SOURCE: "The 'Liberated' Woman in Jean Rhys's Later Fiction," in Revista/Review Interamericana, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1974, pp. 264-72.

[In the essay below, Casey explores the development of strong female characters in Rhys's later short fiction. ]

Jean Rhys is best-known for her Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel that places her among West Indian writers for its concern with the alienation of the Creole after the Emancipation of 1833. Yet Wide Sargasso Sea is also significant in its rejection of the traditional belief in the superiority of men even in the most apparently equal male-female relationships that marks her works before World War Two. Within the same year as the publication of this novel, two scarcely known short stories—"I Spy a Stranger" and "Temps Perdi"—appeared that strike down even more fiercely at female submission to male dominance.

Critics tend to agree that the strength of Jean Rhys's early work is its harshly realistic portrayal of women too weak to move with a fast, cruel, masculine world. E. W. Mellown, Jr., in one of the few lengthy studies of Miss Rhys's fiction, discusses the four early novels as a body of work dealing with a woman at the mercy of her sexual desires [in Contemporary Literature, XIII, Autumn, 1972]. He points out that from the youthful Anna Morgan (Voyage in the Dark) to the aging Sasha Jansen (Good Morning, Midnight), Miss Rhys describes "woman in one of her archetypal roles"—that is, as I understand Professor Mellown's article, woman as a slave to her sexual appetites.

Yet despite the sordid life that each of these women in the early works endures, neither narrator nor protagonist questions the wisdom of rushing headlong after sex, love, and marriage. Only the reader recognizes the woman's ironic situation in these spare, straightforward tales. But in "I Spy a Stranger" and "Temps Pardi," Miss Rhys creates a character who, after a life of the sexual determinism Professor Mellown describes, rejects love, men, and most all other human beings as well. The early novels remain merely powerful examinations of the existence of the underdog. These two short stories suggest a drastic response to the traditional, destructive, male-dominated relationships that the Annas and Sashas take for granted. I think that an understanding of the route Miss Rhys's fiction has taken is incomplete without these recent works, for they represent a strength of will and an honest appraisal of self missing in the protagonists of her pre-war novels.

I

Titles of books to be written ten years hence, or twenty, or forty, or a hundred:—Woman an Obstacle to Insect Civilization? The Standardisation of Woman. The Mechanisation of Woman, Misogyny—well, call it misogyny—Misogyny and British Humour will write itself. (But why pick on England . . . It's no worse than some of the others). Misogyny and War, The Misery of Women and Evil in Man or the Great Revenge that Makes all other Revenges Look Silly. My titles go all the way from the sublime to the ridiculous.

I could have made my collection as long as I liked; there is any amount of material. But why take the trouble? It's only throwing myself against the wall again.

These are titles of books fabricated by Laura, an English woman forced home from Europe by the Second World War. At the time of the story—"I Spy a Stranger"—she lives in a small English town, where she is persecuted by townspeople who think she is a spy.

Laura has been unable to contact her friends in Europe. To forget them, and to protect herself against the hostility around her, she keeps to her room, reads, and collects newspaper clippings in a notebook. Ricky, her landlord and the husband of her cousin, Mrs. Hudson, turns against Laura as anonymous threatening letters turn up. The night of an air-raid, Laura listens to records in her room without turning out her lights. After the raid, the warden warns the Hudsons about Laura, then searches her room and confiscates her notebook. Eventually the notebook is notorious, because no one knows exactly what its purpose is, but everyone thinks it subversive. Soon even Mrs. Hudson believes Laura is crazy, and arranges to send her to a sanitarium where she might get a "rest." Unable to understand the woman, Mrs. Hudson watches her leave with indifference and relief.

Miss Rhys employs an omniscient, third person narrator in this story, who relates the episode of Laura through both Mrs. Hudson's and Laura's eyes. A conversation between Mrs. Hudson and her sister, Mrs. Trant, that spans the length of the story, reveals the observer's view of Laura's behavior. The narrator's interspersing of the excerpts from Laura's notebook that Mrs. Trant and Mrs. Hudson read, reveals Laura's mind and her understanding of the Hudsons' treatment of her. Without the second point of view, the reader would accept Mrs. Hudson's conclusion that Laura is mad. Ricky comments that "'The old girl's got no sense of humour at all, has she? . . . And she's not very sociable'." He misunderstands her seclusion, her incessant letter-writing and reading. In her notebook, Laura explains this behavior:

After I realised I was not going to get answers to my letters the nightmare finally settled on me. I was too miserable to bear the comments on what had happened in Europe—they were like slaps in the face.

