SOURCE: "Jean Rhys on Insult and Injury," in Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. XI, No. 2, Fall, 1978, pp. 55-65.

[In the following essay, Baldanza provides analysis of the recurring themes, narrative strategies, and female protagonists in Rhys's fiction.]

In discussing the seeming monotony of tone in the work of many distinguished literary figures, Alberto Moravia remarked that most major writers have only one string to their lute, so that the fundamental question ought not to be one of the variety of their effects, but of the complexity and intensity with which they do what they do well. Although few readers outside coteries would call Jean Rhys a major writer, Moravia's remark is nevertheless quite apposite to her fiction. Miss Rhys works, in terms of both theme and technique, in a severely limited range—but, since another essay in this collection discusses her Impressionist methods, I shall concentrate on her thematic complexity and intensity and shall try to avoid, insofar as possible, analysis of technique.

The "archetypal" career of the Rhys protagonist—which can be pieced together from glimpses of variously named characters at various phases of similar lives in her five novels and three collections of short stories—closely resembles the few scraps of biographical information now available about the author, though we have no warrant for a reverse extrapolation from fiction to life. It is in the context of this career that we find her most deeply-felt values and most typical thematic concerns.

We first encounter a sensitive, anti-social, reclusive—nearly misanthropic—West Indian girl whose severe alienation seems self-contained and sui generis, though many exterior factors reinforce her withdrawal. In the social sphere, she belongs neither to the stuffily rigid colonial society of her English father nor to the economically precarious but proudly exclusive circles of her Creole mother, a woman of marginal nervous stability. Her only instinctive alliance, and one her mother disapproves of, is with a black servant girl, an omen of her later adult alignment with "the insulted and injured" out cast in Europe. But even here, the general hostility of the subservient natives as a class is a constant source of tension for a girl uncertain of her social identity. In terms of pubescent sexual experience, the girl's passive acceptance of an elderly eccentric's salacious talk and furtive pawing convinces her that she is naturally bad and therefore outside the whole structure of conventional convent-taught morality. (In the deeply felt "Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose," a recently published sketch, the girl bids farewell to her own two pretend-children, about whom she and her classmates had heretofore fantasized.)

The apparent ease and simplicity of this self-judgment, along with her unreflecting passivity, remain highly typical traits throughout her career—the epistemological sanction for most judgments of self and others is simply emotive, never discursively rational, sometimes barely conscious. This passive-emotive decision-making reaches a frozen impasse when one protagonist decides on whether or not to go from France to England to visit an ailing mother by the chance of a taxi horn's blowing before she counts to three. And the most frequent charge against persons she dislikes is their incapacity to feel, their refusal, in effect, to experience emotion. Many characteristics of the protagonists' epistemology bear a remarkable resemblance to those illustrated in the second half of Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground," in itself a locus classicus for tense moods of reclusive alienation. One of the Rhys protagonists, in fact, disagrees with her uncle in his facile dismissal of Dostoevsky's world view, in a scene that constitutes one of the author's most acute confrontations between the alienated and the solidly bourgeois.

After a convent education in the West Indies and a brief period at an English girls' school just before World War I, the girl decides on a stage career on the basis of several scraps of praise for her portrayal of Autolycus in a school production of A Winter's Tale. Typically, the girl includes in her performance words and phrases which some of the teachers wanted to censor. Already we sense the Rhys protagonist's virulent hostility to the ranks of the respectable.

The girl launches herself on an independent course, after a short period at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, with the partly grudging, partly relieved permission of distant relatives, by joining the chorus for the provincial tour of an English musical comedy. From this point on, the Rhys protagonist's career is fairly stable in its typicality and predictability, if rather unstable in terms of economic and emotional security. "Reckless, lazy, a vagabond by nature" (Quartet), the girl seems to accept with a quiet passivity, after a brief initial revulsion, the attentions of well-off young bachelors; partly schooled by more experienced fellow-chorines, partly induced by an insatiable delight in luxurious clothing and a need to feel protected, she goes from one fairly deep emotional involvement through a series of liaisons to a madcap marriage with a dashing, free-wheeling, pettily criminal young man whose appeal is his capacity to live entirely in the present moment. At this point, the early 1920's, she discovers in the Left Bank a more congenial ambiance than the gray streets of London.

