SOURCE: "Jean Rhys's Feminism: Theory Against Practice," in World Literature Written in English, Vol. 28, No. 2, Autumn, 1988, pp. 326-36.

[In the following excerpt, De Abruña argues that Rhys's views, as demonstrated in her fiction, were anti-feminist.]

Despite recent attempts by feminist critics to read all of her fiction as a portrait of oppressed women, Jean Rhys's "heroines" are unco-operatively anti-feminist. They dislike and fear other women, while hoping for love and security from men who, they anticipate, will finally reject them. Her women—Anna, Marya, Julia, Sasha, and Antoinette—expect, often fatalistically, that these relationships will fail; and their predictions become self-fulfilling prophecies that legitimize their fears and preserve them from responsibility. The only exception to this is Wide Sargasso Sea (and, to a lesser extent, Voyage in the Dark). . . .

Critics have considered Rhys a spokesperson for society's oppressed, a satirist of sexism, and a champion of all those persecuted by a mechanistic and conformist, cold northern European environment. Louis James [in Jean Rhys, 1978], for example, praises Rhys's sensitivity to prejudice:

Although Jean Rhys is not a self-consciously political writer, few novelists have made a more effective exposure of sexist exploitation. Few, if any, have revealed so vividly the way in which economic and social dependence undermine a woman's psychic being.

Helen Nebecker [in Jean Rhys, Woman in Passage: A Critical Study of the Novels of Jean Rhys, 1981] suggests that Rhys intended to expose the need for love as "woman's eternal delusion." According to Nebecker, Rhys's presentation of men shows a developing awareness that the role assigned him by Victorian culture oppressed him as well, so that Mackenzie's or Heidler's hatred and fear of women comes from their demands for emotional and financial security. Rhys's women expect the men to play the roles of "God the Father or Christ the Savior in their lives." Ironically, Ford Madox Ford began this type of interpretation in his introduction to Rhys's Left Bank and Other Stories with his remark that Rhys had a "terrific—an almost lucid—passion for stating the case of the underdog."

Since the 1970s there has been a plethora of books and articles, inspired by this type of criticism, that praise Rhys's fiction as feminist or social statement. Despite this, the evidence in the fiction itself, in her autobiography Smile, Please, and in the recently published letters shows that Rhys's "theories" about woman's place in society were anti-feminist. We know that when she read a review of her work that was even mildly feminist, she laughed and tore it up. Often she seems hostile to other women; they are part of an unexamined and unexplained paranoia that pervades her fiction and autobiographical writings. Except in her last novel, Rhys's fictional women never seek a solution for their isolation in relationships with other women. Either the thought does not occur to them, or the women they meet are more ruthless, vicious, and competitive than the men. Thus, in complete isolation, Sasha and Julia are left with the debilitating problems of dependancy, feelings of rejection and self-pity, delusions of persecution, selfdefeating exaggerations of unfortunate circumstances, and passivity—all covered up with alcoholism, depression, or, in Sasha and Antoinette's cases, anger.

The compassion for the "underdog" cited by Ford, James, Nebecker, and others is, disconcertingly to feminist critics, a compassion for individuals, perhaps like Rhys herself, who suffer from apparently irremediable wrongs, starting in childhood, and who will continue to live frustrated, bitter lives. As Marsha Cummins has pointed out [in World Literature Written in English 24, 1984], Rhys's characters do not rebel against the partriarchy because they have internalized its value system and therefore become "other" to themselves. They not only accept society's rejection of them, but also anticipate it. Her characters' paranoid expectations are then legitimized, and the women can feel themselves to be innocent, irresponsible victims. Far from wanting to thwart the system, these women want to belong to it, to be accepted, to be the pampered, hothouse exotics luxuriating in its material goods. The young narrator in "Mixing Cocktails" (The Left Bank) says:

I long to be . . . Like Other People! The extraordinary, ungetatable, oddly cruel Other People, with their way of wantonly hurting and then accusing you of being thin-skinned, sulky, vindictive or ridiculous. All because a hurt and puzzled little girl has retired into her shell.

