SOURCE: "The World of Jean Rhys's Short Stories," in World Literature Written in English, Vol. 18, No. 1, April, 1979, pp. 235-44.

[In the following essay, Morrell examines Rhys's world view as presented in four short stories that span her career. ]

Jean Rhys's world, as seen in her three volumes of short stories, is a unified one. In every story a central consciousness, whether narrator, implied narrator, or protagonist, perceives and responds to reality in essentially the same terms. Rhys has said of her work: "I start to write about something that has happened or is happening to me, but somehow or other things start changing." One might argue that thus is all fiction forged. But in Rhys's work, the autobiographical beginnings are responsible for this central consciousness which we may take to be Rhys's own; the other things that "start changing" are her patternings of experience into a coherent world-view. Rhys is not at all interested in creating individual characters. She does create again and again a society of types acting out the attitudes and assumptions which keep that society intact. Her stories have the strong cumulative effect of a sorrowful, scornful anatomy of essential evil.

I will examine the four stories "In a Café," "Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose," "Till September Petronella," and "I Used to Live Here Once." These range from the beginning to the most recent part of Rhys's writing career; they are set variously in Paris, Dominica, London, and the English countryside; they include her two modes, i.e., episode and complete story; the last three show stages in the development of Rhys's typical female character from childhood to adulthood to late middle age; and these four together outline the ideas and themes which comprise Rhys's work. With the exception of the first, "In a Café," in which the narrator is a cynical observer of what she later explores in depth, each portrays a central consciousness struggling to fulfill her desires or reaching out for understanding from others. She fails and is failed by them. She subsides into the only attitude or role she is allowed as others reject or merely use her. By the end of each story, the social order, in which outcasts are necessary to carry the burden of guilt for the rest, has been perpetuated.

Stories like "In a Café" make up the bulk of the 1927 The Left Bank volume and were not chosen for republication in the 1968 Tigers are Better-Looking or the 1976 Sleep It Off, Lady. Stories in the later volumes are less scornful, more detailed and sympathetic analyses. However, "In a Café" is a good early example of Rhys's central consciousness as observer rather than participant, it fully prefigures her later arrangements of ideas, and is skillfully wrought.

In this café, the musicians are "middle-aged, staid," and go wonderfully well with the café itself. They are capable of playing in "the serene classic heights of Beethoven and Massenet." The patrons are dignified whether they are business men and their "neat women in neat hats," or artistic types accompanied by "temperamental ladies . . . [wearing] turbans"; the atmosphere is peaceful and conduces to philosophic conversation. The alliance of respectable manners and religious certainty is made plain in this satiric comment:

. . . The atmosphere of a place that always had been and always would be, the dark leather benches symbols of something perpetual and unchanging, the waiters, who were all old, ambling round with drinks or blotters, as if they had done nothing else since the beginnings of time and would be content so to do till the day of Judgement.

Into this eternity of calm steps a vulgar Hermes, ancient phallic pillar and artificer of music, to sing about the "grues" of Paris. His song is accompanied by the piano in a "banal, moving imitation of passion"; it tells the pathetic story of the making of a "grue," of her warm-heartedness, finally of the despicable, now decorously married, hero who passes her by in the street when she is reduced to utmost misery. The patrons are embarrassed: women look into their mirrors and rouge their lips; men drink their beers thirstily and look sideways. The song is applauded tumultuously. This jolting of the habitual world of the café is brief. A calm, self-assured, fair-haired American girl buys two copies of the song. The staid, respectable atmosphere is resumed with the request for the American song "Mommer loves Popper. Popper loves Mommer," the title of which the pianist chalks up "for all the world to see."

This is Jean Rhys's world. The implied contrast between the two songs is ironic. The singer cares as little for the "grues" as do the café patrons: like a pimp, he capitalizes upon the economic condition of certain unfortunate women, and upon the "necessities" of monied, respectable men. As prostitutes are not mentioned in polite circles, he has caused a tremor of guilty unease certain to sell his song. The idea of the "grues" has been again sentimentally indulged; the individual woman is still invisible. Conventional sentiment is restored with "Mommer loves Popper": the world goes on.

"Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose" is part of the latest, 1976, volume Sleep It Off, Lady. It relates an episode in twelve-year-old Phoebe's life. An elderly Englishman, Captain Cardew, intrudes himself into her peaceful childhood world of Dominica, shattering her secure illusions and providing her with new ones. Until his wife Edith objects to his friendship with the child, and they return to England, Captain Cardew rids himself of a temptation by giving in to it. He first clamps his hand around "one very small breast," remarking, "Quite old enough." Subsequently while walking with Phoebe he restricts himself to:

. . . ceaseless talk of love, various ways of making love, various sorts of love. He'd explain that love was not kind and gentle, as she had imagined, but violent. Violence, even cruelty, was an essential part of it. He would expand on this, it seemed to be his favourite subject.

