[In the following essay, Thomas utilizes Rhys's “Let Them Call It Jazz” to discuss the tension between the West Indian colonial milieu of her writing and the modernist European perspective and places the story within an historical and feminist context.]

Like Mary Lou Emery's, my project on Rhys negotiates the ‘tension between the two spaces or contexts of Rhys's writing—the West Indian colonial context and the modernist European—as it is inscribed in terms of sex/gender relations in her novels' (Emery 1990: xii). The translation of Rhys's fiction into an exclusively modernist European cultural and literary context—a characteristic move in Rhys criticism—exhibits the ‘logic of translation-as-violation’ discussed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1986) in ‘Imperialism and sexual difference’: such translations are inadequately informed by a sense of the ‘subject-constitution of the social and gendered agents in question’ (1986: 235), the author or her protagonists. The translation of Rhys's fiction into a West Indian or post-colonial context is an effort to read it ‘other-wise’, a term Molly Hite uses in her acute analysis of the refusal of ‘the prevailing constructions of gender and genre’ (1989: 6) by women writers. This effort is occasionally effected, as Emery suggests combined ‘feminist and Third World’ readings of Rhys are, by ‘a structural analogy between colonial hierarchies and sexual oppression that still positions the protagonist as a victim who lacks agency and offers little or no resistance’ (Emery 1990: xii). These strategies of translation, I have argued elsewhere, often insufficiently question the terms and ethics of exchange of gendered knowledges of women and colonialism (S. Thomas 1990b). My project historicizes Rhys's fiction in the gaps, contradictions, and hybridized improvizations of her West Indian colonial and modernist European cultural and literary contexts. Feminist ahistorical, indeed anti-historicizing, approaches to Rhys render ‘ungrammatical’¹ her negotiation of first-wave British feminist discourse and European modernism; and effects which operate as implicit critique or ironizing commentary on modern European feminist tradition or European modernism have gone largely unnoticed in her fiction.

Rhys's ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’, first published in The London Magazine in February 1962, and collected in Tigers Are Better-Looking (1968), provides an appropriate point of departure. The history of Caribbean emigrations and the lack of legal restriction on the rental terms of a furnished bedsit in Notting Hill inscribed in the story establish its 1950s setting. Rhys alludes in ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ to two generic first-wave British feminist narratives—the militant suffragette as martyr and the perils of the working woman. The Caribbean voice cynically dismisses pre-existent generic plots because they do not inscribe her reality: ‘I don't think it's at all like those books tell you’ (Rhys 1972: 59). The intertextuality of Rhys's plot and these feminist narratives signals a commentary on the ‘indifference’ of British law, first-wave British feminist discourse, and the ‘doxa of socialities’ of plausible narratives. I use and extend Luce Irigaray's concept of indifference, but also proceed to undermine the unitary sign of ‘the woman’. Indifference has been summarized as:

a) Within the masculine order, the woman is indifferent in the sense of non-different or undifferentiated because she has no right to her own sexual difference but must accept masculine definitions and appropriations of it.

b) As a consequence, she is indifferent in the sense of detached or remote because of the imposture of her position.

c) From a feminine perspective, however, she might experience difference differently, in relation to her resemblance to another woman rather than to a masculine standard.

(Irigaray 1985b: 220)

Rhys works to demaximize, that is to undermine the ‘doxa of socialities’—the maxims—which render plausible² the unitary sign of the citizen in British law, the indifferent sign of the racial and class other in first-wave British feminist narratives, and the indifferent sign of blackness in the racial stereotype. Her strategy involves the adoption of a black Creole voice; ‘stylized patois’³ functions as the principal sign of the authenticity of Caribbean difference.

In ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ Selina Davis, a young seamstress who has emigrated from Martinique to London, tells her story of finding a home and job in Britain. That process is complicated by racial discrimination and the disjunctive technological times of Martinique and London. Her Notting Hill landlady and her neighbours in an unnamed suburb have the power to objectify her in terms of racial stereotype; the police and the judiciary believe the evidence of white Britons with property. After Selina is evicted from her Notting Hill bedsit, she is offered protection by a shadowy Mr. Sims, who, it is implied, attempts to recruit her into prostitution. Selina is arrested twice—once for being drunk and disorderly, and once for unpremeditated window-breaking. On the second charge she is sent to Holloway Prison. The walls of Holloway, made analogous through allusion with the walls of the biblical Jericho, the accursed city, make literal the imprisonment of Selina within racial stereotype and lack of class prerogative. Acutely conscious of the spectacle made by the ‘different’ motility of her body and quality of her voice in front of the police and the judge, she does not feel she can prove her counter-charges against the landlady and the racist neighbours, and retreats into silence as a tactic to maintain integrity in the face of such invalidation in the time of the story. In the time of the narration of the reconstructed story Selina assumes authority over the representations of her and her property by others.⁴ ‘So let them call it jazz,’ Selina thinks, specifically with reference to a musician's appropriation and marketing as jazz of a precious song she picked up in Holloway. The gift of the song, with words glossed as ‘cheerio and never say die’ (Rhys 1972: 60), offered her a measure of spiritual freedom. But the authority she gains over her experience by voicing her story allows her to shrug off other representations of her in terms of jazz. Jazz also means ‘meaningless or empty talk’, ‘sexual intercourse’, and ‘to move in a grotesque or fantastic manner; to behave wildly’ (OED). Selina can shrug off the police and the judge's apparent perceptions of her efforts at explanation as meaningless spectacle; the neighbours' looks, which place her as a ‘wild animal’; their complaints about the obscenity of her Caribbean dancing; their construction of her as a ‘tart’; and the unspeakable of the italics of the wife's ‘At least the other tarts that crook installed here were white girls’ (ibid.: 54)—the fear of miscegenation—which structures their sense of the contamination of cross-racial contact. The preservation of the song of solidarity intact in memory is a metonym of the horizon of spiritual freedom, but Selina acknowledges: ‘Even if they played it on trumpets, even if they played it just right, like I wanted—no walls would fall so soon’ (ibid.: 63).

After Rhys herself was briefly imprisoned in Holloway in 1949—so that a psychiatric evaluation could be made after she had been convicted on charges of assault—she ironically remembered the sacrifices of the suffragettes (which have been read historically as the origin of feminist modernity) and planned to write a story called ‘Black Castle’,⁵ words which are used of Holloway in ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ (ibid.: 57). However, one does not need such extra-textual support to justify a reading of ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ in the context of suffragette history. Appearance in a British court on charges of disorderly conduct and malicious damage to property (by window-breaking), and imprisonment in Holloway are staple elements of the first-wave feminist generic narrative of the suffragette as martyr. Disruptions of public meetings, demonstrations, and ‘the political argument of the stone’ (C. Pankhurst 1959: 97) to attack ‘the secret idol of property’ (E. Pankhurst 1914: 266)⁶ were militant tactics of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). Imprisonment in Holloway was an important rite of passage for WSPU members; it also became part of its iconography of martyrdom which Lisa Tickner (1987) has analysed brilliantly. Rhys alludes in constructions placed on Selina's behaviour by prison staff to aspects of suffragette experience: attempted suicide by throwing oneself over a railing (1972: 58); and hunger-striking (ibid.: 59). Emily Wilding Davison, who eventually succeeded in committing suicide for the cause in 1913 by colliding with the King's horse on the Derby course, had attempted suicide by throwing herself from a Holloway balcony in 1912; she was honoured with a large WSPU funeral cortège, bearing banners with, among others, the words ‘Give me Liberty or Give me Death’ (Tickner 1987: 138-40). By August 1909 hunger-striking was normal WSPU practice in Holloway. Given Selina's repeated claim that the police and the judiciary discriminate against those without material property, Rhys's choice of Selina's trade, seamstress, may also hint obliquely at the fate of ‘Jane Warton’, seamstress, the cross-class disguise assumed by Lady Constance Lytton to prove class discrimination in the treatment of suffragette prisoners. Lytton had a heart condition, the state of which is carefully documented in her Prisons and Prisoners (1914); Rhys's Selina makes several references to the condition of her heart—her emotional well-being—and the hard-heartedness of Britons. That Rhys may have read Prisons and Prisoners is also suggested by Selina's carrying of the song as a ‘comforter’, a belief in her ‘own power to exist freely’ when outside prison. This action replays and reinflects patronizing advice offered in Lytton's ‘Dedication to Prisoners’. Lytton urges prisoners to seek ‘release from all that is helpless, selfish, and unkind’ in themselves.