Marya, in Quartet, says something very similar: "I don't want anything black or miserable or complicated any more. I want to be happy, I want to play around and have good times like—like other people do." Much of this sense of isolation is reflected in Rhys's writing, which was autobiographical and therapeutic, a rewriting of her early feelings of alienation from her mother and of rejection after her first affair. As Carole Angier has said [in Jean Rhys, 1985], Rhys always felt isolated from other people, despite her envy of their comfort:

The only ones she could really understand and feel for were the ones who were most like her: women who were anxious or unhappy, and anxious and unhappy in the same ways as she was. ... To the end she preferred the company of men, and went on hoping that the end of her isolation would come from them.

Her relationships with her family were strained, and even at the age of nine, Rhys felt that she was different and hated herself. She seems to have been afraid of her mother—a trapped, lonely, and reserved woman who was uninterested in her. In her autobiography, Smile, Please, Rhys remembers: "Even after the new baby was born there must have been an interval before she seemed to find me a nuisance and I grew to dread her. Another interval and she was middle-aged and plump and uninterested in me". Rhys's father, a British immigrant to Dominica, felt exiled and homesick. Although Jean remembers him as kind and gentle, he was often preoccupied and ignored the children. Left with the nurse Meta, Jean was prey to the older woman's superstitions. Meta, Jean says, showed her a world of "fear and distrust" in which she was still living, even in her eighties.

Depressed after Lancelot Smith jilted her and bought her off with monthly cheques, and after a botched illegal abortion, the twenty-year-old author bought two exercise books and filled them with the material for her novel Voyage in the Dark. In this and in her other novels—Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Good Morning, Midnight, and Wide Sargasso Sea—Rhys wrote and rewrote the story of a West Indian woman rejected first by her mother and subsequently and fatefully by her lovers.

If much of Rhys's fiction was partly a therapeutic process for her individual problems, where does this put feminist critics who wish to point out the role, literary and psychological, played by women in Rhys's fiction? Even if we find that, despite Rhys's intentions, significant analysis of her characters can still be made from the feminist perspective, we must at least begin our analysis by acknowledging the gap between Rhys's "theories" about women and her practice of presenting them in her fiction. I would argue two things: first, that Jean Rhys was not a feminist or even a modern writer—and, two, that despite Rhys's bad intentions, she often manages to create something better than the intended exposé of mankind's cruelty and intolerance. She showed the hopeless existence of passivity and the courage needed for women, in her fiction about the Caribbean, to continue their lives despite racism and xenophobia. Her analysis of British imperialism gives some interesting portraits of its racism, intolerance, and xenophobia. Here Rhys is at her best—when going beyond self-pity to find outside sources for feelings of alienation in the realities of West Indian life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

For Rhys's characters, the world is a hostile place in which other people are intolerant and jealous and always looking for a reason to pull someone down. In "Mixing Cocktails" (The Left Bank), the young girl learns an early lesson in intolerance:

Humanity is never content just to differ from you and let it go at that. Never. They must interfere, actively and grimly between your thoughts and yourself—with the passionate wish to level up everything and everybody.

The fiction has many examples of one human's gratuitous cruelty to another. In the story "Sleep It Off, Lady" (Sleep It Off, Lady,) young Deena watches as seventy-year-old Miss Verney has a heart attack while emptying her garbage. Instead of helping the elderly woman who is flat on her back, skirt up, and humiliatingly festooned with garbage, Deena calls her "stuck up" and tells her to "sleep it off." In this and in other stories, Rhys's imagery suggests that society is a collection of wild animals preying on one another; everyone needs someone to attack and insult. As Hans writes in "Tigers Are Better-Looking" (Tigers Are Better-Looking:) "I got the feeling that I was surrounded by a pack of timid tigers waiting to spring the moment anybody is in trouble or hasn't any money." But tigers, he says, are better-looking than humans, and they do not insult their prey after the attack. People, the narrator of "The Lotus" (Tigers Are Better-Looking) suggests, "laugh when you're unhappy"; and Marya of Quartet complains of the same treatment: "I've realized, you see, that life is cruel and horrible to unprotected people. I think life is cruel. I think people are cruel."

