between Anna’s two halves and the gradual loss of her
authentic self are mirrored in the novel’s style; when Anna remembers the past, the
style changes, suggesting the qualities of her inner life. At the most immediate level,
the contrasts become evident: the descriptions of the past are full of adjectives and
those of the present are comprised of disjointed sentences that suggest both repeti­
tiveness and lack of unity.
In Quartet, although the narrative focus still moves through the events, the realis­
tic level is frequently blended with open-ended images and dreamlike visions that are
strictly controlled or achieved by the direct and simple style. This technique, which
becomes a dominant characteristic of Rhys’ later fiction, is related to the form of the
entire novel. This concentration on the interiority of the text, allied with the harsh
realism, creates a much deeper engagement between the reader and the work of art.
When she opposes the voice of a society that represses women, Rhys uses calland response narrative technique. She sometimes creates this device when some
secondary characters repeat the protagonists’ concerns and reflect their values, thus
avoiding the repeated stance of the omniscient narrator, and maintaining the moral
relativism of her modernist universe.
Marya Zelli in Quartet (1928), Julia Martin in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930),
Anna Morgan in Voyage in the Dark (1934), Sasha Jansen in Good Morning, Midnight
(1939) all share the Kafkaesque condition of drifting through life as through a night­
mare. The only truly realized feminine character in her work, Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea, shares her sisters’ feeling of life as unreality or rather as a reality she can
only cope with through a final self-inflicted violence and the redemption of death.
The most used symbol in Jean Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea is the symbol of the
dream and foresight: “Is it true that England is like a dream? One of my friends wrote
and said London is like a cold dark dream” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 126). In devel­
oping Antoinette’s identity, Rhys has no doubt inspired through the idea of Jane’s
dreams and premonitions.
For example, Rochester and Antoinette stop in a village named ‘Massacre’ where
it is raining and rather grey, and Rochester takes an instant dislike to the place
because of the name and the inhabitants, both of which he describes as “sly, spiteful,
malignant perhaps” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 38); words which appear to convey his
whole attitude to all those who surround him. Later, Rochester describes the night
the couple spent in Massacre, emphasizing that he lay awake all night listening to
cocks crowing; a biblical symbol of deception (for example, when Jesus says to Peter:
“before the cock crows, you shall deny me thrice”). Interestingly, this line appears in
the novel further on when Rochester confronts Antoinette about her history.
In what concerns the symbolism of title, just as the name Jane Eyre can be seen
to reflect Jane’s character, the title of Rhys’ novel can be seen to reflect the develop­
ment of its plot. The Sargasso Sea is almost still but at its centre has a mass of swirl­
ing currents, an image suggestive of Antoinette’s character, and of the turmoil of her
imprisonment and the method of her escape. Antoinette is aware from a young age
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of the element of entrapment/imprisonment that hangs over the West Indies; the
paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell.
In Wide Sargasso Sea, the symbolism of fire distinguishes between the representa­
tions of the burning emotions, which surround the character of Antoinette, and her
descent into her ‘zombie-like’ state, which describes Rhys’ insanity and spiritual
death through Obeah, a form of the Caribbean magic. Rochester discovers this black
magic and is even accused by Antoinette of performing it on her: “You are trying to
make me into someone else, that’s Obeah too” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 147). It is
Rochester’s calling of ‘Bertha’ after he discovers Antoinette’s history, and that her
mother’s name was close to her own, which sparks this outburst by Antoinette. Fires
occur throughout the novel, symbolizing destruction and hatred passions, or even
death, magic and incantation (e.g. the fire that burned down Coulibri Estate and pre­
dicted the madness of Antoinette’s mother; the use of candles and the moths that are
burnt by their flames, all these foreshadowing Antoinette’s own tragic end).
Describing the events of the Coulibri fire, Antoinette recalls Coco’s gruesome
death in vivid detail. Thus, the symbolism of birds foretells Antoinette’s own doom.
She experiences, perhaps, an unconscious presentment of her own final moments,
falling from the burning battlements of Thornfield Hall.
The image of a cool, dark landscape that opposes Jamaica’s brightness introduces
the symbolism of forests and trees. Following a strange, faceless man, Antoinette finds
herself in a foreign place that portrays her future ‘entrapment’ in England. Another
forest omen resides in the name of the honeymoon estate, Granbois, which translates
into ‘great forest’. In the forest, Rochester seems to be facing the consequences of his
own actions: a ruined house in the woods, a clear image of his English estate that will
be finally burned and abandoned.
The symbolism of the garden at Coulibri Estate is compared by Antoinette to the
biblical Garden of Eden, with its luxurious excess and lost innocence. In her own
words, the garden has ‘gone wild’, assaulting the senses with its brilliant colors,
strong odors, and snarling overgrowth. The flowers look pretty sinister; one orchid is
described as being ‘snaky looking’, thus, recalling the biblical fall and man’s decay
into greed and sensuality. The decadent Creole lifestyle as portrayed in the novel –
upon exploitation – finds its natural counterpart in the fallen garden.
As I hope to have shown here, Rhys makes use of the literary device of symbol­
ism in her writing. In this aspect of the novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, my appreciation of
the characters and themes is enriched by the symbolism inherent in such narrative
elements as dreams, visions, landscapes, characters’ names, place names, fire, and
even the title.