Unless you are able to keep alight within yourself the remembrance of acts and thoughts which were good, a belief in your own power to exist freely when you are once more out of prison, how can any other human being help you? … But if you have this comforter within you, hourly keeping up communication with all that you have known and loved of good in your life, with all the possibilities for good that you know of—in your hands, your mind, your heart—then when you are released from prison, however lonely you may be, or poor, or despised by your neighbours, you will have a friend who can really help you.

(Lytton 1914: ix-x)

The generic narrative of suffragette prisoners as martyrs contested the authority of representations and constructions of them as criminals (in the eyes of the law) and as grotesques (in the eyes of anti-suffrage public opinion). These representations and constructions undermined the legitimacy of their constitution as ‘politicized speaking subjects in the symbolic order’ of a white, middle-class culture. Using and extending Kristeva's theorization of abjection, I have argued that in the hostile public opinion:

As the borders between the proper and the improper, the clean and the unclean, order and disorder [of conventional femininity] are crossed by the suffragette … it is implied that the degeneracy and lawless licence of the demand for the vote may be read from the body and the voice.

(S. Thomas 1990a)

Typically the body and voice are mapped as grotesque, as boundaries of sexual, racial, animal, or class difference are crossed. In telling their own stories as propaganda, as speeches from the dock, as autobiography, as history, suffragettes contested such stereotyping representations, attempting to regain authority over their own discourse on the ‘battlefield of representations, on which the limits and coherence of any given set are constantly being fought for and regularly spoilt’ (T. J. Clark, quoted in Tickner 1987: 151).

Rhys's Selina has available to her two of the same sites of contestation of stereotyping and criminalizing representations which undermine her constitution as a politicized speaking subject in a patriarchal, white, middle-class culture—a dock speech and an autobiographical account of oppression—and on each of these sites the difference of her cultural capital, and the implications of that difference are marked. When the judge asks her if she has anything to say, she daydreams an account of provocation entailing class and racial discrimination, but is too self-conscious about the extravagance of her body and voice, an extravagance which maps her cultural capital, to articulate it fully publicly:

I want to say this in decent quiet voice. But I hear myself talking too loud and I see my hands wave in the air. Too besides it's no use, they won't believe me, so I don't finish. I stop, and I feel the tears on my face.

(Rhys 1972: 57)

She is overcome by a lack of self-confidence and a sense of her implausibility; she becomes the ‘silent Other of gesture and failed speech’ (Bhabha 1990b: 316). Her extravagance is, to adapt and fissure Nancy K. Miller's formulation of the function of implausibility in women's writing, a form of insistence about the relation of women and representation: a comment on the stakes of difference within the theoretical indifference of British law and of first-wave British feminism and feminist narratives.⁷ The unreflective maxims of racial stereotype are rendered implausible by the demaximizing juxtaposition of Selina's point of view. This demaximization of the threatening carnival of the primitive is, to extend Mary Russo's analysis of the ‘figure of the female transgressor as public spectacle’, a stark reminder that the bodies and voices of certain women, not just unfeminine ones, ‘in certain public framings, in certain public spaces, are always already transgressive—dangerous, and in danger’ (Russo 1986: 217).

The theoretical indifference of British law in the 1950s is usefully discussed by Edward Pilkington in his study of the deteriorating race relations which led to white riots in Notting Hill in 1958:

The established legal view held by government and the judiciary was that the law must be impartial, and should not distinguish between classes or types of people, including racial groups. The problem with this ‘colour blind’ approach was that it left no legal grounds for prosecuting those who practised racial discrimination.

