SOURCE: "The Later Writing," in Jean Rhys: A Critical Study, University of Texas Press, 1979, pp. 121-31.

[In the following excerpt, Staley examines the depiction of feminine consciousness in Rhys's later short fiction.]

Wide Sargasso Sea was both a critical and popular success and its publication had spectacular and far-reaching, if belated, effects on Rhys's literary career. For the first time—after over forty years—her work came to the attention of a substantial number of readers. On the basis of their success with Wide Sargasso Sea, her publisher brought back into print virtually all of her earlier work, and the steady sales encouraged Penguin to publish her work in paperback. By the early seventies all of her work was available in both hardcover and paperback. Her critical reputation from the middle sixties through the seventies has grown steadily. Critics have pointed primarily to her strong originality and her remarkable insight into the feminine psyche, and lying beneath most of the praise, is the collective recognition that Rhys simply writes like nobody else; her talent and intelligence encompass dimensions not found elsewhere in the modern English novel. The increasing interest in her work is to some extent a result of the growing attention that has been paid to women artists and of the recognition of women generally, but this development accounts only in part for her reputation. It is not only because readers are more attuned to the feminine consciousness that Rhys has gained such wide attention, but, more significantly, it has come to be recognised that her work explores with compassion and a rare intelligence the panic and emptiness of modern life and it does this within the consciousness of the female.

Since the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys has thus far published three books. The first, Tigers Are Better-Looking, appeared in 1968. A volume of short fiction, it includes nine stories from The Left Bank, a segment from Ford's original introduction, and eight additional stories, all of which had appeared in various periodicals throughout the 1960s. Sleep It Off, Lady (1976), a second collection of short stories, brings together a group of mostly unpublished stories, but many of them predate, at least in initial composition, the eight new stories in Tigers Are Better-Looking. A third volume, My Day (1975), is a privately printed gathering of three 'pieces', autobiographical sketches really. Given the careful composition and seemingly endless rewriting that Rhys does before reaching a final draft, these three volumes represent a substantial amount of work, especially when we consider the author's great age and delicate health. This later work does not exceed her earlier achievement, but, in fact, seems to parallel it on a smaller scale except for the last stories in Sleep It Off, Lady, with no slackness or diminution of her original powers. The later stories are characterised by those same qualities of subtle brilliance, acute observation, clarity of focus (in most of them), and that remarkable balance and sense of proportion which all of her mature work possesses. Furthermore, the new stories from Tigers Are Better-Looking and Sleep It Off, Lady represent her full development as a short-story writer. More ample in theme and range of sympathy, they also reveal a versatility and technical mastery of the genre that was only initiated in The Left Bank.

The first, longest, and one of the best stories in Tigers Are Better-Looking, 'Till September Petronella', deals with a young model, Petronella Gray, who lives in a bleak Bloomsbury bed-sitter and plans to spend a fortnight in the country with Marston, a young painter. Also staying in the cottage are his friend, Julian, a music critic, and Julian's current lover, Frankie. After one night there Petronella, no longer able to withstand the tensions in the house and Julian's verbal assaults, returns to London. The story is remarkable for its depiction of the surface and underlying tensions at this neurotic gathering. From the beginning the theme is clearly revealed and relentlessly pursued. The group at the cottage and the events described portray a war—as old and as brutal as any other—between the sexes. This story is closely related in theme to an uncollected story of Rhys's which appeared in Penguin Modern Stories 1 (1969), 'I Spy a Stranger', which also demonstrates the polarisation of the sexes, in a condition where men and women are natural adversaries. Images of the battlefield abound in 'I Spy a Stranger' and reflect the war that goes on between the sexes.

Although much younger, Petronella reminds us of Laura in 'I Spy a Stranger' in that she is like those women who draw male animosity simply by their presence, and in Petronella's case it seems she is unable to defend herself against men. As Petronella unpacks her things when she first arrives Frankie discusses with her the biological inferiority of women, and from there radiate the lines drawn in this war of social and sexual relationships between men and women. And even after Petronella exits through a window, events confirm that there is really no escape from the battle.