I could not stop myself from answering back, saying that there was another side to the eternal question of who let down who, and when. This always ended in a quarrel, if you can call trying to knock a wall down by throwing yourself against it, a quarrel. I knew I was being unwise, so I tried to protect myself by silence, by avoiding everybody as much as possible. I read a great deal, took long walks, did all the things you do when you are shamming dead.

We catch hints here that the xenophobic residents of the village suspect Laura because she does not support wholeheartedly England's righteousness in the war with Germany. Laura is no traitor; she simply does not wish to choose sides in the struggle. The war is not political or nationalistic for her, but a source of suffering because it has wrenched her from her friends and her chosen way of life. Laura's stake in the war is personal. The Englishman's is ideological. This shifting of the narrator's attention, then, enables the reader to see Laura both as the world knows her, and as she knows herself.

Laura's connections with protagonists of past narratives by Miss Rhys are clear. She has lived abroad—in France and Eastern Europe—most of her life, because she hates England with its "unforgiving sky" and its "mechanical quality":

When I bought a ticket for the Tube, got on to a 'bus, went into a shop, I felt like a cog in a machine in contact with others, not like one human being associated with other human beings. The feeling that I had been drawn into a mechanism which intended to destroy me became an obsession.

Her aversion to England is as intense as that of Sasha Jansen, who feels suffocated by London. Laura delights in the color and texture of fabrics and objects, as do the earlier women. In her notebook she records her belongings: scarves, "reels of coloured cotton," jewelry, a cigarette-case, postcards. Like Marya Zelli (Quartet), she wonders why some people are "expert in mental torture," but "pretend blandly that it doesn't exist? Some of their glib explanations and excuses are very familiar. I often think there are many parallels to be drawn between—." Of course, Laura's experience at the Hudsons' would reinforce her belief in human cruelty, yet I cannot help but think as I read this statement that Laura never completes, that she refers to an affair similar to Marya Zell's with her married lover, H. J. Heidler. To escape her unhappiness, Laura reads incessantly and takes long walks—"all the things you do when you are shamming dead." Her comment is a haunting reminder of Sasha Jansen, who wants to close the lid of the coffin over herself. Finally, Laura's hysterical screaming and swearing as she is taken off to the sanitarium foreshadows the same behavior in Antoinette Cosway (Wide Sargasso Sea).

Despite these obvious similarities, Miss Rhys takes an entirely new tack in this short story. Previous heroines cling to the ideal of marriage and family, or at least of the comfort of an occasional lover. Anna Morgan is young enough to believe that she will someday marry one of her short-term flames. Marya Zelli has married, and although she rejects her husband, she does not reject love, but assumes that Heidler will fill in the gap that her husband leaves. Julia Martin (After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie) regrets the loss of her dream of husband and home, because a traditional marriage, even after her years of moving from man to man, seems the best way of life. Sasha Jansen shakes off her fear of human contact to go to bed with the strange man next door. She, at least, does not reject the chance of temporary warmth. Laura, however, has rejected almost all human contact. She has loved in the past, as her jottings in her notebook make clear: "... the ring he gave me . . . the blue envelope on which he wrote. . . ." In the early days of her stay with the Hudsons, Laura seeks her friends in Europe: all affection in her is not dead. Yet her strongest friendship is with a woman she calls Blanca, who speaks acidly of the "extraordinary attitude" of Englishmen towards women. This woman, obviously independent and scornful of men, influences Laura, for Laura moves beyond the subservience to men of the Annas and Sashas, to a defiance that is entirely new. I think it worth quoting an entire passage from this short narrative, because it is a startling comment on the problem of men stated, I suspect, long before women's liberation became fashionable:

There is something strange about the attitude to women as women. Not the 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 criticised, 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.

I amuse myself by making a collection of this propaganda. . . .