In Rhys’ fiction, the colonizer’s attempt to unveil the Caribbean woman does not
simply turn ‘the veil’ into a symbol of resistance; it becomes a technique of camou­
flage, a means of struggle. The veil – once signifying the cultural limits of a woman –
now masks the woman, transgressing the colonial boundary. In this respect, a
common symbol associated with identity for the heroines of Rhys’ novels is cloth-
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ing.10 The type of clothing entirely depends on the person who is wearing it. Clothing
is also a means of information about the person wearing it. Therefore, it becomes a
reflection of one’s perception of him or her self, which led us to the concept of personal identity. A person’s choice of clothing and accessories as personal belongings
(e.g. clothing that is worn or carried, but not part of a person’s main clothing) is as
important as identification through the color of hair, height, skin and gender. It is a
cipher; a code that needs deciphering in order to understand what kind of person is
underneath it. The cultural context offers a great number of these “cryptograms” and
therefore, gives people a variety of opportunities to reveal their identity. Therefore,
every item of clothing carries a strong message about its owner and thus every owner
“nests” a certain value in it, depending on temperament, mindset or mood, or even
cultural background. So, the clothing of a person is a means of communication with
the outside world. It is the way of telling people about the inside world, about the
“state” and the “status” of its owner and his/her cultural context.
As every person belongs to a clearly defined culture and has the right to reveal
it, personal identity may sometimes be replaced by cultural identity. In this case, cul­
tural identity is the type of identity that is connected to a certain culture or a separate
social and cultural group. It also brings people belonging to a definite culture, high­
lighting in the same time the differences with other people. Also, in terms of culture,
clothing reveals either the historical roots of a person or the roots of the group he/she
belongs to.
Clothing, thus speaks about a memory of the history of race and racism, colo­
nialism and the question of cultural identity. For example, taking on the garments
of another allows the individual a release from their own existence, “the promise of
transgressive pleasure without any material penalties of actual change” (Thomas,
1999, p. 9). In Wide Sargasso Sea, the cross-dressing moment is described in the
changing process of dresses (identities) between Tia and Antoinette. Antoinette’s
desire to be just like Tia, to take on her cultural identity is very well expressed in the
above-mentioned scene, with the notion of re-dressing thereby representing a form of
escape from her own (inner) misery.
However, following the critique of this idea, Thomas goes on to say that such
cultural re-dressing does not contribute to the metamorphoses of the existing hier­
archies of power; the cross-dresser can always “reveal or revert to her First World
identity beneath the re-dressing of difference” (Thomas, 1999, p. 9). It is important
to note that Tia’s supposed freedom within Wide Sargasso Sea masks the fact that
she was obliged to play with Antoinette, and did not necessarily choose to do so of
her own agreement. When forced to wear Tia’s dress, Antoinette feels “sick…hating
10 Even if the dress is generally considered to be a symbol in the context of class and race, it is
predominantly concerned with the placement of the Creole subject within the European social hierar­
chies rather than with the placement of the black woman within a colonized white culture.
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her”, without realization of what she said to make Tia steal her clothes: “you cheating
nigger” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 8).
In Voyage in the Dark, the dress becomes an esoteric symbol. For Anna, clothing
represents a way to show who she is: “Out of this warm room that smells of fur I’ll go
to all the lovely places I’ve dreamt of. This is the beginning” (Rhys, Voyage in the Dark,
28). She even sells some clothing order to raise money to pay her rent. But for Anna’s
landlady, Anna’s new clothing is symbolic of sexual promiscuity. She needs to buy
new clothes or else she thinks the man she is going out with won’t marry her.
In After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Julia Martin’s attempts to look pretty, wearing
her fashionable clothes, to give others the impression that she is well off, thus aug­
menting her relatives’ disgust when she asks them for cash. She considers selling her
fur coat but at the same time thinks: “People thought twice before they were rude to
anybody wearing a good fur coat” (Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 278).
In Quartet, Rhys uses clothing and make-up to convey the Heidlers’ power and
Marya Zelli’s lack of it. Thus, Lois Heidler wears “With assurance a drooping felt hat
which entirely hid the upper part of her face” and when her eyes do appear “there was
a suspicion, almost a deadened look in them” (Rhys, Quartet, 11).
In the short story “Illusion,” the clothes are never worn, but indicate that the sensi­
ble Miss Bruce is afflicted “with the perpetual hunger to be beautiful and that thirst to be
loved, which is the real curse of Eve” (Rhys, Tigers are Better-Looking, 154). Miss Bruce is
embarrassed that her friend knows she collects clothes and she asserts at the end of the
story that she would never make such a fool of herself as actually to wear them.
In short, Jean Rhys used clothing to illustrate the emerging complexity and mul­
tifaceted nature of an individual’s identity.