She may briefly attempt to work as a manicurist, an artist's model, a teacher of English, or a mannequin, but never for more than a few days at a time, since the slightest contact with middle-class regularity shatters her nerves. Essentially, her life, following the death of a baby and the departure of her husband after he has served a jail sentence, is that of a drifting mistress, sometimes kept for a period of time, sometimes dependent on casual street encounters. When she receives a windfall payment from a present or former lover, new clothes are the first concern; but she has also learned to live with hunger. This lust for new clothes is largely a matter of keeping up street appearances before the implacable phalanxes of the respectable; it recalls the machinations of Dostoevsky's underground man to obtain a new beaver collar for his coat when he plans to go out and jostle the elegant strollers on the Nevsky Prospect.

The tone of her experience becomes the sour, rebellious despair of an aging outcast in Europe, given to the false consolations of alcohol and veronal, occasionally begging from former lovers or disapproving relatives, but still retaining token independence and defiance, as her beauty wanes. The Rhys protagonist is giving a local habitation to the same concerns as Dostoevsky's underground man, who asks within his own context of experience whether a man who takes a perverse pleasure in his own humiliation can possibly retain any degree of self-respect. Much of the direct aim of Miss Rhys's writing, especially at this state of the protagonist's career, is to communicate the emotional states of a rudderless beggar-drifter in Paris—the depressing wallpaper of cheap hotels, the care to avoid cafes where one has wept openly or made a scene, the spiritless encounters with casual men in which the woman depends on a gradually diminishing charm in order not to reveal too soon in the evening her desperately passive dependence on the man's gratuity—either to him or to herself.

The author herself aims cleanly and taciturnly at communication of emotion, though various readers will respond to the presentation of these emotional states in ways suggested by their own experience, education, and values: Marxist, feminist, formalist, or clinically-psychological readers will place differing emphases; at least one of the feminist reviewers already on record uses the dilemma of the protagonist to illustrate assumptions about society that in themselves have no source whatsoever in the Rhys text. However, if there is a thematic core to the whole varied body of work, it is the evocation of the radical loneliness and despair of a woman who has always been outside the pale of ordinary respectability, tinged with a defiant determination not to let defenses down, not to give an inch of advantage to the enemy in spite of poverty and hopelessness.

From a sociological viewpoint, Miss Rhys gives voice to a class and type of person rarely heard in English writing since the eighteenth century, but her works do not supply enough exterior detail to be hailed as documentary in any sense. The closest analogue I can find for the peculiarly desperate, passive, haunting, hopelessly melancholy loneliness of these pages is in the lady diarists of Heian Japan—Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji and Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book, but most particularly The Mother of Michitsuna's The Gossamer Years (Kagero Nikki). Both the Heian diarists and Miss Rhys present the impasse of a helpless woman entirely dependent on the casual whims of male attention, who must maintain a mask of elegant indifference and unruffled economic security as she desperately watches both her material means and her personal beauty decline.

In this world, there are certain constants. Paris grants anonymity and even the possibility of positive pleasure in youth, whereas England's cold climate and darkly oppressive streets constitute an inferno for the Rhys woman. One must have money to buttress respectability, which she early discovers to be the single, massive anathematic force in her experience. Meanly spying landladies and policemen are the immediate agents of the hypocritically punctilious, emotionlessly calculating, penny-pinching majority, who can kill with a glance. The only escape from this dour army are the well-off bachelors who are willing to support a mistress in lodgings and supply pretty clothes, good times, and an occasional weekend in the country as long as their initial passion lasts.