Laura not only decries the suppression of women by men, but also the willingness of women to repress themselves. Lois Heidler (Quartet) is typical of this repressed woman in that she supposedly winks at her husband's affair—because she believes herself emotionally superior to jealousy—then turns on his mistress with a cruelty that devastates Marya. Each of the protagonists I have noted, until Laura, plays along with this system. Because they cannot be human beings in their own right, these women take what affection they can from a man, and when he dumps them, take what money he will give. Theirs is a shameful existence totally dependent on the good will of former lovers. Laura recognizes that most women, whether they are adventuresses, or wives, suffer humiliation because they must cater to men. She asks Mrs. Hudson how she can "breathe after a lifetime of this"—"this" being her domestic routine with husband, cottage, and next-door neighbors. Mrs. Hudson and Mrs. Trant do not understand fully Laura's horror of women's lowly position: "'Do you know,' said Mrs. Hudson, 'there are moments—don't laugh—when I see what she meant? All very exaggerated, of course'." She fears the truth of Laura's statement and backs away from it. Her sister rejects it outright. She worries about her daughter—a "moody . . . fanciful, and self-willed" girl who likes Laura—because it is a "bad sign" when a girl likes unpopular people. Mrs. Trant has been gulled by the birth-to-death propaganda that Laura abhors. If she can cow her daughter with the same propaganda, she will do so. Men have suppressed her, she has repressed herself, and now she must in turn suppress her daughter. Laura's imaginary titles of books of the future leaves both women cold, then, because they think, or hope, that Laura's statements about the oppression of women are madness.

Miss Rhys offers a curious pun on the name of Emily Brontë that crystallizes her attitude toward women in this narrative and in Wide Sargasso Sea as well. Mrs. Hudson tells her sister that the man next door has a dog he calls Brontë. As a joke, he pretends to kick it, saying "Here's Emily Brontë or my pet aversion'." He does his act in Laura's presence. She flies at him; Ricky accuses her of having no sense of humour. It is significant that Miss Rhys refers to Emily Brontë in this work, and to Charlotte Brontë in Wide Sargasso Sea. Emily Brontë is unsympathetic to the brutality of Heathcliff, while her sister rationalizes the obtuse behavior of Rochester and the submission of Jane Eyre to him. Wide Sargasso Sea destroys Charlotte Brontë's gentle, sympathetic study of the master of Thornfield Hall, his mad wife in the attic, and his plain-Jane governess. She exposes Rochester's insensitivity; she reveals the tortured woman who is his wife. It is consistent, then, that Laura in her ramblings about the persecution of women should defend Emily Brontë, for the latter apparently represents to her a classical writer in line with her own thinking. Kicking the dog symbolizes relegating women to their "proper" place in society.

It is unfortunate that "I Spy a Stranger" remains relatively unknown, for it provides a departure from Miss Rhys's earlier assumption that the traditional roles for women are worth seeking. As I read this story my hands shook, because I realized that after years of rationalizing her protagonists' under-dog existence, Miss Rhys rejects it as inadequate. In "I Spy a Stranger," and "Temps Perdi" as well, she portrays a woman who has given up any hope of happiness with another human being. She lives isolated by her own choice.

II

"Temps Perdi" is a three-part study of an old, unnamed woman living more in the past than in the present. In Part One, she describes her life at "Rolvenden," a house on the east coast of England. She recalls in Part Two her life in Vienna, where she roamed the streets and beer halls with several Japanese officers and their French interpreters and secretaries. In Part Three, the woman remembers her visit after many years to the Caribbean island, Dominica, where she was raised. As a child she had heard about the reservation where the last of the Carib Indians live, and convinces Nicholas, the overseer of Temps Perdi, an estate near the Carib Quarter, to take her there. In the final paragraph of the story, the woman says that when she leaves "Rolvenden," she will write the words "temps perdi"—Creole for "wasted time"—on the looking-glass: "Somebody might see them who knows about the days that wait round the corner to be lived again and knows that you don't choose them, either. They choose themselves."

Miss Rhys returns to the contrast between the Caribbean and England in this narrative, although she does not suggest, as she does in Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea, that the tropical environment affects the woman's ability to adjust to England. This woman does hate England, however. She remarks, as the snow falls, that it was better the first time she saw it: ". . . it was a marvel, the only thing in England that hadn't disappointed me." Everything in England is beige and dull. A comparison of her descriptions of her English house and her Caribbean island quickly reveals her disparate attitudes:

"Rolvenden".. . . There is nothing in the house that you can say is ugly; on the other hand there is nothing that you can say is beautiful, impulsive, impetuous or generous. All is sparse, subdued, quiet and negative. . . .

Everything [at Temps Perdi] had run wild, but there was still hibiscus growing by the stone garden walls and butterflies made love over the thorny bougainvillea. . . . But the white-cedars at the end of the garden—the lowest about eighty feet high—had dropped their leaves and were covered with flowers, white flowers very faintly tinged with pink, so light and fragile that they fell with the first high wind. . . .

