SOURCE: "European or Caribbean: Jean Rhys and the Language of Exile," in Literature and Exile, edited by David Bevan, Rodopi, 1990, pp. 77-89.

[In the following excerpt, Wilson explores the impact of Rhys's exile on her work.]

The question of identity in Jean Rhys' life and fiction is inextricably bound to the condition of exile that shaped her perceptions and those of her characters. Rhys was truly a woman without a country. England, where she lived for most of her adult life, was a cold, unreceptive place for the writer. Recognition came too late to compensate for a lifetime of loneliness and financial difficulty. The question of Rhys' West Indian roots is even more problematic. The daughter of a Welsh father and a white Creole mother, Rhys felt exiled even before she moved to England because she was cut off from the black community in Dominica. Thus Rhys suffered from what Amon Saba Saakana describes as "the mental condition of double alienation" [in The Colonial Legacy in Caribbean Literature, 1987]. Doubly dispossessed, Jean Rhys differs from black West Indian exiles who, as George Lamming points out [in The Pleasures of Exile, 1960], "could never have felt the experience of being in a minority".

Jean Rhys is both Prospero and Caliban, a descendant of white colonisers but also, as a woman, colonised and excluded by the patriarch's language. "Carib Indian and African slave, both seen as the wild fruits of Nature, share equally that spirit of revolt which Prospero by sword or language is determined to conquer" [Lamming]. In her own way, Rhys also shares that revolutionary spirit: she wrests Prospero's language from him, inverts and subverts it in her fiction, and turns the empty space between two worlds into a privileged place, the exile's domain, by means of what Edward Said calls a "contrapuntal" awareness.

The uniquely literary nature of exile has been examined by Said, Andrew Gurr, and Michael Seidel, among others. According to Gurr, [in Writers in Exile: The Identity of Home in Modern Literature, 1981] exile has had an "enormously constructive" effect on writers who were born in the colonies and fled to the metropolis, since it creates in them "a stronger sense of home" and thus "a clearer sense of [their] own identity" than is available to their metropolitan counterparts. Questioning this essentially romantic view, Said writes [in Harper's Magazine, September, 1984.]: "To think of exile as beneficial, as a spur to humanism or to creativity, is to belittle its mutilations. . . . For exile is fundamentally a discontinuous state of being. Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past." Yet Said recognises the literary nature of exile, in that the unreality of the exile's new world resembles fiction. Furthermore, the exile's double or contrapuntal vision can lead to a restored and enhanced identity and even a more meaningful life.

Michael Seidel [in Exile and the Narrative Imagination, 1986] similarly views the exilic condition as a paradigm for narrative strategy:

.. . for narrative performs not only as an experiential rival but as an aesthetic substitute or supplement. Exilic imagining in this sense is both the mirror and the "other" of narrative process; mimesis becomes an alien (or allegorical) phenomenon that establishes fictional sovereignty on fictional ground. . . . The narrative imagination inhabits exilic domain where absence is presence, or, to put it the other way around, where presence is absence.

While Seidel focuses "on exile as an enabling fiction" and not on the actual conditions or politics of exile, the autobiographical nature of Jean Rhys' fiction accommodates such a double perspective. And the purely aesthetic concerns expressed by Seidel do not address the real pathos of exile, the extent to which exiles, and women in particular, are often relegated to a position of powerlessness in their adopted land. This is the essence of Jean Rhys' vision. In her novels and stories, matters of race, gender, class, and ethnicity are intensified by the contrapuntal vision of exile, which highlights the interplay of power structures within British, West Indian, and Continental societies. . . .

[In] two of Rhys' short stories, .. . the exile's privileged perspective, combined with a semi-documentary style, reconstructs an image of Europe after World War I that in some ways resembles Christopher Isherwood's pre-World War II Germany in The Berlin Stories, especially the distanced yet nonjudgmental point of view that distinguishes both authors' vignettes. In "Vienne", England displaces Dominica as the "absent presence", for this story parallels experiences in Rhys' life that occurred several years after the events recalled in Voyage in the Dark. The pregnant narrator, Francine, and her husband Pierre are thinly disguised versions of Rhys and her first husband, Jean Lenglet, when they lived on the Continent during the years following the Great War, an exciting time when many people were involved in the dangerous but highly profitable business of currency exchange.

Francine's exilic perspective approaches the "scrupulous subjectivity" described by Edward Said as the ideal stance for the exile:

If the exile is neither going to rush into an uncritical gregariousness nor sit on the sidelines nursing a wound, he or she must cultivate a scrupulous (not indulgent or sulky) subjectivity. . . . For there is considerable merit to the practice of noting discrepancies between various concepts and ideas and what they actually produce.

But "Vienne" is one of Rhys' early stories, and as such it is tainted by "uncritical gregariousness". A Japanese officer is a "poor dear" and an English translator a "marvellous person"! There is an indulgent chattiness to Francine's insistence—"I mustn't cry, I won't cry"—that is absent from a much later version of this episode in "Temps Perdi", and a comparison of these two stories attests to the development and refinement of Jean Rhys' contrapuntal or exilic vision over a period of approximately forty years. A third story, "I Spy a Stranger", from the same period as "Temps Perdi", shows how the subject of misogyny accrues added political significance with the advent of World War II. All three stories overlap in terms of Rhys' life experiences, and consequently, when examined together, they disclose the exilic imagination as it develops both in historic time and in narrative space.