During the narrative section of the story, Phoebe's response to all this is confused. She is pleased to be taken for walks by Captain Cardew because he treats her "as though she were a grown-up girl." She is perfectly passive under his onslaught. She remains still when the Captain grabs her breast, thinking only that he is making a great mistake, is being absentminded and will take his hand away without really noticing what he's done. She says nothing about the incident; nobody would believe her, or if they did, she'd be blamed. She knows he ought not to talk as he does to her, is shocked and fascinated, but cannot bring herself to speak, afraid that she will only manage "babyishly 'I want to go home.'" Phoebe is caught between two worlds, neither of which is secure: in the familiar world of childhood, she will be blamed for wrongdoing; in the "adult" world of Captain Cardew she fears not being "quite old enough." This paralysis lasts until the Cardews leave the island. Alone, Phoebe attempts to make sense of her experience.

The progression of Phoebe's thoughts, which form the conclusion of the story, is startling in its inexorable rejection of everything she has believed or been heretofore. The stars are no longer her "familiar jewels" but are "cold, infinitely far away, quite indifferent." Sure Captain Cardew behaved as he did because he "knew" she was not a good girl, she examines ideas of wickedness. Wasn't it more difficult to be wicked than good? Didn't Mother Sacred Heart say "that Chastity in Thought Word and Deed was your most precious possession?" that a chaste woman would have "a thousand liveried angels" to lackey her? Phoebe relinquishes the promised angels as she had the stars and experiences a sense of "some vague irreparable loss." She now understands the connection between chastity and economic security. Before, she had envied the girls who put up their hair, went to dances, and married "someone handsome (and rich)." Anxiety about whether one would be chosen in marriage is reflected in the child's rhyme:

If no one ever marries meAnd I don't see why they shouldFor nurse says I'm not prettyAnd I'm seldom very good . . .

That was it exactly.

Only a few weeks ago, like other girls, she made secret lists of her trousseau and named her future children. Now children, as well as heavenly jewels and angelic servants, are relinquished:

Now goodbye Marcus. Goodbye Rose. The prospect before her might be difficult and uncertain but it was far more exciting.

The lewd chatter of an old man has introduced Phoebe to the whole world of loveless sex and she accepts it buoyantly.

In "Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose" two possibilities for women are presented to Phoebe. One is the respectable, conventional life she has been taught to expect: in it, chastity is a woman's sole guarantee of marriage, jewels, servants, children, freedom, and respectability. On the practical level, Phoebe is mistaken to believe this way is not possible for her: her virginity is intact. Intuitively, however, she is correct: her chastity is gone forever. Her great mistake is to believe that the life reserved for wicked, unchaste women is her, or anyone's alternative. The Cardews are "respectable" people; yet the brutality of the Captain's sexual attitudes touches his wife intimately. The supposed two worlds are one. In her turn Edith Cardew punishes Phoebe:

"Do you see how white my hair's becoming? It's all because of you." And when Phoebe answered truthfully that she didn't notice any white hairs: "What a really dreadful little liar you are!"

The social web of appearance ("For nurse says I'm not pretty"), respectability, religion, and economic necessity traps equally the chaste and the unchaste, the respected and the outcast.

"Till September Petronella" is from Rhys's middle volume, Tigers are Better-Looking, of 1968. It features Petronella, who could well be Phoebe ten years later, alone in London. The action of this story is more complex and extended than that of the other three. Petronella receives a telegram from the painter Marston, inviting her to spend a couple of weeks in the country. Also at the cottage are the music critic Julian and his girlfriend Frankie, who is, like Petronella, an artist's model; the two couples eat, drink, and make clever-cynical conversation. The next day, Petronella and Marston are treated with suspicion by country people, the four drink a lot of wine, become rude and quarrelsome. Marston weeps because Petronella won't sleep with him, Julian insults her, and she runs away. A farmer gives her a lift in exchange for sex; he takes her to a pub, back to the cottage for her suitcase, then to Cirencester where she catches the train back to London. There, Petronella meets a stranger, a young man named Melville. They go to Hyde Park then on to what seems to be a hotel suite for dinner and sex. He drops her off at her bedsitting room, where she sits alone waiting for the church clock to strike. In this story, unexplained actions seem random and meaningless. The significance of "Till September Petronella" is revealed in Petronella's vague halfthoughts, in what is said, and in the gradual accumulation of symbolic detail.