I should pinpoint here that the dialogue between the art form and the culture
takes place without the detailed authorization of the writer, who is finally de-author­
ized once her text enters the linguistic sphere. Thus, a linguistic sign or a lexical rep­
etition such as ‘laugh’ or ‘smile’, which appears to signify a new order, turns out to
identify the mechanisms of a discourse integration as a tension between identity and
alterity. It is the uncanny and subversive anti-literary stance Christophine assumes, in
her defiant: “Read and write I don’t know. Other things I know” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso
Sea, 104), which comes closest to achieving this stance. Aunt Cora exposes concepts
of difference and otherness within her language; Christophine boldly and proudly
asserts her difference from that language in its totality.
The frequent repetition of ‘laugh’ and ‘smile’ will be analyzed in a selection of
extracts from Wide Sargasso Sea, in which these items occur under different types of
laughter. Thus, a linguistic sign, which appears to signify a new order, turns out to
identify the power structures of the novel.
The occurrences seem to fit into two basic types of laughter: a social and neg­
ative one, and an individual and positive one, an incubus and a succubus. In Part
I, Antoinette is described as an outsider in the Jamaican world, from which she
feels separated by barriers of race and class, upheld by a negative form of laugh­
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ter: the laughter of mockery and derision or its variant, the laughter of deception
and hypocrisy. For example, in passages 1, 5, 6, and 7, Antoinette and her mother
become the butt of the natives’ laughter. In this respect, the mockery and derision
is hidden behind a false smile of friendliness, behind a mask, associated with the
guests at her mother’s wedding (passage 3) and with Rochester at his own wedding
(passage 9). At one stage, Rochester had actually forgotten to put on his mask of
friendliness and the true derisive ring of his laughter was revealed to Antoinette
(passage 10). His weak excuse that the mockery was entirely self-directed reassures
Antoinette and thus seals her fate. Nevertheless, Antoinette and her mother Annette
are associated with the laughter of gaiety and happiness, of naturalness and spon­
taneity (passages 2, 4, 8, 11, 12). This type of smile can also turn into the laughter of
wildness and passion (passage 13).
As a result, Rochester is determined to destroy Antoinette’s passion, and laughter
(passage 14). For this, he locks her in the attic, where Antoinette’s laughter turns from
a natural one into one of madness and despair (passage 15). We can also graphically
represent the different types of laughter (Fig. 6.1.):
laughter of mockery
and derision
social laughter
(negative power)
laughter of deception
and falseness
Laughter
laughter of naturalness
and spontaneity
individual laughter
(positive power)
laughter of madness
and despair
Fig. 5.5: Types of Laughter
It is at the same time a moment of insight and revelation, where she sees her whole
life mirrored in the sky. Indeed the sentence ‘I saw’ is repeated no less than thirteen
times in the final scene.
[1] “My mother usually walked up and down the glacis, a paved roofed-in terrace which ran the
length of the house and sloped upwards to a clump of bamboos. Standing by the bamboos she
had a clear view to the sea, but anyone passing could stare at her. They [the natives] stared,
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sometimes they laughed. Long after the sound was far away and faint she kept her eyes shut and
her hands clenched.”
(Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 17)
[2] “She [Antoinette’s mother] would ride off very early and not come back till late next day –
tired out because she had been to a dance or a moonlight picnic. She was gay and laughing –
younger than I had ever seen her and the house was sad when she had gone.”
(Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 23)
[3] “I was bridesmaid when my mother married Mr. Mason in Spanish Town. ... I carried a bouquet
and everything I wore was new – even my beautiful slippers. But their eyes slid away from my
hating face. I had heard what all these smooth smiling people said about her when she was not
listening and they did not guess I was.”
(Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 24)
[4] “Yes, what a dancer – that night when they came home from their honeymoon in Trinidad
and they danced on the glacis to no music. There was no need for music when she danced.
They stopped and she leaned backwards over his arm, down till her black hair touched the flag­
stones – still down, down. Then up again in a flash, laughing.”
(Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 25)
[5] “‘How do you know that I was not harmed?’ she [Antoinette’s mother] said. ‘We were so poor
then ... we were something to laugh at. But we are not poor now,’ she said.”
(Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 27)
[6] “‘Annette… They [the natives] are laughing at you, do not allow them to laugh at you’.”
(Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 35)
[7] “Some of them [the natives] were laughing and waving sticks, some of the ones at the back
were carrying flambeaux and it was light as day… And I was afraid, because I knew that the ones
who laughed would be the worst.”
(Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 36)
[8] “We [Antoinette and Rochester] came to a little river. ‘This is the boundary of Granbois.’ She
smiled at me. It was the first time I had seen her smile simply and naturally. Or perhaps it was the
first time I had felt simple and natural with her.”
(Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 59)
[9] “[In 9 and 10, Rochester remembers how he got to know Antoinette:] It was all very brightly
coloured, very strange, but it meant nothing to me. Nor did she, the girl I was to marry. When at
last I met her I bowed, smiled, kissed her hand, danced with her. I played the part I was expected
to play. She never had anything to do with me at all. Every movement I made was an effort of will
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and sometimes I wondered that no one noticed this. I would listen to my own voice and marvel at
it, calm, correct but toneless, surely. But I must have given a faultless performance.”
(Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 64)
[10] “‘But don’t you remember last night I told you that when you are my wife there would not be
any more reason to be afraid?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Then… you laughed. I didn’t like the way you laughed.’
