Jean Rhys Short Fiction Analysis
The range of Jean Rhys’s stories, as of her novels, is narrow. She focuses on the world of the lonely, the outcast, the vulnerable. Her central characters are all women who live in a world they cannot control, which regards them with indifference and cruelty. Communication is often found to be impossible, and the protagonists’ fragmented, tormented world is perpetually on the verge of falling apart. The dominant note is of isolation, dependency, and loss, with more than a smattering of self-pity.
The Left Bank, and Other Stories
Rhys’s first collection, The Left Bank, and Other Stories, consists of twenty-two stories, most of them short sketches, of life on the Parisian Left Bank. A few stories, “In the Rue de l’Arrivée,” “A Night,” and “Learning to Be a Mother,” end on an optimistic note, as does “Mannequin,” in which a young girl, at the end of her first day as a mannequin, feels a surge of happiness as she steps into the street and merges into the vibrant life of the city. She is one of the few heroines in Rhys’s fiction who discover a sense of belonging. The dominant mood of the collection, however, is one of helplessness and troubled uncertainty, and as such it sets the tone for Rhys’s later work. The stories focus on characters who inhabit the fringes of society: artists, exiles, misfits, deprived women. “Hunger,” for example, is a despairing, first-person monologue of an English woman who is down and out in Paris. She takes the reader, day by day, through her experience of five days without food.
“La Grosse Fifi”
“La Grosse Fifi” is a more ambitious story, one of a group at the end of the collection which is set outside Paris—in this case, on the French Riviera. Fifi is a huge, vulgar woman who keeps a gigolo half her age in a sleazy hotel. The other main character is a young woman named Roseau. The name, she explains, means reed, and her motto in life is “a reed shaken by the wind” (a motto which might adequately describe virtually all Rhys’s helpless and vulnerable heroines). Roseau can survive, she says, only as long as she does not think. Unhappy and lonely, without home, friends, or money, she is comforted one night by Fifi, who reveals herself to be infinitely kind and understanding. Fifi knows the foolishness of her own situation, yet she genuinely loves her man, however irregular and unhappy the relationship appears. When her lover abruptly leaves her, she faces the hostile world with dignity, still attracting men and still cheerfully defying the darker elements in her life. Roseau feels protected by her presence, which is so full of life that she cannot help but feel gladdened by it. The story reaches a climax when Roseau learns that Fifi has been stabbed to death in a quarrel with her lover.
Fifi’s almost tragic grandeur serves as a measure of Roseau’s inadequacy. She knows that she can never love with such full abandon or live so wholeheartedly. She decides to leave the hotel, and the story ends with her packing (a typical activity for the rootless Rhys heroine) while the yellow sunshine—yellow always carries negative connotations for Rhys—streams through the window.
“The Lotus”
Rhys wrote no more short stories until the early 1960’s, and then eight of them were published in Tigers Are Better-Looking. These stories are longer, more complex, and the characters more fully realized than those in The Left Bank, and Other Stories , but Rhys’s vision has become even more bleak and despairing. “The Lotus,” told with...
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a taut economy and a ruthless fidelity to what Rhys saw as reality, is one of the bleakest. Lotus Heath is an eccentric middle-aged poet and novelist. Ronnie Miles invites her for drinks one evening, since they live in the same apartment building. His wife Christine dislikes Lotus, however, and her frequent cruel insults sabotage Ronnie’s attempts to be polite and sociable. When Ronnie helps Lotus down to her own small, ill-smelling apartment, her cheerful guise suddenly drops and she reveals her own despair and frustration. Later, Ronnie sees Lotus running naked and drunk (she is one of many Rhys heroines who drink too much) down the street, soon to be escorted away by two policemen. When one of the policemen inquires at the Miles’s apartment about Lotus, Ronnie denies that he knows much about her, and no one else in the building will admit to knowing her either. An ambulance takes her to the hospital. Christine, who found her own insults highly amusing, ignores the whole affair, lying in bed smiling, as if Lotus’s eclipse has somehow made her own star rise. The story ends when Ronnie, his kindness revealed as shallow and ineffectual, begins to make love to Christine—cruelty has its reward, and compassion is snuffed out without a trace. Nor can there be any escape or consolation through art, which is represented, however inadequately, by Lotus and mocked by Christine. In this story, the only arts which flourish are popular songs preserved on secondhand gramophone records.
“Till September Petronella”
The best-known story in the collection is probably “Till September Petronella.” It opens with the heroine and narrator, Petronella Grey, performing a typical action—packing. She dislikes London, with its gray days, and heartless people, a recurring theme in Rhys’s fiction. Typically also, Petronella has no money and has cut herself off from her family. She admits to herself that she has never lived in a place that she liked, and the story chronicles the directionless drift of her life. She visits her boyfriend Marston in the country, and his guests Frankie and her lover Julian. During a lunch loosened by drink, they fall to pointless quarreling. Petronella decides to return to London, and Marston says that he will see her in September. The date of their parting is significant: July 28, 1914.