The title itself confirms and adds further ironic dimensions to the story's theme. Dates seldom appear in Rhys's work especially as they relate to historical events, but here a date confers important meaning to the story itself. After having stolen away from the cottage, Petronella is driven into town by a farmer, and while she waits for him to carry on some business in town before taking her to pick up her things at the cottage and putting her on a train to London, she sits in a pub eating tea and cakes. As she looks around the 'small, dark, stuffy room', her eyes come upon two calendars: 'One said January 9th, but the other was right—July 28th, 1914. . .' (ellipses in text). In only a few short weeks the war of guns and trenches would begin, and for the reader the desperate quality of life that Petronella lives is made all the more ominous, and a trim and more catastrophic ironic meaning is given by the title. September, when her 'friends' return from the country, far from bringing any relief, will only confirm the underlying human barbarism on a grander and more violent scale.

Of Rhys's earlier heroines Petronella is closest to Anna Morgan of Voyage in the Dark. She seems to be an extension of the Anna whom the doctor at the end of the novel following the abortion confidently predicted would be 'ready to start all over again in no time'. The careful composition of place at the beginning of the story, with its description of Petronella's Bloomsbury surroundings as she is preparing to leave for the country, characteristically frames the attitude of the heroine as it describes her world. The landscape itself pulses with feeling as Petronella prepares to quit this confining life for a brief period. She had, as so frequently happens to Rhys's heroines, 'struck a bad patch', and 'she hated those streets, which were like a gray nightmare in the sun'. Instead of being an escape from the bleak Bloomsbury world, Petronella's brief visit to the country brings out more clearly than ever to her the hopelessness of her situation, but, at the same time, the experience confirms for her the need to defend one's self against the enemy. Viewed on one level, the story can be seen as an indictment of easy masculine chauvinism and sexist attitudes which dominate most male—female relationships: as Petronella's experience reveals, a woman cannot afford innocence in this world, but neither is its loss a guarantee of survival if male aggression is indiscriminate. But at its deeper reaches the story explores the underside of behaviour and feeling as human beings knowingly and unknowingly torment each other, and the ultimate helplessness of women against male aggression.

Petronella is the Rhys feminine type that we have seen throughout her novels: intuitive, capable of bitter humour toward herself and those around her, trapped in a depressing environment, dependent upon and vulnerable to men and yet somehow steeled against what she knows will be eventual abuses. Petronella has not yet progressed very far along that inevitable downward spiral of life already travelled by Rhys's older heroines, who are wise in their knowledge of men but at the same time long for love; Petronella is young enough to build some defenses, but by the end of the story she is aware that ultimately they too will fail.

The four male characters in the story have been outlined for us in previous novels; they too embody in various ways (on a smaller scale, of course) the dominant male types and display the male attitudes toward women found in Rhys's novels. The weak Marston longs for a passionate relationship and yet fears it. He is not overtly cruel, but pathetic in his weakness that allows others to endure pain while he retreats into his private neurotic world. Marston allows Julian to attack and ridicule Petronella because males stand together against women no matter how antipathetic they are to each other. In Rhys's work it seems the stronger the male personality, the greater the capacity for human cruelty. The arrogant and hollow Julian draws strength from engaging in ridicule and cynicism. His tormented personality obviously seeks release through his mean verbal onslaughts at Frankie and Petronella. He is an example of the bullying male who, having exploited women, through guilt or perversity has a sadistic desire to show them up as insincere and even villainous. Such an image of the female is necessary to justify his own uses of them. Petronella sees clearly his malignancy and spiritual emptiness: his 'beautiful eyes were little mean pits and you looked down into them into nothingness'. The confident farmer who picks Petronella up along the road after she has escaped the cottage, and later takes her back to get her things and eventually puts her on the train for London, expresses more directly his attitude toward women. He sees his pleasures satisfied by what he believes is a fair and open exchange. With easy assurance he draws his stereotype of the male-female relationship, and the place women hold in his eyes: '"They like a bit of loving, that's what they like, isn't it? A bit of loving. All women like that. They like it dressed up sometimes—and sometimes not, it all depends. You have to know, and I know. I just know.'" And with that talent for flat, cutting irony which we see so frequently in Rhys's heroines, Petronella replies: '"You've nothing more to learn, have you?'"

