Rinse and Repeat: Jean Rhys’s Cycle of Despair
Lauren Price, BA English year 3
On 19 November 2020, a special celebration of the Caribbean writer Jean Rhys took place online, run by the Royal Society of Literature. Within minutes, I fell in love with the infectious enthusiasm each panellist displayed for my favourite literary figure of the modernist era. The panel was moderated by Shahidha Bari and included Lauren Elkin, a writer who admires Rhys for her brutal ‘attachment to pain’ and her willingness to expose society’s most pressing issues. It also featured Linda Grant, a novelist who describes Rhys as an ‘extraordinary prose writer’, and Shivanee Ramlochan, a poet who, rightly, heralds Wide Sargasso Sea as ‘the perfect novel’. These accomplished women dug deep into the heart of what made Rhys so special: her complete devotion to presenting the world as she saw it. She explored the good, the bad and the ugly in the world, although her shunned outsider characters mostly experienced the bad and the ugly.
Lauren, Linda and Shivanee each expressed how difficult it is to forget such a gifted and unique writer once you have encountered her. Lauren labelled her relationship with Rhys a ‘long love story’. Though I have not been aware of her work for as many years, I share Lauren’s deep admiration, and I can imagine that my fondness for Rhys’s work will only increase with time. Like Shivanee, I picked up Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel of sorts to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, around the age of 16 or 17, having never heard of Rhys. At this point I had not read Jane Eyre either, so I entered the novel’s magical Caribbean landscape without any preconceptions. I am now 21 and I have still not encountered a novel quite like it. I was completely awestruck by how unsentimental it was, how Rhys had nothing romantic or glamorous to say in it. Shivanee did a wonderful and passionate reading of one of my favourite passages from the novel: ‘I hate the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know.’ Shahidha brought attention to Rhys’s use of repetition here and, personally, I am fascinated by the apparent indifference in this internal rant from the novel’s central male character. In Rhys’s interpretation, Brontë’s Rochester does not care enough about his wife or her culture to even try to understand her. This is one of my favourite characteristics of Rhys’s work: her characters are disconnected from people, places and reality itself. Even an emotion as intense as hatred can no longer be fully experienced; repressed feelings lurk within her characters until they dangerously resurface and reveal these figures’ deepest vulnerabilities, insecurities and flaws.
The panellists were also keen to address the potential reasons why Rhys’s work has often been misunderstood. Linda suggested that readers may not enjoy Rhys’s rejection of ‘feisty heroines to root for’, as she favoured writing about women who yearned for clothes, sex, love and, in Sasha Jensen’s words in Rhys’s exemplary Good Morning, Midnight, to be ‘left alone’. Rhys’s women tend to be socially and economically unfortunate. They are desperate to establish a sense of meaning in a sea of meaninglessness. As much as Jensen claims that she has ‘arranged’ her ‘little life’, she, like many of Rhys’s women, has no definitive plan or goal. She wanders the streets of Paris thinking about new hats, new clothes and new hairdos, before she returns to her cheap hotel room, the place ‘where you hide from the wolves outside’. Linda argued, wonderfully, that her women are what a Jane Austen heroine would look like if she happened to live in the following century, as Austen’s characters also value money and possessions over menial and monotonous tasks. Sasha finds solace in clothes, cafes and, most problematically, alcohol, for she views the entire human race as a horrifying ‘pack of damned hyenas’. It is undeniable that Rhys’s writing is full of despair and anguish, but I am frequently perturbed by those who, in Lauren’s words, call her ‘sentimental’ and ‘weepy’. Indeed, the panellists agreed that Rhys was the opposite of a sentimental writer. Lauren remembered that Ford Madox Ford, a writer and a lover of Rhys’s, asked her to elaborate on certain details in her work, but she objected to this. She extracted any romance or glamorisations, leaving readers with nothing but the vicious truth of the dire situations in which her characters often found themselves.
As well as reading extracts from After Leaving Mr. McKenzie, Wide Sargasso Sea and Good Morning, Midnight, the panellists acknowledged a saddening aspect of recent history. It was devastating to learn that Rhys’s childhood home in Dominica has been demolished and will be replaced by commercial properties. A frequent conversation point throughout this event was that Rhys, as a Creole woman, struggled to find a place in the world; the fact that such a major part of her identity and culture has now been erased only adds to Rhys’s dislocation. Her childhood home, like Brontë’s ‘madwoman’ in the attic from Jane Eyre, is now a voiceless ghost, unable to share its history with the world. Another theme within Rhys’s work is the clash of identities. While Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea was ‘glad to be like an English girl’, she ‘missed the taste’ of Caribbean meals. Her characters are often subjected to precarious cultural transformations, usually against their will. Family homes and cultural practices matter little to those trying (and often succeeding) to oppress Rhys’s ostracised women. It is rather unsettling to discover that Rhys’s own historical background has been similarly disregarded.
Since Rhys faced such brutal exclusion throughout her life, it was wonderful to hear Shivanee, Lauren and Linda discuss Rhys’s most admirable, unique and subtle qualities with affection and respect. They admire her refusal to label any of her characters as heroes or villains, her desire to explore women in desperate situations and her unwillingness to provide them with whole and fulfilling conclusions. Rhys does not provide concrete endings because life is not that simple; in life, little is answered for us. Modernist writers are celebrated for their ability to highlight how the fast-paced nature of modern living is often baffling, monotonous and full of hollow pleasures, a theme that still resonates today. Like a Rhys character, we sometimes go through our lives day by day, never expecting anything to improve or change. We are quick to fall in love with the next item that catches our eye, until we get bored and move on to our next purchase or conquest. Rinse and repeat. But while our lives also include moments of joy, a Rhys character’s soul is, according to Linda, ‘screaming out’, hoping for something, or someone, to fill the void. Life continues to disappoint Rhys’s women and they, like Rhys herself, cannot help but feel that any positive person, object or accomplishment that comes their way has arrived much too late. Even though Sasha Jensen insists that the truth is ‘improbable’ and ‘fantastic’, the feelings of hopelessness that lurk within Rhys’s texts are deeply and painfully authentic.