She uses no such lush imagery to describe England. In fact, she never says exactly what "Rolvenden" looks like, as though it were insignificant. Her powers of metaphor and her sense of pattern and color emerge only in contemplation of the tropical environment that produced her.

This Caribbean background suggests her resemblance to Anna Morgan. The tuneless piano in the woman's house reminds her of Creole songs and a Cuban circus act she saw as a child. Anna also recalls her past in the West Indies as she hears the fading tinkle of a piano in the slums of London. The woman of "Temps Perdi" echoes the woman in Miss Rhys's previous work in her response to a young woman's ecstatic declaration of love for everyone and everything: "'And then you wake up,' I thought." In her old age, she, like Sasha Jansen, runs and hides—"a real Carib"—until death comes with its "own anaesthetic." Yet this woman fears books as much as the other woman cherished them for their usefulness in blotting out the world. "I am almost as wary of books as I am of people. They also are capable of hurting you, pushing you into the limbo of the forgotten. They can tell lies—and vulgar, trivial lies. . . ." She demands truth in a way that Sasha Jansen or Julia Martin never would have. When two men from the village deliver coal to "Rolvenden," the woman notes their "silent, sly, shy laughter. I can imagine what they would have said about me if I had asked them indoors." That familiar tendency to attribute her perceptions of herself to someone else crops up again. But she catches herself, as earlier characters in Miss Rhys's fiction have not: "That's an exaggeration. They don't think or say anything that I would imagine they would think or say. Speak for yourself and no falsities. There are enough falsities; enough harm has been done."

The falsity this woman wishes most to correct is that women must submit to men. She, like Laura in "I Spy a Stranger," has learned after all her years of suffering and catering to men, that she must be independent. In "I Spy a Stranger," Laura writes in her notebook of the "extraordinary attitude" of Englishmen toward women. Miss Rhys picks up this thread, and combines it with the attitudes of Japanese, German, and West Indian men, in "Temps Perdi." The woman remarks in Part One that the English soldiers in the cottage near hers wash up with "venom" in the colorful bathrooms. Her implication is that these men, involved in warfare, trample on the pink, black, green, and blue that women have designed. Her attack on men becomes stronger when she remembers her days in Vienna. Captain Yoshi, after showing a photograph of his wife in European dress, declares that "Madame Yoshi is a most fortunate woman. Madame Yoshi knows that she is a most fortunate woman'." Yoshi then pulls out pictures of his children, but only discusses his daughters, not his son. "Too sacred?" the narrator wonders. Later, one of the secretaries reveals that the Japanese greatly admire the German military strength, and the excellent way in which the Germans and Englishmen treat women—not like the French, who "love women too much." The other secretary adds that she saw an Englishman redden when he unthinkingly called a woman, a "woman." He quickly corrected himself, calling her a "person." Although the narrator does not comment, her inclusion of this material is no mistake. English, German, and Japanese men alike seek to dominate women, to bestow their favour on them, to treat them coolly, as though they were not creative, energetic persons in their own right. Ironically, despite her bitter "And then you wake up," the narrator at this point in her life was herself a slave to this male dominance, as her strong recollections of the many dresses she could have worn only to please men make apparent. Finally, when she visits Salybia, the protagonist talks eagerly with Nicholas about the secret language of the Carib women that the men do not know. Here, at least, are women with a weapon against their own men. But in the village a black policeman brushes off the deaths of "two or three Caribs" in a riot as if they were dogs. "It might have been an Englishman talking," the narrator observes. Indeed, a recurrent theme in Jean Rhys's work is the failure of the European or Englishman to understand the native West Indian. The pretty, crippled Creole girl—half Carib, half some undisclosed strain—who poses eagerly for sightseers, symbolizes this West Indian exploited by outsiders, for she is the product of a Carib woman's submission to a European man. She symbolizes, furthermore, the woman prostituted for her good looks and willingness to please. Again, the narrator does not comment, but against the background of her portrayal of male dominance in England and Europe, this exposure of the same crime on her beloved island rounds out with bitterness her condemnation of men.

What then does a woman who has suffered exploitation do? Like the Carib whose picture she describes, the narrator is helpless against the enemy—people, especially men. Her solution, then, is not to submit as does the pretty Creole girl—who is only half Carib—but to be a "savage person—a real Carib. They run and hide." And so she chooses the chill of "Rolvenden" as her retreat from human cruelty. There she has time to reflect on her life, which, as she suggests in the title, has been a wasted time when she struggled to capture dreams that she finally learns are not worth the fight. With hope and spontaneity gone, she is an old shrew, without fear, waiting for death.