The final male figure, Mr Melville, the young man whom she meets in a taxi upon arriving back at Paddington, is also a familiar Rhys type. Melville combines bravado with nervousness. Although not nearly so fully drawn, he reminds us, in his stops and starts with Petronella, of Horsfield in Mr Mackenzie. His advances, obvious but not without a leering charm, cause the bitter events at the cottage momentarily to recede from her thought. However, she recalls Marston's advice the night before: "Take my advice and grow another skin or two and sharpen your claws before it's too late. Before it's too late, . . . mark those words. If you don't, you're going to have a hell of a time.'" It is this advice and the nullifying effects of the entire visit, with its underlying tensions and Julian's ridicule and abuse, that prompt her to bare her 'claws'. She deals with Melville as directly as the combative Frankie dealt with Julian:

'We must see each other again.' he said. 'Please. Couldn't you write to me at—' He stopped. 'No, I'll write to you. If you're ever—I'll write to you anyway.'

. . . 'Do you know what I want? I want a gold bracelet with blue stones in it. Not too blue—the darker blue I prefer.'

'Oh, well.' He was wary again. 'I'll do my best, but I'm not one of these plutocrats, you know.'

'Don't you dare to come back without it. But I'm going away for a few weeks. I'll be here again in September.'

But as she returns to her room she is aware that it is a Pyrrhic victory, only one slight victorious confrontation in a losing war.

The theme of survival always complements the theme of suffering and helplessness in Rhys's fiction, and 'Till September Petronella' is no exception. Rhys's considerable sympathy for her female victims of continued male exploitation not only diminishes what could be mere morbidity, but offers insight into and understanding of the ways women battle against impossible odds. It is in this shadow of hopelessness that Rhys discovers a vitality in her heroines, such as Petronella, that exposes essential truths of human nature. Her stories frequently complement and draw attention to the themes of her novels, but stories such as 'Till September Petronella' with its subtle unity of tone and brilliant arrangement of detail remind us that Rhys's achievement does not lie exclusively with the novel.

Most of the remaining new stories in this collection recall both in setting and theme Rhys's earlier work. 'The Day They Burned the Books', for example, is set in the West Indies. It is a story of adolescent understanding and tenderness set against the caprice and ignorance of the adult world. Rhys has treated this subject before in such stories as 'Again the Antilles', but in this story she exposes a vengeful ignorance of which a child is the victim. 'Let Them Call It Jazz' returns to the exile in its woeful portrait of a West Indian woman immigrant whose only real possession is a melody she has composed in her head, which is taken from her for five pounds. She is left thinking: 'I don't belong nowhere really, and I haven't money to buy my way to belonging.' 'Outside the Machine' is a curious and interesting story, for it treats a subject that emerges frequently but is usually subdued in Rhys's fiction: women's relationships with each other. And this story ends on a note of kindness, of one woman toward another, that is indeed rare in Rhys's world. 'A Solid House', set in London during the blitz, also explores the tensions which emerge in the complex relationships women have with each other.

The most dramatically intense of the new stories is the last, 'The Sound of the River', a haunting and fearful account of a man and a woman who have rented a remote cottage next to a river. The woman, who narrates the story, is temporarily moved out of her obsessional and premonition-laden private world by the horrible reality of the man's death. After he had tried one night to comfort her and quell her obsessive fears, he had appeared to drift off to sleep. But when the narrator awakens to see the sun for the first time during their stay, she realises that the man is dead, that he died the night before and that she had lain next to him throughout the night. She comes to realise, too, that reality itself is every bit as disturbing and menacing as those fears locked inside of us. The river is analogous to the rhythm and turmoil of life and its passing as it moves in its endless course.