Both Julia in After Leaving Mr, Mackenzie and Sasha in Good Morning, Midnight believe that strangers in restaurants and in the tube eye them and pass judgements on their age, their drinking, and their shabby clothes. None of these characters believes that her discomfort might be coming from her imagination. They prefer the myth that their male lovers and their powerful friends, like lawyers and businessmen, control society and have infinite power to hurt and defeat them. That Jean herself shared these beliefs is evident from Smile, Please and her letters and conversations with novelist David Plante, who helped her write the autobiography. Since Smile was written when Jean was in her eighties, it is clear that she never mastered her feelings of persecution. She still saw others as "trees walking"; and even as an octogenarian, by then an alcoholic for over thirty years, she raged, when drunk, about her hatred of people, the enemies, who wanted to rob her of her Dominican memories:

"And what is Dominica like now? They say there are no roses in Dominica now. There were, I remember them. They gave such a scent to the air." She suddenly shouted, "Lies! Lies!" She bared her teeth. "A pack of lies. And who cares? Who does anything? Terrible things people do. Getting rid of roses in Dominica. I hate the word "people." She spat the word out. "People! I hate people! I hate everyone. I think they are all enemies" [David Plante, Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three: Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, Germaine Greer, 1984].

Because of their dominant position in society, the men in Rhys's fiction seem responsible for most of the victims' problems. The fiction shows us many men who either dislike or actually hate women. In "The Insect World" (Sleep It Off Lady,) for example, Audrey buys a book in which the former owner has written "Women are an unspeakable abomination." Mr. Sawyer, from "The Day They Burned the Books" (Tigers Are Better-Looking,) came to live on an unnamed Caribbean island. Although he hated the climate and the people, and everything about the island, he married a mulatto woman and filled their house with English books. When drunk, he abused her verbally and sometimes physically as well, pulling her hair out one night at a dinner party and taunting her: "You damned, long-eyed, gloomy half-caste, you don't smell right." Rhys gives his hatred no motivation, so that we sympathize with Mrs. Sawyer when she burns his books, the symbol of his intolerance. White males are needlessly cruel to Selina Davis, the mulatto West Indian who moves to London looking for work, only to find that everything is stolen from her, even the one song she learns in prison. Again, in "A Solid House" (Tigers are Better-Looking,) Teresa opens her cigarette case to find it empty. The tobacconist always refuses to serve women whenever there is a shortage and seems very pleased to have an excuse for rudeness. At least, Teresa thought, his hatred is undisguised:

His open hatred and contempt were a relief from all the secret hatreds that hissed from between the lines of newspapers or the covers of books, or peeped from sly smiling eyes. A Woman? Yes, a woman. A woman must; a woman shall or a woman will.

The apparent reason for male dislike of women in Rhys's fiction is the connection between money and gender. All of the women in Rhys's novels take money from their lovers—Anna reluctantly, Julia, Marya, and Sasha much less so. Since Antoinette's money goes directly to Rochester after their marriage, even she is economically dependent on a male. The money seems to make the women the passive property of their lovers and to create a humiliating bond. None of them has the belief that she owns herself or that she could work for some independence. In her autobiography, Rhys spoke of her own beliefs as similar:

It seems to me that the whole business of money and sex is mixed up with something very primitive and deep. When you take money directly from someone you love it becomes not money but a symbol. The bond is now there. The bond has been established. I am sure the woman's deep-down feeling is "I belong to this man, I want to belong to him completely." It is at once humiliating and exciting.

Most of Rhys's characters have a divided consciousness of this self-destructive attitude. On the one hand, they feel lost and betrayed yet hopeful that the right male will rescue them; on the other hand, they realize that their submissiveness and passivity are essentially wrong, even though they feel powerless to change their situations.

In Rhys's fiction, the hatred of men for women does not engender feelings of solidarity among the women. On the contrary, in a typically "underdog" manner, they scapegoat one another. Dislike of other women takes three forms in the fiction: the young women are portrayed as vicious; the sexually mature women as competitive and ruthless, and older women as reminders of the humiliations of aging. In the story "Trio" (The Left Bank,) Rhys presents a Martinique girl of fifteen flirting with an older man who is probably her father:

She had exactly the movements of a very graceful kitten, and he, appreciative, would stop eating to kiss her . . . long, lingering kisses, and, after each one she would look around the room as if to gather up a tribute of glances of admiration and envy—a lonely, vicious little thing.