(Pilkington 1988: 47)

Or, by extension, those other blind spots of an old legal dream of symmetry, sexual or class discrimination.⁸ British law also did not officially recognize discrimination—racial, sexual or class—as a defence in mitigation: Emmeline Pankhurst gives an example of the law (represented by the judge in a trial of Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence and herself) being out of step with public opinion (of a jury) on the issue of mitigating circumstances (1914: 228-48). In speeches from the dock, window-breaking middle- and upper-class British suffragettes offered the defence of sexual oppression and it was rejected. Mrs. Leigh, the first suffragette to be imprisoned for window-breaking, said in the dock, indicating she would repeat the offence: ‘We have no other course but to rebel against oppression’ (quoted in E. Pankhurst 1914: 119). Selina justifies herself after she has broken the window (not in court): ‘But if they treat you wrong over and over again the hour strike when you burst out that's what’ (Rhys 1972: 55). The theoretical indifference of the law is destabilized by Selina's consciousness of the racism implicated in the responses to her extravagance. The symmetries of interest assumed in the British legal tradition also justified the refusal to extend the franchise to women: ‘It was argued that the interests of all women and working-class men who did not meet the property qualification could be adequately represented by the votes of propertied men, whose interests were the same’ (S. Thomas 1990a). Suffragettes challenged this economy of sameness in their self-representations and their demonstration that it was maintained by the physical violence of arrest, imprisonment and force-feeding in the last resort.

A paradigmatic and compressed contestation of the legitimacy of the asymmetry of interest is provided by Harold Bird's ‘No Votes Thank You’ produced for the National League for Opposing Women's Suffrage in February 1912 (Tickner 1987: 193; Figure 13.1), and Louise Jacobs's ‘The Appeal of Womanhood’ produced for the Suffrage Atelier in 1912 (Tickner 1987: 214; Figure 13.2). ‘The foregrounded classical figure of womanhood’ in Bird's poster ‘represents the aspirations of bourgeois individualism (vide Bakhtin)’ (S. Thomas 1990a). It is implied that the criminally licentious grotesque suffragette in the middle ground (armed for a window-breaking raid) has crossed boundaries of racial and sexual difference. This same figure appears in a slightly earlier Bird poster with a feather in her hat (‘Her Mother's Voice’, Tickner 1987: 195). Her place is taken in Jacobs's reply

by a women's parade of working-class misery and exploitation over which looms the darkness of Westminster. … It is implied the interests of these women are unrepresented or inadequately represented in the State; their plight is a sign of the degeneracy of the State. The abject in this representation of women is the non-nurturant State.

(S. Thomas 1990a)

Suffragists and suffragettes stressed the ideally nurturant functions of the State in which their different interests as women would be incorporated (Holton 1986: 14). The underside of the State, and more specifically London, is the dark, feminized collective body of the working class, whose interests may be represented by the cross-class chivalry of bourgeois, feminist individualism symbolized in the foregrounded figure (S. Thomas 1990a).

The suffragist and suffragette generic narrative of the working-class woman's life represented her as negotiating a perilous course between sexual and economic exploitation, in their melodramatic vocabulary the White Slave Traffic and sweated labour. This narrative is codified and compressed in paradigmatic form in M. Hughes's postcard ‘The Scylla and Charybdis of the Working Woman’, produced for the Suffrage Atelier, c. 1912 (Tickner 1987: 182; Figure 13.3). In such narratives London is often orientalized as modern Babylon. The body and voice of the prostitute or the casually promiscuous woman are rendered other to those of the maiden chivalric warriors of the WSPU or the classically feminine suffragists. The motility of the body of the prostitute is so obscene that the body is literally unspeakable, and various metonyms take its place in the narrative—modern Babylon, venereal disease, the sick bodies of the respectable women and children infected with venereal disease, ‘dreadful trade’ as in, for instance, Christabel Pankhurst's The Great Scourge and How to End It (reprinted in Marcus 1987). As Lisa Tickner argues:

The rhetoric of moral outrage required men to be venal and prostitutes to be victims. As articulated by the WSPU it sharpened sexual antagonism and disguised the circumstances in which prostitution in fact took place. … In that simplification, however, lay the strategic power of their arguments, which could then be fitted to an increasingly influential concern with the relation between moral behaviour and social stability.