The stories in Sleep It Off, Lady can be seen collectively to form a kind of thematic coda, or retrospective chorus, to all of Rhys's previous work. If the less successful ones leave the reader with the feeling that this is material written long ago that for one reason or another was discarded, the majority confirm the clarity of focus that has always marked her work as well as that certainty of feeling within that narrow world she draws upon for her subject matter. The mood and view of the world that hovers over all of her work is securely present in the stories in this volume. The progression of the sixteen stories, moving from youth and adolescence to adulthood and, inevitably, to old age, from Dominica to London, Paris and, finally, to Devon, are recognisable to the reader as an echo of Rhys's previous fiction. We can also see in these stories a retrospective progression that reveals a life as well as a substantial art. The last story, ''I Used to Live Here Once', gathers up many of the qualities and attitudes characteristic of Rhys's art in its richly symbolic depiction of the ultimate separation that occurs between not only youth and age but between all human beings because of their fears and conflicting needs. It charts the perilous journey one takes in life to arrive at that point of impotent wisdom and awful knowledge.

The last four stories in Sleep It Off, Lady, treating as they do the loneliness and frequent humiliation of old age, reveal in their depth of feeling and intensity Rhys's sustained powers of observation and sympathetic understanding of her characters. Rhys's treatment of the dreadful circumstances of these aged victims reminds us in an uncanny way of the themes and outlook found in her stories of childhood disillusionment—as though the very old and very young share the same vulnerability and the world itself looks upon them with the same sense of exclusion, but they in turn see, precisely because they are outsiders, the whole enterprise of life with a clarity of vision that penetrates the vulnerable facade of hypocrisy and prejudice which society erects to protect itself. Actually it is in the vision of these outsiders and victims that we come closest to Rhys's own view of the world and to her central thematic concerns. The most fully realised stories in Sleep It Off, Lady are those which treat the lost innocence of youth as it becomes aware of the adult world and the aged as they attempt to cope in a world insensitive to them.

The first story in the volume, 'Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers', concerns the fate of Mr Ramage, a young Englishman who comes to Dominica to buy an estate, as 'remote as possible'. He weds a coloured girl of dubious reputation and attempts to 'go native'. But to cross such a cultural gap is impossible. His behaviour is regarded as highly eccentric by both the natives and the white population. He is bitterly maligned by the whites and finally killed by the blacks. On the periphery of these events, but central to the story's theme, is the young girl Rosalie's identification with and sympathy for Ramage.

In the opening scene Rosalie and her young friend observe the absurd figure cut by an elderly Englishwoman who rides up the mountain in the heat in her heavy, dark riding habit and carries a huge chunk of ice, held by a blanket, that drips on her knee. In its absurdity and humour, this scene foreshadows the more important but equally ludicrous scene which seals Ramage's fate with the white community. Rosalie defends the old woman by saying, 'she wants her drinks cold', while her friend dismisses her as crazy. However, behaviour such as the old woman's is acceptable because it is merely identified as evidence of the legendary eccentricities within the English character.

But eccentricity on the part of the white man who identifies with the natives is labelled as barbaric by the majority of the whites and occasions less tolerant reaction. In a marvellously funny scene, Mr Eliot and his wife are out looking at some young nutmeg trees and have stopped to heat water for tea when they run into Ramage 'coming out from under the trees. He was burned a deep brown, his hair fell to his shoulders, his beard to his chest. He was wearing sandals and a leather belt, on one side of which hung a cutlass, on the other a large pouch. Nothing else.' They are both shocked by the spectacle of this naked Englishman, but Mrs Eliot, with a degree of sophistication never seen before in the Islands says, '"Mr Ramage, the kettle is just boiling. Will you have some tea?'" But this little episode as recounted by Mr Eliot to the white settlement seals Ramage's fate, and he is hounded by both the natives and the whites until he is killed.

Rosalie sympathises strongly with Ramage and reveals in her sympathy a union with him which predicts her own fate. Her sensitivity will make her as vulnerable to the world as Ramage's eccentricities have made him. She is one of those women about whom Rhys will write again and again, whose special qualities of feeling inevitably lead to suffering and torment. Rather than finding support for their feelings, women such as Rosalie are repeatedly victimised by men and shunned by other women.

The second story in the volume, 'Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose', deepens the theme of the lost innocence of childhood and focuses more emphatically on the intrusion of the adult world and its dramatic and far-reaching effects. The young girl in the story, Phoebe, is left at the conclusion of the tale with her entire outlook on life shaken, but her experience has become for her an awakening, a kind of rite of passage into adulthood:

Well there was one thing. Now she felt very wise, very grown-up, she could forget these childish worries. She could hardly believe that only a few weeks ago she, like all the others, had secretly made lists of her trousseau, decided on the names of her three children. Jack. Marcus. And Rose.

