Jean Rhys's Historical Imagination

Reading and Writing the Creole

Veronica Marie Gregg

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469617350
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

As the foremost white West Indian writer of this century and author of the widely acclaimed novel Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys (1890-1979) has attracted much critical attention, most often from the perspective of gender analysis. Veronica Gregg extends our critical appreciation of Rhys by analyzing the complex relationship between Rhys's identity and the structures of her fiction, and she reveals the ways in which this relationship is connected to the history of British colonization of the West Indies. Gregg focuses on Rhys as a writer--a Creole woman analyzing the question of identity through literary investigations of race, gender, and colonialism. Arguing that history itself can be a site where different narratives collide and compete, she explores Rhys's rewriting of the historical discourses of the West Indies and of European canonical texts, such as Rhys's treatment of Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea. Gregg's analysis also reveals the precision with which Rhys crafted her work and her preoccupation with writing as performance.

1: History, Reading, Writing, and the Creole Woman

History and the Creole Writer

From the beginning of her career, some of the most influential critiques have focused on Rhys as colonial and West Indian. In what follows I shall discuss some of the salient features of this critical literature, as it provides the pretext for my analysis of Jean Rhys as Creole reader and writer.

The preface to Rhys’s first collection, The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927), was written by Ford Madox Ford, Rhyss mentor and editor. His long introduction serves effectively to contextualize the cultural and political framework, of which Ford himself is a part and in which Rhys writes and is being read. His first comment on Rhys significantly identifies her as an oppositional critic of the world he so carefully details in his introduction: “What... is the lot of the opposition who must wait till their Thought is the accepted Thought of tomorrow?... To some extent the answer will be found in . . . Rhys’s book” (23). His reading of The Left Bank identifies Jean Rhys as a writer and thinker whose ideas are out of step with contemporary ideologies, ahead of their time:

And coming from the Antilles, with a terrifying insight and a terrific— an almost lurid! — passion for stating the case of the underdog, she has let her pen loose on the Left Banks of the Old World—on its gaols, its studios, its salons, its cafes, its criminals, its midinettes — with a bias of admiration for its midinettes and of sympathy for its lawbreakers. It is a note, a sympathy of which we do not have too much in Occidental literature with its perennial bias towards satisfaction with things as they are. But it is a note that needs sounding ... since the real activities of the world are seldom carried much forward by the accepted, or even by the Haute Bourgeoisies! (24)

Ford suggests that Rhyss position as a colonial contributes to her ability to represent the case of the “underdog” and makes her acutely critical of divisions inherent in European social structures. He places her writing outside of Western literature, which, in his view, conforms with more often than it questions or undermines dominant social systems. “Let[ting] loose her pen” suggests combativeness and intense criticism of a social and historical order. The attributes identified by Ford signal the major impetus of Rhyss writing: Europe and the West Indies and a focus on what she calls “the other side.”

As her mentor and editor, Ford observes that he tried hard to induce her to introduce topography, in the way Flaubert, Conrad, or Maupassant did, but she eliminated with “cold deliberation” all traces of descriptive matter. Ford concludes that Rhys’s business was with passion, hardship, emotions: “The locality in which these things are endured is immaterial. So she hands you the Antilles with its sea and sky . . . the effect of landscape on the emotions and passions of a child being so penetrative, but lets Montparnasse, or London, or Vienna go” (26). For Ford, the Antilles is not a place (to be written) in the same sense as London, Montparnasse, Vienna, but landscape, or as Edward Said terms it, “imaginative geography.” The West Indies, then, is seen as “nothing” but/ and landscape. Edouard de Neve, like Ford, points to the ways in which the West Indies — as beautiful-landscape-and-immense-blue-sea—shaped Rhys and made it impossible for her to become acclimatized to Europe (“Jean Rhys,” 8). That Ford and his contemporaries lacked the conceptual tools and the critical vocabulary to read the West Indies as anything other than “nothing” or landscape is a function of the imperial history to which Rhys’s texts obsessively call attention.