(Tickner 1987: 225)

The first paragraph of ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ locates the story in a very specific place (Notting Hill), time (1950s), and recently acknowledged social problem (racketeering landlords abusing uncontrolled tenancies of black Caribbean tenants in Notting Hill), circumstances well documented by Edward Pilkington (1988: 40-67); the narrative then moves to an apparently more timeless site. Selina negotiates the working woman's perilous course between prostitution and sweated labour, but she is not loosened into this narrative channel by the venality of men. Her situation is more complex, inflected by her racial difference, dispossession of money and tenancy, disjunctive technological time, and her cultural capital. Initially she cannot find even sweated work, but eventually—after her imprisonment—imposes herself in the market through anancy-style trickery. As she negotiates that perilous course, deliberately under-melodramatized in Rhys's ironizing reinscription of it, she goes hungry, possibly becoming anorectic until the intervention of the precious song. In the protection of the venal Mr. Sims, Selina has to choose between food and the alcohol which will allow her to transcend the materiality of her body and release her into a nurturant dreamspace of Caribbean and maternal memory—in this space she dances, sings, remembers calypso heroes, and imitates her feisty grandmother to produce carnivalesque laughter. This dreamspace allows her to preserve her psychological and cultural integrity. Rhys resolutely inscribes Selina's demaximizing body and voice.

Selina is released into a hybrid narrative site of female and immigrant Caribbean Gothic picaresque. On this site Rhys contests both the hegemonic first-wave British feminist construction of the working woman and the real circumstances of potential recruitment into prostitution; and offers ironic commentary on the symmetries of interest assumed in the cross-class chivalry of bourgeois feminist individualism. Rhys often takes up and improvizes on the seduction-betrayal-ruin paradigm of female Gothic picaresque in her novels, abandoning the heavy moralism characteristic of the genre. In one picaresque version of female Gothic—inflected differently in ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’—the middle-class white heroine, declassed (or whose middle-class dependence is threatened), is called upon to resist sexual menace, often from villains posing as protector figures, by displaying qualities of resourcefulness and strength which run counter to the stereotypical view that women are inherently passive. The preservation of chastity is a metonym for preservation of integrity. Extending an argument of V. S. Naipaul's, Ena V. Thomas (1990) argues that the ‘typical picaroon environment of violence and brutality’ was reproduced socially for the black Caribbean person in colonial Trinidad and that that closed environment ‘elicited picaroon responses from its most vulnerable citizens’; Caribbean picaresque does not imitate, but rather reinscribes and crucially reinflects, picaresque in a discordant literary historical time (1990: 211). Dispossessed of any Caribbean middle-class prerogative by the British labour market and racism in the 1950s, the non-white Caribbean immigrant generally entered a closed picaresque environment, in which the material and cultural capital to break down its walls was difficult to obtain or impose. The emerging Caribbean British literature of the 1950s—Samuel Selvon's The Lonely Londoners (1979) and George Lamming's The Emigrants (1980), for instance—reinflects the picaresque, marking the emergence of an authentic national cultural time with the imported Caribbean vernacular and hybridizing it with ironizing modernist set pieces or narrative strategies. In 1910, Rhys herself was dispossessed of Caribbean middle-class prerogative by a paucity of marketable skills and the impoverishing death of her father. The loosely autobiographical origins of her fiction are well known, but the discursive and narrative sense and meanings she gave that experience crucially reinflect and improvize on the female Gothic picaresque to stage her marginality. They mark the emergence of her unique hybrid modernist female Gothic and immigrant Caribbean picaresque, which ironizes the generic narratives of European cultural and literary modernity, inscribing the cultural vernaculars of her underclass. These reinflections and improvizations are examples of the hybridity Homi Bhabha writes of as

the perplexity of the living as it interrupts the representation of the fullness of life; it is an instance of iteration, in the minority discourse, of the time of the arbitrary sign—‘the minus in the origin’—through which all forms of cultural meaning are open to translation because their enunciation resists totalization.

(Bhabha 1990b: 314)

Rhys's reinscription and reinflection of two of the generic narratives of suffragette modernity in the time of the emergence of second-wave British feminist modernity may be read as her fear of the ‘ghostly’ repetition⁹ of the indifferent sign of ‘the woman’ which gives sexualized racial and class others (among others) no rights to their own differences, forcing on them indifferent middle-class British feminist definitions and appropriations of those differences. The cumulation through time of suffragette autobiographies and histories also produced ‘ghostly’ recirculations of that first-wave British feminist sign of ‘the woman’ and of the generic narratives Rhys contests. The temporal gap also reminds us that certain women caught within the maxims of indifference experienced feminist time as recursive, not progressive. Further, Rhys's indifference to the British feminisms of her day may be read as crucially inflected by her imposture within their orders.¹⁰ Rhys and her protagonists experience their difference differently from feminist maximizing constructions.