Miss Rhys's first publication, The Left-Bank, Sketches and Studies of Present-Day Bohemian Paris, includes a few West Indian vignettes along with Paris material, some of which show up in fuller form in later fiction—for example, the sketch "From a French Prison" parallels certain chapters of her first novel, Quartet. The most impressive piece is "La Grosse Fifi," detailing narrator Roseau's observations of fat, vulgar Fifi's stormy amours with a young gigolo, who later murders her when she objects to his proposed marriage to a young girl. The refraction of Fifi's life through the mind of Roseau guarantees instant and implicit sympathy, since Roseau, despite her morose manner, is herself a similar (if quieter) outcast from respectability whom Fifi tries to resuscitate. In Roseau's allying with Fifi rather than with her snobbishly disapproving friends the upright Olsens, Miss Rhys initiates a strategy that becomes familiar in later works—if the focus is not on the experience of the protagonist/narrator herself, it is frequently transferred to another derelict. In one of Miss Rhys's most recent sketches, "Night Out, 1925," Suzy overpays a pair of whores from the wallet of her stingy escort to compensate them for failing to interest the couple. When Suzy's escort abandons her, she drapes a medallion given her by one of the whores over a discarded red hat in a gutter. This image, by no means as sentimental as it may sound in summary, combines her sympathy for the unlucky whores with an extension to whoever lost the red hat in whatever sad circumstances.

Though slightly marred by explicit "description" of characters here and there, Miss Rhys's first long work, Quartet, presents the absolute confrontation between the outcast and the respectable in a taut domestic situation. Marya Zelli, without resources during the imprisonment of her husband for fraud in the sale of art works, is taken in by Hugh and Lois Heidler, rich dilettantes of the Left Bank who repeatedly "adopt" vagabonds and repeatedly quarrel with them. Although at first the offer is simply one of succor, it soon becomes evident that Hugh is overmastered by a passion for Marya, in which his wife, Lois, is prepared to acquiesce for his sake, though she extracts her price in insisting Marya show up at social functions to quell gossip about the affair; she habitually practices mean little cruelties that would reduce Marya to the status of a family rag doll.

After a nasty domestic squabble, Hugh removes Marya to a cheap hotel as an occasional mistress. The Heidlers' attempt almost literally to enslave Marya is balked when she leaps from a taxi, after her husband's release from prison, in her determination to be with him despite the Heidlers' disapproval.

The epigraph to this work, a verse by R. C. Dunning, warns against having any doings with Good Samaritans, and despite Miss Rhys's taciturn cleanliness of narration, the deck is stacked fairly heavily against the Heidlers—Hugh wants passion, but not at the cost of breaking with Lois, the perfect snobbish party hostess; Lois thinks she wants Hugh to have his fling, but she erupts in crying spells and endless petty cruelties to Marya. The Heidlers want to dabble in Bohemia without renouncing one bit of respectability.

From all the evidence given in the text, Marya is a helpless victim: at each important early juncture in the relationship, she would prefer not to take up with Hugh and Lois, but their indomitable bossing, coupled with her imprisoned husband's advice to take advantage of their largesse, pushes her into the menage. Once committed, she develops a hopeless love for Hugh, though apparently despising his character throughout. Frequently, the Rhys woman's position as a guest at a bourgeois household or celebration (a weekend in the country with the Heidlers) is generally similar to that of Dostoevsky's underground man at the farewell dinner for Zverkov, the sulking, resentful, brooding intruder whose enraged eruptions and denunciations are simply dismissed by the irritated host. To be sure, Miss Rhys presents such situations with certain differences due to a feminine protagonist and a set of manners removed from nineteenth-century St. Petersburg. And Marya is also much more passively helpless than the underground man, to a degree that taxes my own sympathies: if one frequently behaves like a rag doll, one's right to complain about rag-doll treatment is therefore qualified.

In the two years that intervened before her next novel, Miss Rhys's art matured remarkably; After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie is a poignant, masterful evocation of her peculiar blend of desperation, loneliness, and defiance. There is even less emphasis on narrative trajectory than in the slight "story" of the first novel, and a consequent emphasis on mood-moments and individual confrontations. Julia Martin, having broken with rich Mr. Mackenzie in Paris, is cut off from her monthly stipend by a lump payment, which she angrily tears up; then, she taps his cheek with her gloves in a restaurant. The bulk of the rest of the novel concerns her return to London to visit her dying mother while maintaining an acquaintance with Mr. Horsfield, a tepid interim lover. Always just a pound or two away from total poverty, abandoned, rejected, and despised, Julia nevertheless maintains an admirably integral grittiness, as assertion of her own autonomy in the face of impossibly bleak prospects and outright hatred by smugly respectable relatives. Her virtues are, without much exaggeration, those that sustain people who keep dignity in the face of incurable illnesses or prison death sentences.