In the 1940s travel writer Alec Waugh observed:

In England I was to meet Jean Rhys. Her novels have not reached a large public, but they have a personal flavor. Jean Rhys in her writing is herself and no one else. There are no echoes. The central character in her best known novel is a composed and assured person, unable to fit herself into organized society, who recognizes this idiosyncrasy in herself and is undisturbed by it. She told me she had been born in Dominica. Rereading After Leaving Mackenzie, I could see how many flashbacks to Dominica—imperceptible to the unacquainted reader—occurred in it. I could see how Dominica had colored her temperament and outlook. It was a clue to her, just as she was a clue to it. People who could not fit into life elsewhere found what they were looking for in Dominica. Jean Rhys, who had been born there, chose as her character one who could not adjust herself to life outside. (Sugar Islands, 95-96)

This circular argument connects Jean Rhys and the West Indies and mystifies both.

In the introduction to his edition of The Letters of Jean Rhys (1984), Francis Wyndham provides a reading of the writer’s psychological disabilities and her West Indian origins:

Ever since the end of her first love affair she had ... been cursed by a kind of spiritual sickness — a feeling of belonging nowhere, of being ill at ease and out of place in her surroundings wherever these happened to be, a stranger in an indifferent, even hostile, world. She may have wanted to think that this crippling sense of alienation was merely that of a native West Indian exiled in a cold foreign land, but in fact she believed that the whole earth had become inhospitable to her after the shock of that humdrum betrayal. All that had happened was that a kind, rather fatherly businessman, who had picked up a pretty chorus girl... decided after a year or so to pension her off. (10-n; emphasis added)

Diana Athill, the editor of Wide Sargasso Sea and later works, observes: “She had lived in the Caribbean until she was sixteen; in England (which disappointed and frightened her) until she was twenty-nine. . . . She . . . escaped from the cold-eyed English and her sense of herself as despised by them for being an ignorant ‘colonial.’ . . . Jean Rhys’s truth was that of a woman who was no good at managing life . . . and who suffered from a tendency to be paranoid” (Introduction, vii-viii; emphasis added).

Jean Rhys’s constitutive otherness, this critical reading suggests, derives (in part) from her West Indian birth, her colonial status. The historical Jean Rhys and the West Indies become the fixed, passive objects of study, understood and defined by others. Meaning and subjectivity are assigned within a politics of representation that constructs “Jean Rhys” as the subaltern of metropolitan systems of knowledge. The West Indies is simultaneously written by these commentators as a projection of Europe’s imaginary and the unspoken Other of Europe. Hence, the problems in and of her writing are displaced onto Rhys’s “pathological” personhood and naturalized as a function of her individual, spiritual, and emotional defects. In the case of Francis Wyndham, his personal generosity toward and staunch support of Rhys and her writing is unquestioned, beyond reproach. It is the ideological position, which prescribes the reception of “Jean Rhys” and “the West Indies,” that is of particular concern to this study.

I agree with the premise, which underlies much of the critical literature I have cited, that it is only through an examination of Jean Rhys’s Creole identity as subjectivity and location (and the ways in which her gender identity is dependent on this) that the structures of Rhys’s fiction can be adequately deciphered. I believe that there must be an examination of the history which underwrites and drives her work and without which she could not have produced the kind of fiction she did. But, as Hayden White teaches us, “we are indentured to a choice among contending interpretative strategies in any effort to reflect on history-in-general” (Metahistory, xii).

The lifespan of the historical Jean Rhys, 1890-1979, traverses crucial periods of European and West Indian history, marked by imperialism, colonialism, anticolonial struggles, two world wars, and the constitutional independence of formerly colonized countries. But it is the immediate postslavery period, the 1830s and 1840s, a watershed in British and Caribbean colonial history, which marks the obsessive beginning in Rhys’s writing on the West Indies. This period is one of the most ideologically contested moments in Caribbean history — then and now. The ideological struggle to construct the narrative of this definitive moment in the history of the region remains today in the ongoing debates among professional historians of and from the Caribbean as they analyze “push/ pull” factors that shaped postslavery labor and social relations. (Simply stated, “push” refers to the factors that forced the freedpersons away from the plantations, “pull” to the factors that seemed to offer better alternatives.)