‘But I was laughing at myself, Antoinette.’ She looked at me and I took her in my arms and kissed
her.”
(Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 66)
[11] “Her [Antoinette’s] little fan was on the table, she took it up laughing, lay back and shut her
eyes. ‘I think I won’t get up this morning’.”
(Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 72)
[12] “All day she’d [Antoinette]… smile at herself in her looking-glass (do you like this scent?), try
to teach me her songs, for they haunted me… she’d laugh for a long time and never tell me why
she laughed.”
(Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 76)
[13] “She’ll [Antoinette] loosen her black hair, and laugh and coax and flatter (a mad girl. She’ll
not care who she’s loving.) She’ll moan and cry and give herself as no sane woman would – or
could. Or could”
(Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 135-136)
[14] “I tell you she [Antoinette] loves no one, anyone. I could not touch her. Excepting as the hurri­
cane will touch that tree – and break it. You say I did? No. That was love’s fierce play. Now I’ll do it.
She’ll not laugh in the sun again. She’ll not dress up and srnile at herself in that damnable look­
ing-glass. So pleased, so satisfied.
Vain, silly creature. Made for loving? Yes, but she’ll have no lover, for I don’t want her and she’ll
see no other.”
(Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 136)
[15] “I [Antoinette in Thornfield Hall] saw the sunlight coming through the window, the tree
outside and the shadows of the leaves on the floor, but I saw the wax candles too and I hated
them. So I knocked them all down. Most of them went out but one caught the thin curtains that
were behind the red ones. I laughed when I saw the lovely colour spreading so fast, but I did not
stay to watch it.”
(Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 154)
Humor is thus used as a postcolonial strategy in Jean Rhys’ novel, Wide Sargasso Sea,
deconstructing as it does the frontier mentality of the nineteenth century colonialism
and racism and masking a reflection on the process of creation linked with all forms
of denial. Rhys confronts these issues, but she chooses to do so in ways that are often
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108 Narrative Discourse in Jean Rhys’ Fiction
ironic or even manifestly grotesque, for she sees identity construction as inextricably
intertwined in a contested Caribbean landscape. Homi Bhabha sees these interac­
tions differently. In his essay “Signs Taken for Wonders”, Bhabha suggests that:
“The discriminatory effects of the discourse of cultural colonialism, for instance, do not simply
or singly refer to a person or to a dialectical power struggle between self and Other, or to a dis­
crimination between mother culture and alien cultures […] the effect of colonial power is seen
to be the production of hybridisation rather than the noisy command of colonialist authority.”
(Bhabha, 1994, p. 34)
Inherently paradoxical, the quotation above is interpreted as the confrontation
between colonizers and colonized. In the Hegelian notion of master and slave, the colo­
nial figures become, in a way, dependent on their subjects and in attempting to deny
or resist this dependence, they seek to express superiority through stereotypes and
stigmatization. The colonized, on the other hand, while submitting to colonial author­
ity, begin creating a hybrid identity that is in opposition to that imposed on them by
the colonial outsiders. Rhys uses humor as Bhabha suggests, to critically analyze and
question any notions of colonial cultural superiority and to undermine attitudes that
are patently false and liable to continue generating conflict if not confronted by their
illusory power. The postcolonial purpose of Rhys’ humor is to target attitudes of racism
and misplaced colonizing zeal. Here, the humor encourages readers to question the
belief systems that led to the various events and conflicts in the novel. Laughter thus
becomes more than a cathartic device; it requires the reader to respond to these aspects
of the text and acknowledge the existence of a new hybrid identity.
To conclude, the tension between identity and alterity – “one belongs either to
one group or to another; one is either in or out” – culminates in a “frightening consol­
idation of (…) assertions of cultural superiority, mechanisms of control, whose power
and ineluctability reinforce… the logic of identity” (Said 1994, p. 56). The most funda­
mental challenge between ‘laughter’ and ‘smile’ is to confront the relation of superior
to subaltern identity that is embodied in the construction of Otherness. Moreover, the
‘smile’ is a symbolic act of something that is not felt, but done purely for the sake of it.
The point about this kind of experience is that it could serve to decentre a hegemonic
and self-assured culture.
5.3 (Power-)Textualization
Jean Rhys’ stylistic techniques reflect not only the externality of the materialistic
culture, but also the deployed sense of tradition and circumscribed abstraction, and
the multiple and contradictory temporality serialization. Some short stories reflect
the exotic characteristics of Jean Rhys’ fiction and illustrates the idyllic image of the
Antilles. The novels enrich the notion of ‘text’ in an imaginative manner, starting with
the signs system. Their status remains divided between the anxiety of influence and
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the anxiety of authorship over the intertextual configurations, as a coping strategy to
the postcolonial narrative texture.
All Jean Rhys’ novels and short stories take for granted the cruelty and brutality
of human behavior, which we are always so eager to ignore. She deals in dejection,
cowardice and squalor. She exposes drunkenness, passivity and isolation. She never
compromises with a bright picture of life. Her bohemians have no glamour. There
is no real intimacy in her world. The figures wandering through her texts are virtu­
ally homeless, they have no family, no friends, and they are barely surviving on the
margins of society. There is no poetic justice in her stories, no reward for the virtuous,
no punishment for the wicked because hers is a world where conventional values are
either unknown or discarded.
