http://www.lib.utulsa.edu/speccoll/collections/rhysjean/index.htm
Jean
Rhys (1890-1979) - pseudonym of Ella
Gwendoline
http://caribbeanchronicle.com/Jean_Rhys.html
She was born Ella Rees Williams to a Creole mother
and a Welsh-born doctor in Roseau, on the Windward Island of Dominica. As a
white girl in a predominantly black community, Rhys felt socially and
intellectually isolated; in 1907 she left the island for schooling in England,
returning only once, in 1936. Although Rhys's attitude to her birthplace
remained ambivalent throughout her life, the Caribbean shaped her sensibility.
She remained nostalgic for the emotional vitality of its black peoples, and the
conflict between its beauty and its violent history became enmeshed in the
tensions of her own often-fraught personality.
Rhys's Dominican background is important to her
works, playing a part in both her longer fictions like Voyage in the Dark, and
in short stories such as "The Day they Burned the Books." Dominica is the most
rugged of the Caribbean islands. Its peaks rise to more than 5000 feet despite
being only 29 miles long. The violent contrasts between dense vegetation, deep
gorges, waterfalls and stretches of arid wasteland are totally unlike the
atmosphere that Rhys was presented with upon her arrival in Britain. The
irreconcileability of the landscapes is evoked in Wide Sargasso Sea when
Rochester's attitude to the beauty is to mistrust its lushness -- "what an
extreme green!"
Rhys identified with the Negro community in her
childhood, and indeed throughout her life, although she came to realise that her
world could never align itself with that of her nursemaid, Meta, and other Negro
mentors. She envied the Negro community its vitality and often contrasts the
sterility of the white world with the richness and splendour of black life.
Themes of attempted friendship with black girls recur in her work, an obvious
example being the figures of Tia and Christophine in Wide Sargasso Sea, but Anna
Morgan in Voyage in the Dark also attempts to find a friend among the Negro
community.
Rhys's early life paralleled that of other
postcolonial writers who have felt themselves betrayed by the reality of
Britain; it was only when she was in her seventies that she found a social niche
in England. Shaped by her instinctive drives and created out of the struggle to
comprehend her own isolated predicament; her writing was obstinately
unconventional. In part, this prevented her work from receiving due recognition
for much of her lifetime.
Rhys's short fiction shows a remarkable variety of
themes. A significant number of stories recall her childhood in the Caribbean
and range from a girl's cruel sexual awakening ("Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose")
to incisive sketches of the narrowness of small-island life ("The Day They
Burned the Books"). Others, such as "Vienne," reflect Rhys's restless bohemian
life in Europe. In "Let Them Call it Jazz," she assumes the personality of
Selina, a black West Indian in London, whose struggles parallel her won.
However, although Rhys declared "I have only ever written about myself," it is
important that her life and her writing not be confused. Her first published
novel was Postures (1928, American title Quartet: A Novel, 1929). While it lacks
the confidence of her later work, in the character of Marya Zelli it introduced
what was to become the recognisably Rhys heroine -- sensitive, sexually
attractive, and vulnerable, with a tendency to self-defeat. It also shows Rhys's
stylistic control in moving within characters and in observing them objectively,
without irony.
In After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930), the heroine is
Julia Martin, who is recovering from the experience of sexual betrayal and
attempting a futile liaison with the decent but inadequate Mr Horsfield. The
moral descent is completed in Good Morning Midnight (1939), a brilliant
evocation of psychic disorientation and despair. The heroine, Sasha Jensen,
remembers a life of love and defeat and faces the ultimate darkness suggested by
the novel's title. Told in first person narrative, alternating between the past
tense and the continuous present, Good Morning, Midnight is a technical tour de
force.
Voyage in the Dark (1934), Rhys's third published but
first-written novel, is her most autobiographical work of fiction. Its heroine,
Anna Morgan, aged nineteen, has come to England from Dominica. The novel opens
with a compelling evocation of the Caribbean, its colours, sights, smells, and
warmth. As the novel recounts Anna's attempt to come to terms with her new life
the inner narrative traces a remembered life in the Caribbean.
Rhys disappeared from public view until 1958, when
the BBC dramatised her Good Morning, Midnight. The publication of Wide Sargasso
Sea followed in 1966. Jean Rhys's great-grandfather, John Potter Lockhart,
acquired a plantation in Dominica in 1824. After his death in 1837 his widow was
left to run the estate. The riots in 1844 following Emancipation (see Slavery)
led to the destruction of the estate and the burning of the house. Rhys visited
the plantation and was affected by the experience. An awareness of this may help
to explain some of the more ambiguous attitudes in Wide Sargasso Sea, such as
Antoinette's caustic remarks to Christophine and Tia about their blackness.
Rhys's own background, as well as Antoinette's, was that of the former
slave-owning Creole community.
Rhys's final years brought fame and freedom from
financial anxiety, but no work of similar importance. She published a collection
of new short stories, Sleep it off Lady, and worked on her autobiography,
unfinished at death, published posthumously as Smile Please: An Unfinished
Autobiography (1979). Her letters were published in 1984 in England as Jean
Rhys's Letters: 1931-1966, edited by Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly.
This project was
completed under the direction of Dr Leon Litvack as a requirement for the MA degree in Modern
Literary Studies at the Queen's University of Belfast. The site is
evolving and will include contributions from future generations of MA students
on other writers and themes.
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