Jean Rhys’s Real Fiction
Richard Snowden-Leak, BA English year 3
Jean Rhys managed to capture through her fiction the reality of what life is like as a marginalised individual – marginalised both as a woman and as a Creole (a person of European descent born in a colonised country, especially of the Caribbean). Rhys came from the slave-owning Lockhart family, too, and even felt an estrangement from her own ancestry. Of this estrangement Rhys writes in her autobiography Smile Please, ‘I am a stranger and I always will be.’ All fiction aspires to be truthful, but with Rhys, fiction is the only way to arrive at the truth, and the only way to make sense of being a ‘stranger’, of living on the periphery, is to import reality into fiction. Lauren Elkin, one of the panellists in the RSL’s event ‘What’s So Great about Jean Rhys?’, pointed this out, quoting Rhys talking to David Plante: ‘I can’t make things up. I can’t invent. I have no imagination. I just write about what happened.’ Elkin expanded, saying that Rhys would ‘begin with a fact, and then something happens to it, it goes somewhere’. Rhys situated the writing process as something inexplicable and unknowable, as if the fiction naturally came from the facts. Rhys drew from her life to create fiction, and that fiction, in turn, never strays too far away from life, from lived experiences.
The reality of Rhys’s fiction hasn’t been consistently appreciated, though. After Good Morning, Midnight in 1939, Rhys did not publish another book until Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966. Even some positive readers suggested that Rhys’s characters lacked complexity and depth by categorising the archetypal ‘Rhys woman’. But with the release of Wide Sargasso Sea in the 1960s, when there was a much greater emphasis on the role of women in society, and on marginalised groups, there was a newfound appreciation for Rhys’s work. Shahidha Bari, the moderator of the RSL event, asked an important question regarding this creative lull in Rhys’s career: ‘Why does Rhys have this renewed resonance in the 60s and 70s?’ Linda Grant replied: ‘What Rhys does is she scrapes away everything which is unimportant, or frivolous, or temporal about being female and gets down to the bones of it. That’s what fascinated us as young feminists in the 70s. She was saying, “Look, this is the hard, harsh truth of being a woman.”’
Rhys, then, validated real torment with her fiction, and gave a voice to those whose pain raged quietly within them. Grant poses this pain as the sum of paradoxically opposing forces within women during this period, as she says Rhys wrote of women as driven by a kind of ‘yearning’, ‘a desire’, that ‘she wants clothes; she wants sex; she wants love; she wants to be left alone; she wants money; she wants to be looked after; she also wants to be free.’ This is the bind in which Rhys saw women caught. The woman in Grant’s example, for instance, wants money, presumably to buy clothes, and if buying clothes is to care about one’s appearance, then perhaps buying clothes is a way of appealing to men, so as to satisfy these desires of wanting love and sex, to be looked after. Each urge or want always leads to another urge or want – but underlining this constant cycle is the desire to be left alone, to be free. It is no coincidence, then, that Good Morning, Midnight opens with its protagonist, Sasha, in a faceless, characterless, bland set-up of a hotel room created to service the needs of every conceivable patron. Rhys tells her readers that this is what freedom looks like for women; freedom is to be without a home, without a family, without love, and so to be loved is to be owned, to belong is to be encaged. Rhys was exposed to these feelings at, unfortunately, a rather early age. Lilian Pizzichini, in a biography of Rhys called The Blue Hour, talks of Rhys meeting a Mr Howard, a family friend. Mr Howard assaulted Rhys when she was twelve, all the while telling her a story of how he would ‘kidnap her’, saying, ‘he would love her, which meant punishing her, and that she would have to give herself up entirely and hopelessly to him’. To be loved is not only to be owned, then, it is also to be punished.
Shivanee Ramlochan, another one of our panellists, reminded us that the prejudices Rhys faced as a Creole shaped her reality just as much as her experiences as a woman did. When she first moved to England, for instance, Pizzichini says that Rhys writes about standing out at school for being foreign, and that other girls would laugh at her voice. Rhys’s own ostracisation, then, is what planted the seeds for Wide Sargasso Sea, as she gives Bertha Mason, the ‘madwoman in the attic’ in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, a chance at justice. Rhys told Elizabeth Vreeland, in a Paris Review interview, ‘What a shame to make Rochester’s first wife, Bertha, the awful madwoman,’ adding that she ‘immediately thought I’d write the story as it might really have been. She seemed such a poor ghost. I thought I’d try to write her a life.’ Note the word ‘really’. Rhys promises to treat Bertha not as a character, here, but as a person with a history and a life, with memories and hopes and dreams. Rhys gives Bertha the chance to live, to finally be real, through her fiction.
Ramlochan herself described Bertha as a ‘ghost, a pitiable one’, and said that Wide Sargasso Sea is an ‘answer’ to Jane Eyre and not a ‘prequel’. How does this ‘answer’ look? For one, Rhys recontextualises the burning down of Rochester’s house as an act of freedom and rebellion, and not as the sad and demented whims of some nameless madwoman. Another way the novel answers Jane Eyre is by giving the marginalised Antoinette – Bertha’s real name – a voice, while also removing Rochester of his name, so that his presence in the novel seems as ghostly and as vengeful as Antoinette’s is in Brontë’s novel. While Rochester’s presence is ghostly, his motivations, however, are not, and Rhys goes out of her way to ensure Rochester’s side of the story is fleshed out, another privilege Antoinette lacked in Jane Eyre. Ramlochan said of this, ‘She fills his narrative with this keen desire for him to be understood, for his voice to be lucid, to matter. We leave the novel not with an easy sense that he’s a villain you can cast aside.’ Rhys’s decision to include Rochester as she does falls back in line with this idea that in her fiction there is always a sense of reality. If Rochester had been treated as Antoinette had, then Rhys would have left holes in the reality of her fiction.
Rhys draws from her own life to give a voice to the marginalised. Her work still persists as a nuanced and unflinching look at the hardships she faced throughout her life, of the hardships of being a woman in a patriarchally organised society, of being a white Creole from a slave-owning family. All the panellists gave such insightful comments to each aspect of Rhys, to how she used the reality of her experience as a marginalised woman to create stories that tell real truths about the world. Rhys said that something ‘happens’ to the facts she puts in her stories; I believe she was being modest. Rhys happened to those facts. Rhys gave them a story. She turned her hurt and pain into art, a hard task for any writer, and to see how she has inspired these three panellists – among so many others – is a beautiful sign of what Rhys wanted for her paradoxical, yearning characters: hope, love and empathy.