The presentation is one of subtle nuance, in which juxtaposition of extremely short scenes often serves an expressive function. For example, we know that before the opening of the novel, Julia made a loudly hysterical scene at the Restaurant Albert; we then observe her second encounter with Mr. Mackenzie, when she follows him to the same restaurant, he fearing a recurrence of the same ugliness, but getting off more easily with a soft slap. At the conclusion of the novel, perhaps in unconscious gratitude for her restraint at the restaurant, he actually goes over to Julia in the street, after her return from London, congratulating himself on his liberality in even acknowledging her existence, and when she asks him for a small sum, he cavalierly hands her most of the change from his pocket.

The complexity of situational irony at this juncture is overwhelming, because in the meantime Julia has in part sustained herself on handouts from Mr. Horsfield, the only man in the Restaurant Albert who observed the slap and who followed her that evening out of interest at her pluck. There is an interesting implicit contrast between Mackenzie and Horsfield in themselves: the former is a very upright, respectable businessman whose general probity carries him through in bourgeois circles, despite the minor weaknesses of having written a few poems and having indulged in the secret liaison with Julia; Horsfield, by contrast, had earlier felt the same kind of smug superiority, the same self-satisfaction in using and discarding unfortunate victims, until wartime experience obliterated his sense of the categorical difference between exploiter and victim. At an important juncture in their London meetings, Julia remarks that seeming benefactors often extract one's life story in lurid detail, and then take subtle pleasure in refusing to give one a penny. Horsfield responds that the pleasure is not subtle, it is direct and brutal, but that he has learned it is also mistaken and cruel. Julia mentioned this kind of situation because she had just asked money of her uncle, who is even more summarily cruel than Mr. Mackenzie; after pumping her for details of her failed marriage, he refuses her absolutely, only relenting to the extent of one pound to pay her fare back to France. Perhaps the most trenchant focus for the oppositeness of Julia and her uncle is in his puzzled opacity in the face of her assertion that Dostoevsky saw man's condition clearly.

The Marya of Quartet was at a somewhat younger phase, when her physical appeal still gave her a minimal confidence; whereas Julia has begun to sense the onset of middle age—indeed, one aggressive young Parisian pursues her vigorously until he catches a close look at her face in a good light and then departs muttering, "Oh, la, la … Ah, non, alors." As she walks through the tawdry Halles quarter, she no longer feels a quick sympathy for tired horses or doorway drunks: Julia realizes that through an accumulation of troubles, she has ended up where most hard-hearted, respectable people begin, with an impassive coldness toward the suffering of others. This sense of both physical and spiritual aging gives peculiarly painful poignancy to the closing lines, "The street was cool and full of grey shadows. Lights were beginning to come out in the cafés. It was the hour between dog and wolf, as they say."

In her fourth work, Voyage in the Dark, Miss Rhys gives us her typical protagonist, now named Anna Morgan, at a much earlier stage in her career, two years after her arrival in England from the West Indies. The work teems with minor characters, complexity of perceived detail, and an increased emphasis on story line—altogether thicker in texture than any of the preceding novels. In addition, the psychological complexity of Anna's presentation is augmented by sudden recalls of fairly lurid, frightening details from her Caribbean childhood. The substance of the narration concerns Anna's loss of virginity during her chorus-girl phase, and the subsequent breakup of this first love attachment, followed by a brief period as manicurist to a masseuse and a series of brief liaisons and one-night encounters.

The previous novel treated in an elegiac tone the onset of middle age for a vagabond woman; now the author is looking back to a protagonist who recalls her first menstruation, undergoes sexual initiation and later disillusionment, culminating in a lonely, nightmarish, fear-ridden abortion. From the outset, Anna always instinctively turns toward others outside received society rather than to their respectable persecutors: as a child, she is obsessed by the very name of a slave in family estate records; she is only happy with the black cook Francine, and fervently wishes she could be black; perplexed by her first menstruation, she goes immediately to Francine, who reassures her gently, but her fears are revived in a subsequent talk with her mother. Even as an adult, when the forty-year-old masseuse takes her to a cinema in Camden Town, Anna sympathizes totally with Three-Fingered Kate, the burglaress, and feels the audience always applauds in the wrong places, as when the police arrive to arrest Kate.