In Good Morning, Midnight the young girls at a restaurant table pick out Sasha to ridicule and ask one another loudly what an old woman like that is doing there. Sasha feels that they have attacked her as part of a game in which young women show themselves to advantage by laughing at an older woman. Surprisingly, Sasha accepts their evaluations and questions her right to exist since she is old, alien, and a stranger. The hostility that Rhys's younger heroines experience is more destructive because unexpected. Frankie, the upper class woman of "Till September Petronella" (Tigers Are Better-Looking,) tries to humiliate Petronella by calling her down as a cheap chorus girl. In Voyage in the Dark Anna Morgan is shocked by the way other women look at her:

But I was thinking it was terrifying—the way they look at you. So that you know that they would see you burnt alive without even turning their heads away; so that you know in yourself that they would watch you burning without even blinking once.

For their own protection, they believe, some of Rhys's women become anti-feminist. Lois and Marya, in Quartet, both know that they are Heidler's victims; yet they make the mistake of attacking one another instead of turning on Heidler, who began the menage à trois for his simple amusement.

Because they fear that age will rob them of their attractiveness to men, who are their only resource, Rhys's victims often project this fear in a loathsome hatred of elderly women. Petronella hopes that she will never have to age and swears that she will dye her hair any colour to avoid grey. Sasha hates herself because, at age forty, she feels useless. Audrey, of "The Insect World" (Sleep It Off, Lady,) wants older women to disappear so that they will not remind her of her fate:

In front of her stood an elderly woman with dank hair and mean-looking clothes. It was funny how she hated women like that. It was funny how she hated most women anyway. Elderly women ought to stay at home.

One reason for these attitudes is the equation of beauty with one's potential to be loved. The hunger to be beautiful and the obsessions for clothes and comfort that beset many characters are cloaks for their thirst to be loved, which, Rhys says, is "the real curse of Eve." Rhys believed that her culture had impressed upon all women that marriage was a woman's mission in life and that you were a failure if you did not attain this goal.

However, Rhys did not believe in love in any optimistic way. She seems to find in it something cruel and violent, even though she never gave up hope in it. The contradiction is cleared up by a statement in Smile, Please in which she claimed that she believed in love but not in humanity: "Because I believe that sometimes human beings can be more than themselves." That love is also cruel and violent is part of Rhys's philosophical position. She believed that the beautiful is something that human beings can only degrade and corrupt but never understand. As she wrote in a letter to Diana Athill, "Perhaps there is violence in all magic and all beauty" [The Letters of Jean Rhys, 1984].

In some of Rhys's fiction love and lust are entangled in the woman character's mind, especially if she is young or confused. In "Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose" (Sleep It Off Lady,) the elderly Captain Cardew takes twelve-year-old Phoebe on walks around the island. She is flustered by his continual, obsessive talk of love and ways of making 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.

He then thrusts his hand into her shirt and clamps it on her breast. The girl is sure that she is at fault and decides that no one will marry her because she has jeopardized her chastity. As Helen Nebecker has pointed out, something sinister has also occurred to Anna Morgan, who fantasizes that "I only dreamt it, it never happened." Many of Rhys's women are affected by the confusion of love with sex; but after each disaster they get up and stagger on, never realizing their mistake, waiting to be finished off by the next affair.

One exception to Rhys's anti-feminist fiction is her last novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, in which she goes beyond victimization by giving us an account of Antoinette's childhood experiences and linking them with the social and historical problems of West Indians in the Caribbean during the 1830s and 1840s. In many ways, all of Rhys's heroines have a colonial sensibility. This extends the importance of her fiction because there is a parallel between the way the British treat the creole immigrants in England and the way colonials in general are treated. . . .

Because she asserts herself within the limited context offered her, Antoinette is one of the lucky Caribbean women in Rhys's fiction. Problems are not resolved in her earlier novels Quartet, Voyage in the Dark, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and Good Morning, Midnight, or in her collections of short stories The Left Bank, Tigers Are Better-Looking, and Sleep It Off, Lady. The women in these novels and short stories are more typical of creole and Afro-Caribbean women presented in other Caribbean literature. They feel like outsiders in a cold country and a hostile culture. They remember the warm, relaxed atmosphere of the islands with a sense of nostalgia, of regret, and of tremendous confusion in identity. For all of the women characters examined here—Marya, Julia, Sasha, Antoinette, Audrey, Petronella, Selina, Anna, and Miss Verney—confusion in identity is the inheritance of prejudice directed against women who are figurative, if not literal, outsiders.