Moreover, Ford Maddox Ford was aware from the very beginning that Rhys would
find trouble in securing an audience and after her initial succès d’estime she would
more or less be forgotten. Her work was too gloomy; her books too angry and unhappy
and her heroines too remote from an optimistic picture of a woman’s condition.
Recog­nizing her talent for compression and her preference for misfits and outsiders,
Ford encouraged her to write in the traditionally marginal form of the short story:
“Always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the
fringes of society […] an intense awareness of human loneliness” (O’Connor, 1985,
p. 19). These words written by Flannery O’Connor, when trying to define the short
story, would fit Rhys’ oeuvre as a whole and not only her short fiction. However, we
want to show how the short story was the literary form that best suited her vision of
life and to suggest that even in her novels, she went back repeatedly to the fragmen­
tary and episodic structure of the stories.
While it would be impossible (and perhaps even undesirable) to attempt a defi­
nition of the short story as a genre, it is possible to agree on a set of characteristics
common to most stories. The brevity of the form imposes an economy of words and a
capacity to select those that will maximize the effect sought for. It forces the elision of
what went before a certain moment and of what happens next; it leads the writer to
evoke feelings and atmospheres rather than to tell us about them – it works by sug­
gestion rather than by statement.
Living in a world almost totally isolated from any human contact, the women in
Jean Rhys’ short stories persistently refuse to abandon their stubborn freedom from
social ties. They suffer from their exiled condition yet they refuse to belong as if they
were doomed never to be at home wherever they went. They find no support in other
people. Men abuse them. Women reject them. They are free and therefore danger­
ous to the ordered well-behaved lives around them. One of the rare narrative situa­
tions where another woman understands the heroine’s distance from a sheltered and
respectable existence is also a good example of Rhys’ modernist writing technique.
As always in Rhys’ fiction like Outside the Machine (1960), no illusion of a better
life lasts long enough to be taken seriously either by the heroine or by the reader. In
this story, the heroine relates her experience in an English hospital in Paris. In her
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110 Narrative Discourse in Jean Rhys’ Fiction
first day in the hospital, Inez thinks: “The day after I come out of this place something
lucky might happen” (Rhys, Tigers are Better-Looking, 79). Relentlessly the days go
by, the initial sadness is exchanged for despair: “No, this time I won’t be able to pull
it off, this time I’m done” (Rhys, Tigers are Better-Looking, 97). And each new episode
confirm the heroine’s knowledge that she does not belong in the “stable, decent
world” (Rhys, Tigers are Better-Looking, 81) of the English hospital. In this situation,
every day counts and Inez hopelessly counts her days in hospital as a momentary
pause before confronting the menace of the outside world. Overheard bits of dialogue,
glances, and occasional remarks combine with the narrator’s inner voice to evoke the
atmosphere of the place for the reader. As Inez felt from the start, the enclosed space
of the women’s ward is part of the destructive texture of society, not a delay from life’s
struggle. “Up and down”, “in and out” – this cinematic quality, as so often in Jean
Rhys’ prose, is objectively given. Leaving the hospital, Inez is just as frightened of life
as before: “Because you can’t die and come to life again for a few hundred francs. It
takes more than that.” (Rhys, Tigers are Better-Looking, 100)
This example of a lonely existence where there is no possibility of escape is
typical of Jean Rhys’ fiction. Throughout her work, I found the same skillful combi­
nation of objectively presented dialogue with the interior monologue of the narrating
consciousness. Such focus on the contrast between what people say – in bits and frag­
ments of heard conversations – and what the narrator silently experiences is one of
the techniques used by the author to emphasize the isolation of her figures. In Rhys’
short fiction, the reader never receives a complete portrayal of anyone. There are only
glimpses of other people’s feelings or motives.
Through her heroines, the ‘film-mind’ floats a succession of disconnected images
and random memories – fragments which the author pieces together, episode after
episode, time and again dissolving any (narrative) exceptions of a sheltered exist­
ence, in a stubborn attempt to build for the reader a coherent puzzle out of her dis­
membered experience of life. Through the understated elliptical style of her prose,
Rhys used her own displacement to challenge conventional patterns, institutional­
ized structures of power, accepted narrative strategies and protocols for seducing or
persuading the reader.
As a woman writer, Rhys knew that her fiction was directed towards the new
image of woman and disrupting the pervasive twentieth-century myth that the world
is ours for the taking. As Elaine Fido perceptively wrote: “Rhys’ language... which
tends to be carefully defined, clear and exact, disciplined seems almost to symbol­
ize the element which her major female characters lack, i.e., a capacity to impose a
particular order on the world. Rhys’ very syntax contains and defines her heroines in
their chaotic and aimless experience” (Fido, 1991, p. 5).
In Again the Antilles, the narrator’s identification with Papa Dom, however, is
obstructed by the promise of social power she gains by siding with the white English
(male) colonialists. The story allows us to see Rhys, simultaneously, asking challeng­
ing questions about cultural identification and race, of the sort that Frantz Fanon
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(Power-)Textualization 111
asks later in Black Skin, White Masks, and disclosing through the unconscious of the
text itself, the racial and political ambivalence of the ‘settler discourse’ and particu­
larly of native white women.