As she makes her first encounter with the edges of English society, she shows little of the savoir-faire of her more seasoned comrades and their playboy admirers, and despite their best efforts to initiate her, she persists in her own peculiar non-conformity. She frequently looks sad, withdrawn, and contemplative in situations where a chorine is uniformly expected to be chipper and sparkling, again like the underground man at Zverkov's banquet. She repulses the attentions of men who do not stimulate her romantically, but when she does find the right man. Walter Jeffries, she relates herself to him in terms of a loving equal, despite what all the pulp fiction, fellow artistes, and even the playboys themselves tell her about the evanescence of the man's interest. Indeed, one of Walter's reasons for tiring of her is that Anna burdens him like a heavy stone, rather than taking vigorous advantage of his offer of singing lessons and professional contacts. Unlike her more astute friends, she never saves a penny, and when Walter breaks with her, Anna impulsively refuses help (just as Julia tore up Mr. Mackenzie's parting check). This passive failure of the instinct of self-advancement again demonstrates that the Rhys protagonist hasn't a bourgeois bone in her body.

In Part Two, when Anna has come on desperate times, she is appropriated by the masseuse Ethel Matthews, who takes her up on the impressive strength of her owning a fur coat. But after an occasional success with men like a rich visiting American businessman, Anna's seeming lumpish passivity culminates in a pregnancy that is three months advanced before she seeks help. Ethel abandons her in anger and exasperation.

In contrast to the narration itself, my summary runs the danger of moralizing, to the degree that it incorporates as explicit statement certain value-conclusions which are presented in the text as extremely subtle implicit meanings. Miss Rhys's own emphasis is on the reader's participatory sharing in Anna's sensibility, without generalization. The most masterful effects are in the juxtaposition of present emotional states and recalled childhood traumas, with the hallucinatory abortion at the end as a general recall of previous imagistic leit-motivs. In the flow of Anna's contemporary experience, the implicit meanings are carried by scraps of songs or conventional pictures on the walls and especially by images of walls and streets associated with the stern, repressive grayness of English morality. The Caribbean memories, like that of the face of a noseless victim of yaws, tend toward drama and horror.

A morose verse of Emily Dickinson provides the title of Miss Rhys's fourth novel, Good Morning, Midnight, which takes us forward in the protagonist's career to 1937. This work moves along on a rich flow of perceived detail, even fuller than in the preceding novel, though the narrative progress is considerably less evident; indeed, this seems by far the most episodic of all her novels. In other works, there is a surface commitment to the detached moment, but one senses the steady flow of the story underneath—in Voyage in the Dark, for example, the stages in the initiation of a young girl. In this novel, seemingly random street encounters and lengthy reminiscences take up the first three parts. Sasha Jansen, the protagonist, is in Paris for a brief rest, financed by a London friend who wishes to rescue her from her immersion in alcohol. The novel ends, in Part Four, on Sasha's tense, dramatic, shattering confrontation with the gigolo René—a devastating impasse which, even if it does seem to stem from the cliché comic encounter of a gigolo and a street walker, is handled with masterful power and gripping emotion that give it profound human significance.

On reaching this final scene, the reader senses a structural ambiguity in the work that may be either a weakness or a strength, perhaps depending on the depth of his sympathy for Sasha's whole world-view. One feels the final scene concentrates the essence of Sasha's whole experience, and yet the drifting, episodic character of much of the previous material does not encourage one to expect a definitive conclusion. In short, the loose structure may be an organic expression of living from moment to moment.

Part One sketches out situation and mood, along with preliminary recall of earlier passages in Sasha's life; Part Two is entirely taken up by an encounter with a subduedly disillusioned Russian who introduces her to an eccentric Dutch painter. Part Three consists of Sasha's memories of her earlier vagabond marriage to the ebullient Enno, and her loss of a baby. To be sure, Sasha first meets René at the end of Part One, but the reader barely distinguishes him from the texture of other random encounters.