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

Although something is destroyed, and 'some vague irreparable loss saddened her', there is something to be gained, 'the fun of being grown-up and important, of doing what you wanted instead of what you were told to do, would start'.

This manifest change in Phoebe's life is brought about by her encounter and subsequent visits with an old sea captain who takes her on long walks and one day places his hand on her breast. He does not fondle her, nor does Phoebe feel any sexual pleasure, but the psychological effect upon her is profound. She feels violated, seduced, but gradually she begins to feel as well that she has been initiated into another realm of experience, and somehow set apart from her friends, and, because it is also secret, separated from her family and drawn into a strange union with the randy old captain. Phoebe sees more of Captain Cardew, and during their long walks together he delights in telling her of love and passion; Phoebe is drawn to an identification with him that is no less intense because she senses something wicked in him and thus in herself. What we see in both of these stories is not only the way the intrusion of the adult world erases the protective cover of childhood from the young heroines, but, more importantly, the way in which these experiences, indirect in the first story, reveal to Rosalie and Phoebe particular sympathies within themselves to values and sensibilities which are opposed to those of the social world in which they were brought up. Rhys's account of these early experiences, although published much later, seem to prefigure the more developed and ultimately more self-destructive female sensibilities that we see in the heroines of her novels. Without making too much of these short works, the reader, nevertheless, gets the feeling that they are brief explorations into the early formation of a particular female consciousness that gradually sets itself apart from the established values and behaviour expected of women. These are young women who will choose ultimately to accept the consequences in a quest for freedom. And they somehow know full well from the beginning the nature of their risk, but because they do not know men they really have no sense of how perilous their journey will become.

While the early stories in Sleep It Off, Lady take us backward in a way, the last four stories extend the range of Rhys's own sympathies as she treats with considerable feeling and power the inevitable humiliation and loneliness that comes to the elderly near the end of their lives. These stories are remarkable for their intensity and depth of feeling; they also possess a closeness to the experience in style and utterance that the other stories in the volume, for all their polish, seem to lack. As the characters in subsequent stories grow older and approach death the narrative voice seems to reside more deeply in the experiences as they unfold and become increasingly horrible. In 'Rapunzel, Rapunzel' the narrator, who is herself elderly, lies next to an old woman, Mrs Peterson, in a convalescent home and watches admiringly as she brushes her hair. She realises that, 'she must have taken great care of it all her life and now there it all was, intact, to comfort and reassure her that she was still herself. A few days later a barber comes in and Mrs Peterson requests a trim and a shampoo. The barber with 'a large pair of scissors' nearly cuts all of her beautiful hair to the roots, and tells her, 'You'll be glad to be rid of the weight of it, won't you dear?' With a few clips of the scissors Mrs Peterson is robbed, not of her vanity, but of the last comfort and ressurance she had left, and shortly thereafter she dies. Told from the point of view of the narrator-observer, who can identify with the old woman, the story's brutally sad ending achieves enormous meaning. Rhys's irony is brilliantly effective because it is dependent on the narrator's cold recognition of the callousness with which Mrs Peterson is stripped of her last symbol of self-respect. And the narrator's own protective devices are revealed in the closing lines of the story, which make us all the more aware of the narrator's own struggle for life—a struggle all the more intense because of the nearness of death and rejection by the living. Rejection in one form or another lies deeply within these stories of old age. The title story, 'Sleep It Off, Lady', the most dramatically intense of the stories, traces the fears and obsessions of the elderly to a horrible conclusion. And the last story, 'I Used to Live Here Once', mentioned earlier, offers a concluding vision of the inevitable separation between those who, to use the story's own symbolism, have crossed the stream and those who have not. A terrifying vision really, but the power of Rhys's art has always resided in her ability to see most clearly those things within us that separate and drive us apart.

The range of her subject matter has never been wide, but her understanding of what it is to have been a woman in this century is comprehensive. Written in a style that brings form and content into a harmonious whole rarely equaled in modern fiction, her work reveals in its humour, sympathy, and understanding a fully realised and significant portrait of the female consciousness in the modern world.