It is, nevertheless, the power of Rhys’ texts and of Anglocentric education, not
to mention the economic necessity that sends colonial-born writers to England
to pursue their literary aspirations. The creation of the colonial subject, therefore,
takes place not only in the colony but in the ‘Mother Country’ as well. At the centre of
Rhys’ writing is her extremely powerful deconstruction of this ‘family’ – the ‘mother’
country, England or France, and her ‘children’, the colonies. The metaphor of ‘family’
for political relations is not haphazard, but highlights the exploitation that Rhys sees
at the heart of both the political and social family systems. Just as Rhys focused her
attention on Charlotte Brontë’s off-stage Bertha and discovered a story that had not
yet been told, so we could have the opportunity to find rich and important stories
embedded in Rhys’ own texts. If the story Rhys tells critiques the metaphors that
sustain colonialist politics (metaphors linking race to culture or family to Empire),
the story embedded within it reveals the collusion and participation in this politics of
even such an astute critic.
Consequently, the effects of the colonization process were generally the same
almost everywhere. By means of power (in all its social forms) and exploitation, the
colonizers created an alterity, an ‘other’ or a ‘margin’ in order to define themselves as
‘centre’ – a system which evaluated and valued everything in relation to the stand­
ards of the economically developed, civilized Western Europe. As a consequence, the
concept of ‘Eurocentrism’ developed.
Taking into consideration Cixous’s account: “I learned everything from this first
spectacle. I saw how the white (French), superior, plutocratic, civilized world founded
its power on the repression of populations who had suddenly become ‘invisible’,
like the proletarians, immigrant workers, minorities who are not the right ‘colour’.
Women. Invisible as humans. But, of course, perceived as tools – dirty, stupid, lazy,
underhanded, etc. Thanks to some annihilating dialectal magic, I saw that the great,
noble, ‘advanced’ countries established themselves by expelling what was ‘strange’;
excluding it but not dismissing it; enslaving it. A commonplace gesture of History:
there have to be two races – the masters and the slaves” (Cixous, 1986, p. 115), In using
this in the analysis of Jean Rhys’ short story The Day They Burned the Books, I ask the
questions: are there instances of racism, sexism and colonialism in the short story?
Who is the ‘margin’/’centre’? The study’s aim is to prove that in fact this is what the
short story is all about. Jean Rhys’ short story The Day They Burned the Books deals
with the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, by focusing on the
condition of the woman in a society given to abuse and discrimination.
The relationship between Eddie’s parents has to be analyzed from several angles,
all leading inevitably to the same descriptive oppositional pair: master and slave.
Mr. Sawyer’s alcoholic (and consequential racist) outbursts result in him abusing
(verbally and even physically) his wife. However, she responds to his violence with
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112 Narrative Discourse in Jean Rhys’ Fiction
silence. Her silence is metonymic of the profounder silencing the ‘marginal’ world
of the slave. Throughout the short story, there is not even one instance in which she
speaks, and all her opinions are expressed indirectly. In G.C. Spivak’s opinion “there
is no space from where the subaltern (sexed) subject can speak” (Spivak, 1985, p. 112);
therefore I can only come to the conclusion that Mrs. Sawyer will permanently find
herself in a silent position. But does she? Let us postpone the answer to this question
for now. There is also the (more obvious) racial dimension of this relationship – Mrs.
Sawyer is a ‘coloured’ woman,11 whereas her husband is white. During his drunk­
enness he makes a point of her skin’s colour: “Look at the nigger showing off [...]
You damned, long-eyed gloomy half-caste, you don’t smell right” (Rhys, The Day They
Burned the Books, 458), thus reinforcing the inferior position she has been thrown
into by her sheer racial features. The racial aspect of the master-slave relationship
undeniably favors the first, the master of the dichotomy within the imperial discourse
and thus associates his whiteness with the mark of superiority. Eddie’s and the narra­
tor’s skin color also situates them at the top of the racial pyramid, and though born in
the Caribbean, they think of Great Britain as ‘home’. However, their situation is more
complex, if we take into account that the very place of their birth provides them with
the status of ‘other’ in the eyes of the English boys and girls they meet, who identify
them not as English, but as ‘horrid colonials’. In other words, we face here a duality of
placement within the colonial system of power. Moreover, this duality is symbolized
by Eddie himself. Physically ‘he is the living image of his father’ with his ‘pale blue
eyes and straw-coloured hair’ and the ghost- like color of his skin, which makes him
‘inherit’ the master, ‘centre’ status of his father; but the narrator also mentions that
he is ‘silent as his mother’ (emphasis added) – silence, as mentioned before, being a
feature of the oppressed.
Postcolonial theorists oppose the printed (lifeless) culture of the colonizers to the
oral (lively) culture of the native, which ultimately brings about the latter’s silencing
within the imperial discourse. Therefore, it is not by accident that Mrs. Sawyer hates
the room built by her husband to store the books and she hates the books as well. In
his attempt to identify himself as ‘centre’, Eddie practices some sort of cultural fetish­
ism: “My room” Eddie called it. “My books,” he would say, “my books.”