In London, she is befriended by an eager young man, Melville, and during their evening together she recalls that her career as a chorus girl failed because she could not remember the only line she had to speak. The incident keeps coming back to her; it is a parable of her life. She has lost her connections, the threads which bind her to the rest of life and society. She cannot fit smoothly into the flow of life. When Melville tells her that he, too, is going away until September, their lighthearted farewell does not disguise for the reader the dangerous period of loneliness which Petronella is about to enter. Not only does the story emphasize her dependence on men, who provide her with distractions but not fulfillment, but also it makes it clear that Petronella enters her private wasteland just as Europe begins to tear itself apart in World War I. Her aimlessness is somehow linked to a wider spread of chaos. There will be no September reunions.
Much of the story’s power comes through Rhys’s gift for subtle suggestion rather than overt statement. The reader is forced to penetrate beyond the apparently trivial nature of the dialogue, which makes up nine-tenths of the story, to the darkness which lies behind it and threatens to engulf it. When the story ends with Petronella sitting quietly, waiting for the city clock to strike, the moment has acquired an ominous quality, as if the striking clock will inaugurate some dreadful Day of Judgment which she, waiting passively, can do nothing to avert.
Sleep It Off, Lady
Sleep It Off, Lady consists of sixteen stories. They are predominantly tales of regret and loss and fall into a rough chronological sequence which resembles the chronology of Rhys’s own life. The first five take place in the West Indies at the beginning of the twentieth century. Two of these (“Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers,” and “Fishy Waters”) deal with the difficulties of white settlers in the West Indies, isolated in the land they were responsible for colonizing. A strongly autobiographical middle group centers on a young female protagonist who goes to school in Cambridge, England, trains as an actress, and becomes a member of the chorus in a touring company. Three stories toward the end of the collection (“Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” “Who Knows What’s Up in the Attic?” and “Sleep It Off, Lady”) feature elderly female protagonists.
“Sleep It Off, Lady”
There is probably no more quietly horrifying story in English literature than “Sleep It Off, Lady.” Told with an unsentimental, almost clinical precision, it centers on an elderly heroine, Miss Verney, a spinster who lives in one of the poorer parts of the village, where she does not really belong. The central action consists of her attempts to rid herself of a dilapidated old shed which stands next to her cottage, but she cannot persuade any of the local tradesmen to pull it down. She feels increasingly helpless, and the shed begins to acquire a sinister power over her. She dreams of it as a coffin.
One day, she sees a rat in the shed, and the powerful rat poison which Tom, her neighbor, puts down seems to have no effect. The rat walks unhurriedly across the shed, as if he is in charge of everything (while she feels herself to be in charge of nothing). Tom suggests that the rat must be a pink one, the product of her excessive drinking. She feels trapped and misunderstood and retreats into a closed world of her own. She stops going for walks outside. Letters remain unanswered, and she rejects the good-neighborliness of Tom.
What makes the story so poignantly effective is that just before her inevitable demise she undergoes a form of rebirth. On her birthday, she awakes feeling refreshed, happy, and young again. It is a windless day, with a blue sky overhead. Poised between one year and the next, she feels ageless, and she makes plans to reach out to other people once more when her new telephone is installed. Yet her optimism is misplaced. Later in the day, as she struggles to move a garbage container back to the shed, she falls and loses consciousness. When she awakes it is nearly dark, and she is surrounded by the contents of the trash can, including broken egg shells (symbolizing the failure of her rebirth). When she calls to some passing women for help, the wind drowns out her cries. Even nature has turned against her. A local child named Deena finds her but refuses to help and makes it clear that Miss Verney is despised in her own neighborhood. The next morning, Miss Verney is discovered by the postman, who is carrying a parcel of books for her. The parcel—like the telephone, a symbol of communication with the outside world—comes too late. She dies that evening. Her individual will to live proves useless in the face of the hostility and indifference of her neighbors. Regarded as trash, she dies surrounded by trash. Her feeling of renewal was only the last and the cruellest trick that life was to play upon her.
“I Used to Live Here Once”
The last story in the collection, only one-and-a-half pages, serves as an appropriate epitaph for all of Rhys’s stories. “I Used to Live Here Once” features an unnamed protagonist who in later life returns to her childhood home in the West Indies. She crosses a stream, using the stepping stones she still remembers well, and approaches her old house. In the garden, she sees a young boy and a girl under a mango tree and calls to them twice, but they do not answer. When she says hello for the third time, she reaches out, longing to touch them. The boy turns to her, looks her directly in the eye, and remarks how cold it has suddenly become, and he and the girl run back across the grass into the house. The story ends with the pregnant sentence “That was the first time she knew.”
She knows that she cannot return to the freshness and vitality of her youth. She also knows that the coldness emanates from her, and therefore she must have frozen into a kind of living death. Yet beyond this, it is as if she knows everything that Rhys’s stories have depicted, time after time: the pain of final separation, the loneliness of exile, the failure of people to connect with one another, the horrible realization of what life can become. Several critics have seen the woman as posthumously returning to the scenes of her childhood and achieving no emotional accommodation or reconciliation even after death. Jean Rhys’s stories do not elevate the spirit but rather reveal the gradual strangulation of the life force. They do not make easy or comfortable reading. Rhys’s merit lies in her quiet but devastating presentation of the hopeless and the forgotten. She looks on despair and futility with an unblinking eye; she does not flinch or sentimentalize, and she does not deceive.