In "Vienne" and "Temps Perdi", misogyny is seen as a common denominator among the German, the Japanese, and the English officers who frequent Sacher's Hotel in Vienna during the summer of 1921. In the earlier story, Francine explains with characteristic directness that:

Hato [a Japanese officer] was a great joy. He despised Europeans heartily. They all did that, exception made in favor of Germany—for the Japanese thought a lot of the German army and the German way of keeping women in their place. They twigged that at once. Not much they didn't twig.

When Rhys retells this story in "Temps Perdi", a Japanese officer's affinity for Germanic misogyny is presented less directly. The nameless narrator recalls the typist Simone's reconstruction of Captain Yoshi's confidences:

"Well", I said, "He looked as if he were telling you all his secrets."

"He was", Simone said, "he was. Do you know what he was saying? He was saying how much he admires the Germans. He said they'll soon have the best army in Europe, and that they'll dominate it in a few years He said the French love women too much. He said only the Germans know how to treat women. The Germans and the English think the same way about women, he said, but the French think differently. He said the English and the French together won't last another year, and that they are splitting up already."

Although less direct in terms of narrative structure, the "Temps Perdi" passage is more far-reaching than the one from "Vienne", since at a distance of forty years Rhys associates the Germans' attitude toward women with their later attempt to dominate Europe militarily.

There are other significant differences between the two stories. The youthful Francine in "Vienne" has internalised Prospero's attitudes; she uses the language of the patriarchy when she describes women in terms of their "podgy hands", "thick ankles", and "enormous" feet—women being equal to the sum of their bodily parts. Her goal for her own appearance is to achieve a doll-like look by means of make-up and "stuff dropped in [her eyes] to make the pupils big and black". The much older narrator in "Temps Perdi" recalls her youthful preoccupation with pretty dresses, but the passages critical of other women's appearance have been expunged.

Rhys launches a direct attack on misogyny in "I Spy a Stranger", which is also written in the first person, although the character who corresponds to Francine of "Vienne" and the nameless narrator in "Temps Perdi" is here not the narrator but rather her cousin Laura. Like Francine, Laura has lived in Central Europe, returning to England only when she was "forced to". In her exercise-book, Laura writes about being unable "to bear the comments on what had happened in Europe . . . the eternal question of who let down who, and when", a passage that recalls Francine's despair when Pierre admits "that he had lost money—other people's money—the Commission's money—Ishima had let him down". Laura's cousin, Marion Hudson, is pressed by her husband and her irate neighbours to expel Laura from the Hudson household and force her to return to London, now that the blitz is over. Laura's unsociable, bookish ways, but especially her Central European connections, have turned public opinion against her. Laura is suspected of "trying to pass information on to the enemy", and her exercise-book is confiscated by the police as evidence.

While the exercise-book reveals no evidence that Laura is a spy, it does contain the most blistering condemnation of English misogyny to be found in all of Rhys' fiction. Laura recalls:

. . . those endless, futile arguments we used to have when we all knew the worse was coming to the worst. The world dominated by Nordics, German version—what a catastrophe. But if it were dominated by Anglo-Saxons, wouldn't that be a catastrophe too? Then, of course, England and the English. . . . There is something strange about their attitude to women as women. Not dislike (or fear). That isn't strange of course. But it's all so completely taken for granted, and surely that is strange. It has settled down and become an atmosphere, or, if you like, a climate, and no one questions it, least of all the women themselves. There is no opposition. The effects are criticized, for some of the effects are hardly advertisements for the system, the cause is seldom mentioned, and then very gingerly. The few mild ambiguous protests usually come from men. Most of the women seem to be carefully trained to revenge any unhappiness they feel on each other, or on children—or on any individual man who happens to be at a disadvantage. In dealing with men as a whole, a streak of subservience, of servility, usually appears, something cold, calculating, lacking in imagination.

But no one can go against the spirit of a country with impunity, and propaganda from the cradle to the grave can do a lot.

Laura amuses herself in the exercise-book by inventing titles for future books:

Woman an Obstacle to the Insect Civilization? The Standardization of Woman, The Mechanization of Woman . . . Misogyny and British Humour. . . . Misogyny and War, The Misery of Woman and the Evil in Men or the Great Revenge that Makes all other Revenges Look Silly.

Through Laura, Jean Rhys has aligned herself with Caliban, with the black slave and the Carib Indian who have been "colonised by language, and excluded by language". In England, Rhys, like George Lamming's exiled Caliban:

... does not feel the need to understand an Englishman, since all relationships begin with an assumption of previous knowledge, a knowledge acquired in the absence of the people known. This relationship with the English is only another aspect of the West Indian's relation to the idea of England.