At a certain point in the development of the short story, Mr. Sawyer dies quite
young we might suppose, but the cause of his death is never mentioned. However,
prior to his death, one particular incident draws attention: during one dinner party,
he humiliates his wife once again, this time in public by pulling Mrs. Sawyer’s hair
in an attempt to prove that it is ‘not a wig, you see’. Although in extreme pain, Mrs.
Sawyer pretends that this is one more of the ‘mysterious, obscure, sacred English
11 It is interesting that immediately after mentioning the fact that she is ‘coloured’, the narrator jux­
taposes the qualities she possesses: “though a decent, respectable, nicely educated coloured woman,
mind you”; this statement points to the idea that the text is written from a white person’s position.
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(Power-)Textualization 113
jokes’ of his and laughs it off; later on, she puts some of the pulled hair in an enve­
lope, and since hair is ‘obeah’ (i.e. magic) ‘Mr. Sawyer ought to look out’. If we are to
attribute a mystical dimension to his death, this incident is not insignificant.
Several weeks after Mr. Sawyer’s death, Mrs. Sawyer enters the room in which the
books are kept and starts pulling the books out of the shelves, piling them into two
heaps – good-looking books which are going to be sold and books ‘condemned’ to
be burnt. One of the books she decides to burn (although judging from its very good
condition, it should go to the pile of the books to be sold) has Christina Rossetti as an
author. At this point, the narrator makes a rather strange statement: “(...) by a flicker
in Mrs. Sawyer’s eyes I knew that worse than men who wrote books were women
who wrote books – infinitely worse. Men could be mercifully shot; women must be
tortured” (Rhys, The Day they Burned the Books, 460). First, Mrs. Sawyer’s gesture
clearly discloses an attitude of liberation, an assertion of her independence brought
about by her husband’s death. Secondly, the following question arises: why would
she decide to ‘torture’ a member of her own gender? Following Spivak’s argument
again might provide us with some answers. In her opinion, as soon as the subaltern
tries to acquire a voice, she must move into the dominant discourse to be understood.
From the first viewpoint, it can be argued that Mrs. Sawyer turns herself from being
tortured into a torturer, thus taking her husband’s place. We obviously are dealing
with a movement from the marginal position in her case; where/what is her voice
then? As mentioned before, she never speaks throughout the whole short story. The
answer is that logos is replaced by fire and thus fire, symbolically, becomes her voice.
From the second point of view, an interesting phenomenon takes place. As far as
Mrs. Sawyer is concerned, we know that her skin-color puts her in an inferior posi­
tion, but nevertheless something in her physiology makes the narrator admit that she
is aesthetically superior to her own mother: “she has (...) quantities and quantities
and quantities of hair” (Rhys, The Day they Burned the Books, 461) as Eddie (proudly)
puts it. In other words, the color of the skin is replaced by the quantity of hair as a
superiority standard. This is one reason for hair being ‘obeah’ – because it transmutes
the centre of power.
Mrs. Sawyer is a woman doomed to live in her own native land, which unfortu­
nately no longer belongs to her and her people, but to the mighty colonizers. She is a
woman living in an age when women are not yet fully entitled to rights equal to those
of men, at least in practice, and she is also colored, a fact which confers her to an even
lower status in the discriminating, colonial society she has become part of. She is first
mentioned in relation to her husband, Mr. Sawyer, a peculiar man who doesn’t quite
belong among the other British settlers, and who doesn’t even like the Caribbean, but
has nevertheless chosen to live here and also marry a local woman. Thus, Mrs. Sawyer
is first mentioned as the “coloured woman” to whom Mr. Sawyer is married. This min­
imalist mention of a human being foreshadows the way she is described further on.
The narrator chooses, however, to describe her as a “decent, respectable, and nicely
educated” woman, distancing herself from the view of the biased society, who sees
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Mrs. Sawyer as a mere colored woman. Unfortunately, her husband also shares this
view. In his drunken moments, he abuses her both verbally and physically, calling
her a “nigger”, a “damned, long-eyed gloomy half caste” (Rhys, The Day they Burned
the Books, 462). However, his wife never answers back. Her silence is puzzling to the
narrator, but through this symbolic silence, however, Mrs. Sawyer seems to express
the profounder silence of the ‘marginal’ world of the slave. She is indeed a slave in her
husband’s eyes, a fact clearly emphasized by his behavior towards her.
Throughout the short story, there is not even one instance in which she speaks,
and all her opinions are expressed indirectly. She is submissive, she keeps her house­
hold, is a good mother, and she also tries to understand the “mysterious, obscure,
sacred English” (Rhys, The Day they Burned the Books, 462) which her husband fre­
quently pokes fun about. The expression, “mysterious, obscure, sacred English joke”
emphasizes the rift that exists between the two people in particular, but on a larger
scale, the rift between the English colonizers and the colonized. It expresses the fact
that whatever the English do or say is to be accepted; it is not to be debated because it is
“sacred” and English, even though it is not right or fully understood. It seems that Mrs.
Sawyer is fully aware of this, and of her condition as the colored wife of a white man,
subjected to the discrimination of the society and worst of all, to that of her husband.