The most important refrain in the story is Petronella's missing her French friend Estelle, who has recently returned to Paris. Estelle "walked the tightrope so beautifully," that is, managed a life similar to Petronella's with more ease. Estelle's bed-sitting room was more like something out of a long romantic novel than a Bloomsbury room. She brought brightness and friendship to Petronella's life; it was after she left that Petronella "hit a bad patch." She remembers Estelle at significant moments. Her sympathetic understanding was a contrast to Marston's unfathomable demand that Petronella be "gay." Back in London, she doesn't want to return to her house because: "'When I pass Estelle's door . . . there'll be no smell of scent now.'" On her way to dinner with Melville she is reminded of pleasant evenings with Estelle, who very practically insisted on the necessity to eat one good meal a day. But the illusion that Estelle is walking alongside her vanishes: "'I shall never see her again—I know it.'" Finally, back at the Bloomsbury house, Petronella passes the door of Estelle's room: "not feeling a thing as I passed it, because she had gone and I knew she would not ever come back."

As Petronella accepts the loss of her only friend she acquiesces to what people expect of her. An artist's model, dependent upon her looks (for as long as they might last) for a living, semi-suicidally depressed and very poor, Petronella has, in losing Estelle, lost the self-respect which might have kept her from part-time prostitution. She has successfully avoided the unattractive Marston for some time: Julian's and Frankie's opinion that she has been leading him on for his money drives her away from the cottage. But it is as if they have clarified reality for Petronella. In their loveless world, she might as well get what she can, however she can. Her response to Marston will be different in September.

After her sexual encounter with the farmer, which is implied rather than stated, Petronella's thoughts and words are mainly repetitions. She is started on this track when the farmer says of her what others have said: "Well, you look as if you'd lost a shilling and found sixpence." On the train to London, she repeats Marston's words to herself: "Never mind . . . never mind, never mind. . . . Don't look so down in the mouth, my girl, look gay." She kisses herself, now, in the cool glass as she had before kissed a plaster cast of a Greek head. When Melville offers her the taxi, she associates him with the farmer: "'You have it' he said. The other one said, 'Want a lift?'" As she and Melville drive along, Petronella thinks of her landlord's reaction when she received Marston's invitation: "There's a good time coming for the ladies. There's a good time coming for the girls." In Hyde Park, as he evaluates the poetic phrases she quotes to him, Petronella judges Melville and every man in the terms Julian had used about her: "How do they know who's fifth-rate, who's first-rate and where the devouring spider lives?" To describe her experience at the hotel with Melville she amends Marston's opinion of steak:

"I've been persuaded to taste it before," Marston said. "It tasted exactly as I thought it would. . . ." But Marston should have said, "it tastes of nothing, my dear, it tastes of nothing. . . ."

To keep herself awake in the taxi, Petronella sings for Melville the same song she had sung for the farmer: "Mr. Brown, Mr. Brown, Had a violin. . . . " She then tells him about her failure to be graduated from the chorus to a speaking part because she could not remember how to say the one line she had been taught: "Oh, Lottie, Lottie, don't be epigrammatic." At her house, Melville promises to write. Petronella quickly repeats what the farmer had said girls want: "Do you know what I want? I want a gold bracelet with blue stones in it. Not too blue—the darker blue I prefer." As she quips, "The pleasure was all mine," Melville repeats her lost line: "Now Lottie, Lottie, don't be epigrammatic." Alone in her room, Petronella recalls the girls in the dressing room on the night she'd fluffed her line saying to her, "What a waste of good tears!" and says aloud to herself: "Oh, the waste, the waste, the waste!" As she sits waiting for the church clock to strike, we realize that time has stopped for her. Having finally learned her lines, Petronella has stepped into a state of suspended animation; henceforth she will only be able to repeat, in words and actions, what she has been taught.

This is a fully-realized story unified by time, place, and symbols. It begins in Petronella's room and ends there two days later. References to the arts provide the allusive backbone of meaning: the barrel organ plays Destiny, La Paloma, and Le Rêve Passe; Petronella becomes immersed in long romantic novels; Julian whistles the second act duet from the opera Tristan; a reference is made to Samson and Delilah; the picture in Marston's studio is The Apotheosis of Lust; Petronella has kissed a plaster cast of a Greek head, then her own reflection, ironically recalling Pygmalion; a man named Peterson wrote a play about Northern gods and goddesses and Yggdrasil; Marston quotes poetry about unrequited love; in the pub there are three pictures of Lady Hamilton; and a club is called the Apple Tree, a reference to Adam and Eve, and perhaps a satiric allusion to Galsworthy's tale "The Apple Tree." These are like signposts in a foreign country in a language Petronella has begun to understand. By incorporating these references, Rhys is making a point about the mythical, religious, and artistic bases of behaviour in the culture to which Petronella must adapt.

"I Used to Live Here Once" is the last story in the latest volume, Sleep It Off, Lady, of 1976. It is a tiny story, less than two pages long, which, because of its location in Rhys's oeuvre gives the impression of a finale. It relates a brief, emotionally significant incident during Jean Rhys's return after many years of exile to her old home in Dominica.