The historical narratives that I shall focus on begin in this postslavery period. The second significant historiographical break begins almost a century later, from the 1930s to the 1960s, the decades of Caribbean-wide social revolts, the Second World War, and the independence movements in colonized countries. The third period covers the 1960s and 1970s. An analysis of these historical moments can help to contextualize not only the structures of Jean Rhys’s writing but may shed some light on the conditions of its production and reception. In the section that follows, I shall summarize some of the main strands of the arguments that comprise the “history of the West Indies .” These debates reveal how events accrue historical significance according to successive and even contending interpretations. In order to fully understand the Creole perspective from which Rhys writes and the ways in which she seeks legitimacy for this position, these contending interpretations must be taken into account. There are important differences in the ordering of and emphases on events among European/ imperial, settler/ Creole, and later cultural nationalist histories of the West Indies.

Some Versions of the Imperial History: The “Nigger Question”

In “The Postslavery Labour Problem Revisited,” Woodville Marshall observes:

[The] “pull” interpretation is as old as the slavery abolition question itself, [it] is therefore the staple of the historiographical tradition. Briefly, this interpretation suggests that a mix of psycho-cultural and objective factors were critical: ex-slaves, because of the experience of slavery, possessed a long-standing antipathy to the plantation and all its works and a “natural” desire to exploit the abundant land outside the plantation for a “simple” peasant-type existence. This was the view propounded by officials in the Colonial Office, by some abolitionists and naturally by the slave-owners as soon as slavery abolition became a practical possibility. All accepted that the lure of the available land would destroy the blacks’ “inclinations to industry” and therefore remove all possibility of the plantation retaining an adequate labour force. These fears and suppositions received theoretical formulation in 1841 when Herman Merivale, an Oxford Professor (and later Permanent Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies) published his ... Lectures on Colonization and Colonies. (3)

The writing of such nineteenth-century figures as Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and William Sewell also helped to shape the ideological grounds of the debate about the recently freed people in the Caribbean and their relationship to labor and to the plantocracy. It is Thomas Carlyle, arguably the leading ideologue of his class and of imperialism during this period, who offers some of the most valuable insights. Klaus E. Knorr, in an interestingly worded observation in British Colonial Theories 1570–1850, notes that

Carlyle has been called a founder ... of modern English expansionist imperialism. That is an exaggeration. . . . He was not interested in the subject of colonies per se.... If he had an imperialist theory, he did not state it. Whatever influence he had—and he had more on the imperialism of his posterity than on that of his contemporaries — was through the propagation of a particular philosophy and the diffusion of an intellectual temper conducive to the development and acceptance of some components of later British expansionist imperialism. But even in this respect he has a claim to the noteworthiness of the propagator, not to that of the originator (104; emphasis added)

Carlyle’s importance as “propagator,” as amply recognized in the work of historians and literary critics, is what concerns me here.¹

In terms of Caribbean history, Carlyle’s “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question” understands and articulates the business of empire and colonialism as a relation. Metropolitan politics and imperial policy, the construction of the domestic subjectivity and that of the colonized Other, are inseparable. The “Negro Question . .. lying at the bottom” forms part of the foundation on which the edifice of imperial might is built: “Taking ... an extensive survey of social affairs, which we find all in a state of the frightfulest embroilment . . . the Council has decided . . . that the Negro Question, as lying at the bottom, was to be the first handled, and if possible the first settled “ (August, ed., Carlyle and Mill, 2; emphasis added).

Carlyle also expounds the view that the postslavery period in the West Indies was one of prosperity, leisure, and the “good life” for the freed-persons at the expense of the suffering Creoles and metropolitan whites:

West-Indian affairs ... are in a rather troublous condition this good while. . . . [H]owever . . . the Negroes are all very happy and doing well. . . . West Indian Whites ... are far enough from happy; West Indian Colonies not unlike sinking wholly into ruin: at home too, the British Whites are rather badly off.... But, thank Heaven, our interesting Black population ... are all doing remarkably well....