The narrator ironically observes that even though she has to go through all sorts
of abuse silently, she does have compensations: a pleasant home in a nice area, a large
garden and a fine mango tree, which is very prolific. These are indeed compensatory, but
not to measure up to the amount of abuse she is being subjected to, in order to be able
to erase it from her mind and heart. For the colonized also have feelings, a fact which
the colonizers often seem to forget. At a certain point in the development of the short
story, Mr. Sawyer dies. Everybody says “how nice Mrs. Sawyer had looked, walking like
a queen behind the coffin and crying her eyeballs out at the right moment” (Rhys, The
Day They Burned The Books, 461). The word ‘queen’ can be ambivalent in this context.
She might be described as being dignified and respectable, proper looking, according to
the rules of decorum in such a situation. Also, what the narrator might want to suggest
is that she is walking proudly and even triumphantly behind the coffin, having finally
escaped the oppression of her husband. She is described to have cried “her eyeballs out
at the right moment,” which could mean that she feigned her distress and wanted to
show that she was truly upset by overdoing it.
Several weeks after Mr. Sawyer’s death, Mrs. Sawyer enters the rooms in which her
husband’s books were kept and starts sorting them out, either to be sold or burned.
Mrs. Sawyer’s gesture clearly discloses an attitude of liberation; she realizes that with
her husband’s death she has become independent. She can now rebel against the
things, which she cannot accept, once her husband is out of the way. This can be
described as a movement from “margin” to “centre,” the position of the privileged.
In her son’s eyes, she turns from a state of tortured into the torturer. “Now I’ve got
to hate you too. Now I hate you too” (Rhys, The Day they Burned the Books, 462), she
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has to assert herself and “voice” her frustrations. However, she chooses to take more
radical action than speaking, screaming or shouting; logos is symbolically replaced
by “fire” – she burns the literary manifestations of the colonizing society.
Mrs. Sawyer changes radically. If in the beginning, the narrator thought that “she
must have been pretty once” but that it had “gone by,” now that her husband was
dead: “She looked beautiful, too-beautiful as the sky outside which was a very dark
blue, or the mango tree, long sprays of brown and gold”. She becomes more beautiful
than, thus superior to, the narrator’s mother, because Mrs. Sawyer “has (...) quan­
tities and quantities and quantities of hair” (Rhys, The Day they Burned the Books,
461), the color of the skin being replaced by the quantity of hair, as a superior token,
helping to transgress the centre of power.
Going back to the initial question: does Mrs. Sawyer find herself permanently in a
silent position? No, but this means that she is no longer in a subaltern position either.
Thus, it is not by chance, her comparison with a ‘queen’, when she walks behind her
husband’s coffin. The title of the book the narrator grasped from the “condemned”
pile, Fort comme la Mort, means that Mrs. Sawyer has the strength to extricate herself
from a double slavery – as a woman and as a colonized subject. She has proved to be
strong enough to survive abuse and even reach a state of happiness through inde­
pendence, thus setting an example for many other people who find themselves in
similar conditions.
In short, The Day They Burned the Books could be considered a complex study of
social and cultural relationships developed within a space and tormented by a tumul­
tuous history of colonization. And within this space, juxtaposing the condition of ‘col­
onized’ to that of ‘woman’ automatically determines double enslavement: a position
that Rhys’ character, Mrs. Sawyer, proves she can transgress.
As a conclusion, this chapter reflects my endeavor to analyze Jean Rhys’ fiction
that displays a consistent preoccupation with issues of race, and examines the ways
in which their racial representations interplay with her depictions of gender and sex­
uality. Part of my analysis was also to show how Rhys employs a variety of narrative
forms which allow readers to enter an in-between space, a starting point for the trans­
formation of stream of consciousness technique. The autobiographical narrative often
involves “the desire to create a portrait of growth and maturation,” which “informs,
indeed often incites, life writing” (Marrone, 2000, p. 89) and cannot be claimed to
be wholly invented. The autobiographical pact (Tab. 6.1.) has changed over time to
overcome autobiography, although the author’s personal life has a very relative value.
One of the acknowledged values of this style of writing is still recognized by the re-siz­
ing effort of self and the search for a “shelter” of the ego (which Jean Rhys often calls
“home”). In this respect, Jean Rhys’ novels and short stories are more than an auto­
biography, going beyond the latter by the general human values that it claims (e.g.
marriage seen as a rite of passage, searching for self through work, decay (by alcohol)
and descent into the depths of self.
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116 Narrative Discourse in Jean Rhys’ Fiction
Tab. 5.2:The Autobiographical Pact (Philippe Lejeune, 1975)
grammatical
→
person
identity ↓
I
YOU
HE
narrator
= principal
character
classical
autobiography
(autodiegetic)
autobiography
in the 2nd person
autobiography
in the 3rd person
narrator
≠ principal
character
biography
in the 1st person
(witness narrative)
(homodiegetic)
biography
addressed to
the model
classical biography
(heterodiegetic)
The figure of the persona helps us to clarify the relationship between the writer – the
historical person – and the characters, which the writer creates. The situation becomes
even more difficult when the writer uses the first person singular pronoun, ‘I’.
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