The character in "I Used to Live Here Once" balances between memory and the present until the final sentence, which is like the fall of a tightrope-walker. "She" is "extraordinarily happy" walking alone, recognizing the setting and noticing changes. When she approaches the boy and girl on the lawn of her old home she calls "Hello" several times to them, says "I used to live here once" and "her arms went out instinctively with the longing to touch them." The boy gazes expressionlessly at her, says to the girl, "Hasn't it gone cold all of a sudden. D'you notice? Let's go in . . ." and she watches them running from her. The last sentence is: "That was the first time she knew."

What she knows is that she has brought on the cold. Her strangeness inspires mistrust if not fear in children; they cannot know they represent to her the long-ago relinquished Marcus and Rose. And there can be no return home to her warm and colourful West Indian world.

There is another, a symbolic, reading of this episode. The stepping stones across the river, variously safe and treacherous, represent a dangerous passage through life. It is as if the character has died in that life and is crossing the eternal river searching for her lost heaven. As she walks the broad road feeling "extraordinarily happy," dangers past, she looks up at the blue glassy sky, which is strange to her, unremembered, as if she has entered a new sphere. The description "glassy" is a warning hint: glass is manmade, hard. Still she goes on, and with great excitement looks at the house she has been wanting to see. It is white and "worn stone steps" lead up to it. At the top are two very fair children. But as she approaches them, asserting that she belongs here too, they flee from a draught of cold as if she were a ghost they cannot see. If this was the heaven she had struggled and travelled to reach again, she has just been cast out by the angels, doomed to remain in the limbo of death in life she has known. I accept this reading as Rhys's final comment on life and the life to come. It is all too likely that, heaven being manmade, painted white and peopled by angels in whom "white blood is asserting itself against all odds," there, as here, the orderly and respectable citizen will be preferred to the chaotic yearning consciousness of the exile. This is what "she" and Rhys know: to be an outcast in life is to be an outcast for eternity. This bleakly poetic final vision is the most fitting culmination of Rhys's world-view.

I have mentioned that Jean Rhys writes two types of stories, the episode and the completed experience. The effect on the reader of the first is like watching ripples radiate out from a stone thrown into still water. "Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose" and "I Used to Live Here Once" are intensely observed, economically presented brief periods in a life, which expand in meaning after reading until we understand the whole of the characters' lives and the attitudes of the society which produced them. "In a Café" and "Till September Petronella" are complete stories which present the organization of a whole world: their effect on the reader is that of looking at a mandala. The circle image also applies to Rhys's stories as a whole and describes her world-view.

The central, organizing consciousness contributes much to the overall impression of oneness. This consciousness is Rhys's own; each female character represents a fragment of it. Each is alone, and learns, if she can, the same lesson about her relation to the world. One might almost say that Rhys has told the same story 46 times, only finding different characters, settings, and symbols to convey her meaning. I do not mean by this to slight the real range and diversity of Rhys's stones. Her compelling rendering of the exact spirit of each place and her haunting references to earlier literature deserve separate studies.

Her stories insistently expose the position of the lone woman in any society, whether West Indian, French, or English. Money, the need to have it, is very important. Most of Rhys's female characters have little or no training, no family, no secure position. As Marston says:

What's going to become of you, Miss Petronella Grey, living in a bed-sitting room in Torrington Square, with no money, no background and no nous?... Is Petronella your real name?

Indeed, these women have no real name, no separate identity; money is only one aspect of that. Young Phoebe's coming from a secure family does not protect her.

It is not by chance that Phoebe, Petronella, and all the others are exiles or outcasts. Especially in "In a Café," "Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose," and "Till September Petronella" show staid middle-class men casually using vulnerable and unfortunate females and, incidentally, the disdain and cruelty of women who intend never to be in that position. Phoebe and Petronella and all their sisters are altered by men's treatment of them; in the future they will behave so as to fulfill the men's and society's original intention for them.

Rhys's world-view is uncompromising: the making of scapegoats is society's first and necessary evil. The socalled "respectable" men, the Captain Cardews, the Parisians in the cafe, Petronella's farmer, as well as her "unacceptable" but rich artistic friends, project their sexuality outside of their comfortable religious, family, and social establishments onto designated outcasts. These men are destroying an aspect of themselves inimical to society's smooth functioning: this is why Rhys's lone women are dismissed by polite society and ultimately destroyed. Stray, "wicked" women are shown to be necessary to the perpetuation of the "decent" world. "I Used to Live Here Once" flatly dismisses sanguine hopes for a more tolerant future, whether placed in a new generation or in a life hereafter and thus completes the circle of social relations which is Jean Rhys's central preoccupation.