On Jean Rhys
A Summary of the Novelist's Life, Work. and Thematic Concerns
Introduction to Jean Rhys.
Jean Rhys is best known for Wide Sargasso Sea, her 1966 novel which retells Jayne Eyre from the perspective of Rochester’s “mad” wife. In Wide Sargasso Sea this character, portrayed in Bronte’s novel through the lens of her English husband’s cultural superiority, becomes Antoinette and gains her own voice. Antoinette’s story, and the experiences of Rhys’ other heroines, echo the author’s circumstances, including her cultural dislocation, alcoholism and itinerant lifestyle.
Rhys' biography.
Rhys was born in 1890, in Roseau, Dominica, to a Welsh father and White Creole mother. At the age of sixteen she moved to England to attend school in Cambridge. When her father died she found employment as a travelling chorus girl. In 1922 she married French-Dutch writer Willem Johann Lenglet. She later resided with him in Paris, where her writing came to the attention of Ford Maddox Ford. Ford became her first publisher, patron and lover. Their relationship was transposed into fiction in her 1928 novel Postures, later published as Quartet.
Other novels include Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight. Rhys married two more times. After 1928 she lived mainly in England, often in difficult financial circumstances. The publication of Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 brought her international recognition. In 1978 she became a CBE. She died in 1979.
Rhys’ heroines.
Rhys’ novels present vulnerable, rootless heroines with ambivalent relationships to European metropolitan life. In Good Morning, Midnight, London and Paris are depicted as pitiless cities woven from a fabric of anonymous cafes, restaurants and shabby hotels. The novel’s central character, Sasha Jenkins, wanders through a parade of nameless Parisian establishments trying to patch together routine and purpose in the aftermath of divorce and the death of a child.
Quartet features a ménage-a-trois between a young woman whose husband is arrested and imprisoned, and a rapacious intellectual couple who turn the young woman into a pawn. Rhys’ heroines are more than veiled autobiographical sketches, or portrayals of victimhood. They are also keen observers, attuned to the cruelties and tenderness of urban life, who eschew conventional female roles of the period, and who throw into question categories of nationality and race.
Her modernist style.
Rhys’ prose is glassy, lucid and precise. She uses Modernist techniques such as stream of consciousness narratives, ellipses and a fractured, fragmented voice to evoke the dislocations experienced by her female characters. These characters are perennial outsiders, neither European nor Caribbean, marked out by their lack of stable employment, relationships and places of residence. Underpinning their disrupted circumstances lays a yearning for home, sometimes pictured as an enchanted Caribbean landscape that exists, ultimately, in memory alone.