The West Indies ... are short of labour; as indeed is very conceivable in those circumstances. Where a Black man, by working about half-an-hour a-day (such is the calculation), can supply himself, by aid of sun and soil, with as much pumpkin as will suffice, he is likely to be a little stiff to raise into hard work!.. . The fortunate Black man, very swiftly does he settle his account with supply and demand:—not so swiftly the less fortunate White man of those tropical localities. A bad case, his, just now. He himself cannot work; and his black neighbour, rich in pumpkin, is in no haste to help him. Sunk to the ear in pumpkin ... he can listen to the less fortunate white mans “demand,” and take his own time in supplying it. (3-7)

As Eric Williams aphoristically puts it, the fact that Carlyle never visited the West Indies “allowed him to speak with the greatest authority” about the region (qtd. Lamming, Pleasures, 93). An important reminder that the invention of the Caribbean as a European enterprise required little knowledge of the region and, in fact, depended upon a willed ignorance, an always already constructed narrative of the Other within and by metropolitan discourses. The trope of the “lazy black” whose refusal to work poses a threat to civilization is reproduced in Anthony Trollope’s The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1860). He actually visits the Caribbean briefly and changes Carlyle’s “pumpkins” to mangoes, breadfruit, and coconuts while “discovering” the same lazy, self-indulgent blacks of Carlyle’s discourse:

If I have means to lie in the sun and meditate idly, why, O my worthy taskmaster! should you expect me to pull out at thy behest long reels of cotton. . . . Why indeed? Not having means so to lie, I do pull out the reels, taking such wages as I can get, and am thankful. But my friend and brother over there, my skin-polished, shining, oil-fat negro, is a richer man than I. He lies under his mango-tree, and eats the luscious fruit in the sun; he sends his black urchin up for a breadfruit, and behold the family table is spread. He pierces a cocoa-nut, and, lo! there is his beverage. He lies on the grass surrounded by oranges, bananas, and pineapples. Oh, my hard taskmaster of the sugar-mill, is he not better off than thou? why should he work at thy order.... It will be quite as bad in the long run for the negro as for the white man—worse, indeed; for the white man will by degrees wash his hands of the whole concern.... The question stands thus: cannot [the black man] be made to [work]? Can it not be contrived that he shall be free, free as is the Englishman, and yet compelled, as is the Englishman, to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow? (in)

James Anthony Froude, an Oxford history professor of preeminent stature and Carlyle’s biographer, would produce The English in the West Indies: The Bow of Ulysses in 1888. He too predictably “discovers” “black people” to be prelapsarian Adams, blissfully occupying the tropical garden of Eden: “They live surrounded by most of the fruits which grew in Adams paradise — oranges and plantains, bread-fruit, and cocoa-nuts, though not apples. Their yams and cassava grow without effort, for the soil is easily worked and inexhaustibly fertile. The curse is taken off from nature, and like Adam again they are under covenant of innocence. Morals in the technical sense they have none, but they cannot be said to sin, because they have no knowledge of a law, and therefore they can commit no breach of the law. They are naked and not ashamed” (49). Like Carlyle, Trollope, and others, Froude notes the extreme state of satisfaction and luxury in which the “black people” reside, due not only to abundant nature but also to the largesse and moral ascendancy of the English: “In no part of the globe is there any peasantry whose every want is so completely satisfied as her Majesty’s black subjects in these West Indian islands. They have no aspirations to make them restless. . . .They have food for the picking up. Clothes they need not, and lodging in such a climate need not be elaborate. They have perfect liberty, and are safe from dangers, to which if left to themselves they would be exposed, for the English rule prevents the strong from oppressing the weak. In their own country they would have remained slaves to more warlike races” (50).

In “The Creolization of Caribbean History: The Emancipation Era and a Critique of Dialectical Analysis,” William Green, like Carlyle, Trollope, and Froude before him, calls attention to the early postslavery period as “a kind of golden age for Caribbean working people — to the extent, that is, that Caribbean working people have ever enjoyed a golden age. Employment was abundant; wages were relatively high; and collective actions calculated to preserve pay levels and enhance the terms of work generally succeeded” (32). As a corollary, he too “discovers” a tendency in some contemporary Caribbean historians to misrepresent the planter class of the post-slavery era: “The old image of the slothful, hide-bound and technologically backward West Indian planter dies hard, but it is, nevertheless, a regrettable stereotype that sorely misrepresents the prodigious efforts of many energetic, modernizing ag...