What’s So Great About Jean Rhys?
Anthony Marshall, MA English Literature
This special online event assessing the significance of Jean Rhys was held to celebrate the Royal Society of Literature’s 200th birthday and ten years of the Caribbean Bocas Lit Fest. Hosted by Shahidha Bari, Professor of Fashion Cultures and Histories at University of the Arts London, the evening saw a lively discussion of Rhys’s work between writer Lauren Elkin, author and journalist Linda Grant, and poet and book blogger Shivanee Ramlochan. Panellists considered the impact Rhys’s work has had, from its importance in Caribbean literature to its place in their own lives.
To begin the event, panellists exchanged heartfelt anecdotes of their discovery of Rhys and her work, each from very different perspectives. Lauren Elkin spoke of her discovery of Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1939) in a Parisian book shop at the age of nineteen or twenty. Transfixed by the Modigliani painting on the cover that day in Paris, Elkin later included Rhys in her book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City. Linda Grant recalled how she discovered Rhys’s work in the 1970s, and that it was far from the feminist literature and fierce female characters that were popular at the time. Shivanee Ramlochan talked passionately about Rhys’s impact on her as a Caribbean writer herself. When asked where Rhys belongs in her book collection, Ramlochan said proudly that she has her own shelf. To Ramlochan, Rhys cannot be placed, either thematically or geographically.
Rhys’s displacement recently took on a new relevance, in light of the demolition of her childhood home on Dominica in May 2020. This made me think about why such an errant figure was, and is, so great, as the title suggested. To me, it is this very errancy that makes Rhys and her work so interesting. Rhys’s unwillingness to be defined shows through her unfiltered depictions of depression, juxtaposed by her wicked humour. In Good Morning, Midnight, a text that Elkin proclaimed as one of the greatest novels of the modernist period, Rhys’s exploration of loneliness in the life of the modern woman is somewhat overwhelming. Good Morning, Midnight takes the pessimism and discontent of so many of Rhys’s fellow modernists and amplifies it. Rhys does not dilute unhappiness; she confronts it clearly and unapologetically, and, in this text at least, she does this time and time again. The first quarter of the book introduces Sasha Jensen as a lonely woman, punctuating her time in Paris with Pernod and Luminal as she copes with her sadness and failure. Lamenting her time at one of her failed jobs, Sasha describes how she ran away from her bosses ‘into a fitting-room’ and locked herself inside. Here, she ‘[cried] for a long time – for [her]self, for the old woman with the bald head, for all the sadness of this damned world, for all the fools and all the defeated’. This is just one moment of despair in a text throbbing with pain.
Once Sasha pulls herself together and leaves the fitting-room, Rhys turns this sombre tone on its head by using dark humour. After being humiliated by a stranger in Theodore’s, a café she normally avoids, Sasha refuses to let anyone see her cry, saying ‘If I do that I shall really have to walk under a bus when I get outside.’ It is clear that Rhys uses black comedy to mask pain. Perhaps Rhys used it to cope with the terrible things she had gone through, which are portrayed in Good Morning, Midnight – the alcohol dependency, the failed marriage, the miscarriage. Or perhaps Rhys knew life is not so black and white: at times she felt the need to lock herself indoors and cry over the sadness of the world, but she also knew that she was going to find some reprieve for her suffering, in humour, in the dimly lit cafés of Paris.
Rhys refused to be pinned down. This was also reflected in the ways Grant, Elkin and Ramlochan discussed the significance of Rhys’s work in their own lives, in different locations. Rhys’s writing made waves for these women in the 1970s in London and in 1990s Paris, and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), as Ramlochan stated, has also been hugely popular in the Caribbean education system for a long time. Ramlochan’s fascination with Wide Sargasso Sea elicited more discussion about Rhys’s complex talent, through which she transformed elements of her own life and her struggles with identity. Ramlochan commends Rhys for ‘daring to walk the Brontëan hallways’ with Wide Sargasso Sea and for facing the criticism she received and is still receiving for challenging this canonical text. Rhys confronted the colonialism of Brontë’s novel in relation to her native West Indies, a place she explored from her first to her last text. In her first, The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927), West Indian characters emerge and disappear as Rhys touches on her memory of ‘home’, a term that is as hard for her to define as it is for us, her readers, to define her.
This event, ‘What’s So Great About Jean Rhys?’, did not portray an easy answer to its title question and it was never supposed to. Three writers, from totally different backgrounds, all showed in their different ways why they thought Jean Rhys was great – whether it be for the beauty of her writing, her modernist techniques, or her redefinition of what it means to be a Caribbean writer. Whilst a lot of Rhys’s characters, like Antoinette and Sasha Jensen, seem to have their lives overwhelmed with lost potential and failure, Rhys did not fail in the eyes of so many readers. Almost one hundred years since the publication of her first book, her important stories continue to fascinate us.