Rhys' "idea of England" is complicated by the fact that in her life and her fiction, England represents both the "present absence"—in Voyage in the Dark, Anna Morgan's dark, frowning London houses "all alike all stuck together"—and the "absent presence"—Francine's imagined place of refuge from the terrifying events that force her and Pierre to flee from Hungary when Pierre's mismanagement of other people's money gets them in trouble with the law. Anna, exiled in England, longs for the West Indies; Francine, adrift in Central Europe, insists: "We must go to London". Pierre warns her not to count on help from her English friends, but Francine persists. As the two later stories reveal, Pierre was right. For the older version of Francine in "Temps Perdi", England is "the land of the dead"; and in "I Spy a Stranger", Laura has discovered that "coming back to England was the worst thing [she] could have done, that almost anything else would have been preferable".

England, for Jean Rhys, was "perhaps the greatest disappointment of her life and one she never stopped resenting." But as an emblem of the exilic condition, the idea of England plays a crucial role in the unfolding of Rhys' contrapuntal vision. Like Voyage in the Dark, "Temps Perdi" juxtaposes England and the West Indies, though structurally the works are quite different. Whereas Anna Morgan's West Indian memories and English experiences overlap in the text as in her mind, the narrator in "Temps Perdi" separates her experiences in England, on the Continent, and in the West Indies. In the process, she travels through time and space to a mythical place where women speak a secret language.

Section One of "Temps Perdi" is itself divided into two time frames. The narrator, apparently fairly advanced in years, recalls her stay, at some point in her past, in an English country house whose coldness in turn reminds her of Vienna. Section One thus slips gracefully into the second section—"The Sword Dance and the Love Dance"—set in Vienna shortly after World War I. Section Two ends with the narrator's remark that the liberating effect of memory will turn her into "a savage person—a real Carib", a phrase that provides the transition into Section Three: "Carib Quarter".

The third section describes the narrator's brief return visit to the West Indies and to an estate called Temps Perdi, which in the Creole patois "does not mean, poetically, lost or forgotten time, but, matter-of-factly, wasted time, lost labor". This section contains both: the "wasted" effort of the narrator's disappointing visit to Salybia, the Carib Quarter, and the "lost" time of a (probably apocryphal) account of the "original West Indians", who presumably inhabited the islands before the Caribs came from the South American mainland and the Spaniards from Europe. According to a book once read by the narrator, the male members of this aboriginal people were killed by the Spaniards and the Caribs, or deported to Haiti:

But the book, written by an Englishman in the 1880s, said that some of the women, who had survived both the Spanish and the Caribs . . . had carried on the old language and traditions, handing them down from mother to daughter. This language was kept a secret from their conquerors, but the writer of the book claimed to have learned it.

Local West Indian custom holds that the Carib women have inherited this "language that the men don't know".

Despite the narrator's disclaimer regarding the nineteenth-century author's excess of imagination, this idea of an all-female aboriginal language is emblematic of the exile's true "home"—a language untainted by Prospero's value because it predates the white man's rule. The language of the patriarchy reinforces the distance between persons of different race, creed, class, or sex. Even within a group, feelings of difference and hostility are maintained by means of language, as in the distinction made throughout Voyage in the Dark between women and girls, ladies and tarts, virgins and non-virgins. By keeping women divided among themselves, the language of Prospero protects its interests.

But the secret language of the Carib women has had the opposite effect: it has forged a bond among women that has survived incursions from two continents, linking generations of mothers and daughters in a conspiracy of eloquent silence.

Whether this secret language does or ever did exist among the Carib women is beside the point; its significance within the context of Jean Rhys' life and work should be clear. Toward the end of "Temps Perdi", the narrator lies "caged under a mosquito net" thinking: "Now I am home, where the earth is sometimes red and sometimes black. Round about here is ochre—a Carib skin." Rhys' home is neither the West Indies of her "lost" childhood nor the England of her many and sometimes "wasted" adult years. Home for Jean Rhys is a language like "a Carib skin", a mosquito net of language that protects and confines the writer, "a prisoner in a cell of small peepholes". Safe within the Carib body of her text, Jean Rhys is also limited by her exilic condition. A white girl in a black society that she envied and longed to be a part of, a West Indian in the imperial English system that reinforced her sense of powerlessness both as a colonial and as a woman: Rhys perceived both worlds as though from a very great distance and felt herself cut off from other people. But this contrapuntal point of view is for Rhys, as it is for Edward Said and other exiles, a source of power and inspiration: "Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience (...). Seeing 'the entire world as a foreign land' makes possible originality of vision."

In a poem about the novelist [in Collected Poems 1948-1984, 1986], Derek Walcott describes the child Jean Rhys, whose sigh transcends the barriers between two cultures:

And the sigh of that child
is white as an orchid
on a crusted log
in the bush of Dominica,
a V of Chinese white
meant for the beat of a seagull
over a sepia souvenir of Cornwall,
as the white hush between two sentences.

A fragile white flower of the Caribbean transplanted to the cold brown English soil, Jean Rhys made her home in neither place. Rather, she lived and continues to thrive in a linguistic space, the "white hush between two sentences".