What may serve to hold together the exceedingly disparate materials of the first three parts—and may even weld them to the climactic fourth part—is the common theme of down-and-outers, of people at the end of the tether, derelicts at the edge of desperation, like the tramp in a Halles-quarter café who tried to eat his glass to earn a drink. The material makes one think of the James Purdy of "63: Dream Palace" or Eustace Chisholm and the Works.

Sasha herself, in recalling her humiliating days as a receptionist at a haute couture establishment, dwells on her English employer's spite (the animus against the English is strong in all these novels): perhaps his type has the power to cut off one's legs at one blow, but should he then have the right to ridicule the cripple? She later recalls a grim period when she was living at a cheap hotel. On leaving a cafe with a casual escort, Sasha staggered from drunkenness, saying she'd not eaten in three weeks; as a result, the man slammed the taxi door in her face and raced off. A train of such incidents illustrates the hideous irony that the more desperate one is, the more cruelly people treat one; the more one needs help, the less one gets. As a capstone to this kind of reminiscence, the Dutch painter recalls finding a sobbing, drunken mulatto woman in his hallway during a London sojourn in Notting Hill Gate. She had lived for two years with a man she didn't love, who only tolerated her for her cooking. She almost never went outdoors because one time when she entered the street at twilight, a child shouted, "I hate you and I wish you were dead."

This emphasis on the lacerating pain of such humiliations raises a central issue of interpretation and of value in Rhys. The financially, socially, and mentally secure middle-class reader may have difficulty understanding the point of such anecdotes. If one steps out of a suburban home and the child next door shouts such a remark, one either laughs it off or gives the parents the name of a good psychiatrist. It becomes obvious that the reference to Dostoevsky in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie is not just window dressing: the narrator of "Notes from Underground" has the same open-wound sensitivity to slights like being jostled on the street. It would be too facile to dismiss both Dostoevsky and Rhys as chroniclers of a certain cast of neurotic sensibility (though the observation is true); the value of their art lies in its achievements in inducing readers to extend imaginative sympathy toward "the insulted and injured."

But if we recall how Dostoevsky's protagonist got revenge for his many humiliations—by seeming to redeem a prostitute by genuine love, and then cruelly debasing her—the final section of this novel becomes clearer. Sasha indeed tells herself when she first meets René that his tales of service in the Foreign Legion are lies, but she will lead him on with the lure of her fur coat (the same bait that drew the masseuse in the preceding novel) into thinking her a lonely rich woman and will then slap him down to get revenge for her own humiliations.

In Part Four, in the final confrontation in her room, Dostoevskian ironies proliferate. Sasha refuses René's overtures (though she has been ambivalent about his sexual appeal), and he threatens violence because, though an obvious gigolo, his male pride is piqued. Sasha offers him money from her purse if he will only leave, and when he discovers that this is all the money she has, he departs. There is a very subtle suggestion that each of the down-and-outers comes to see the other's wretchedness, though the multiple ambiguities leaves open many paths of interpretation.

But the tone of the ending is certainly not one of tender sympathy triumphant. In another Dostoevskian reversal, Sasha lies naked on her bed with the door open hoping against hope that René will return and take her passionately. Instead, the repellent traveling salesman from the next room, a man who has despised and vilified her, enters and takes her as she moans Molly-Bloom yeses.

Miss Rhys's latest novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, receives full treatment in Todd Bender's essay in this issue, so I shall simply remark that this attempt to right Charlotte Brontë's apparent prejudice against the West Indies in Jane Eyre carries forward typical thematic interests. For one thing, the experience of the protagonist fits interestingly into the standard Rhys pattern of what Ford Madox Ford called her "underdog" sympathies. The vindication of Rochester's mad wife, a bit like Anna Morgan's cheering on Three-Fingered Kate at the movies, does not express itself as partisan pleading or tourist brochure blurbs; by simply inducing the reader to share the experience of an outcast, Miss Rhys puts her faith, as she does in all her works, in the proverb Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.