Part of that different sexual difference as Caribbean immigrant may be read through Rhys's adoption of a cross-racial voice in ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ and her representations of attachments to nurturant Caribbean dreamspace. Rhys tries to produce the stylized patois in good faith, with attention to detail of syntax, vocabulary and form. ‘Let Them Call It Jazz’ is also a ‘speakerly text’ (Gates 1984: 296), true to the oral traditions of Caribbean folk language. The story caused Rhys considerable anxiety, but not over the ethics of cross-racial voicing. She posted the manuscript to her daughter Maryvonne for typing rather than give it to her regular typist, fearing the operation of the autobiographical fallacy in a local reading of it would confirm the worst suspicions ‘people here’ had of her. There is a danger in the voicing, but she also wrote the story ‘as a holiday … A bit of a crazy story. For fun.’¹¹ Rhys's title, too, may mark her own shrugging off of any potential invalidation of her experiment with patois and cross-racial voicing as jazz, in a range of its meanings. In her autobiography and in her fiction the nurturant black Caribbean dreamspace of patois, calypso song, and a black maternal body are produced as the oceanic, not ungendered as the oceanic usually is (Torgovnick 1990: 165), but gendered feminine. For her white Caribbean female protagonists, Anna Morgan and Antoinette Cosway Mason, that oceanic is a potentially pleasurable site for the obliteration of racial difference, and potentially operates outside, but can never wholly escape the colonialist patriarchal law and its legacies which structure the maxims of power which repress the oceanic.

Notes

1. I am using and applying in a new context Nancy K. Miller's notion of the ‘ungrammaticalities’ of women's fiction. Miller discusses the inability of a patriarchal critical paradigm to read aspects of women's fiction which ‘violate a grammar of motives’ informed by ‘a certain ideology (of the text and its context)’ (1988: 26-7).

2. In a ‘translation-adaptation’ of an essay by Genette, Nancy K. Miller affirms that

   the precondition of plausibility is the stamp of approval affixed by public opinion … the critical reaction to any given text is hermeneutically bound to another and preexistent text: the doxa of socialities. Plausibility then is an effect of reading through a grid of concordance:

   What defines plausibility is the formal principle of respect for the norm, that is, the existence of a relation of implication between the particular conduct attributed to a given character, and a given, general, received and implicit maxim. … To understand the behavior of a character (for example), is to be able to refer it back to an approved maxim, and this reference is perceived as a demonstration of cause and effect.

   (G. Genette 1969: 174-5)

   If no maxim is available to account for a particular piece of behavior, that behavior is read as unmotivated and unconvincing.

   (Miller 1988: 26)

   ‘Demaximization’ is Miller's term; I use it in a wider range of contexts.

3. Jean Rhys, letter to Francis Wyndham, 6 December [1960] (Wyndham and Melly 1985: 197).

4. My argument here endorses and extends that of Paula Le Gallez (1990), who questions the validity of conventional constructions of Rhys's protagonists as passive victims. Le Gallez argues that:

   Where Rhys's heroines are concerned, the struggle [for authority] concerns itself not with a physical grouping together in solidarity against the oppressive forces, but rather in the more subtle way of each becoming her own maker of fiction. As such … the ‘Rhys woman’ has the power to build texts and to articulate her own narratives. In this respect, as the author of her own discourse, she sets herself against the suffocation of her spirit, a suffocation which the traditionally expected ‘passivity’ would surely bring her.

   (176)

5. Rhys writes of her Holloway experiences to Peggy Kirkaldy on 4 October [1949]: ‘I did think about the Suffragettes. Result of all their sacrifices? The woman doctor!!! Really human effort is futile’ (Wyndham and Melly 1985: 56). She mentions ‘Black Castle’, a projected story about Holloway, on Monday [1950] (Wyndham and Melly 1985: 76). Rhys was diagnosed as a hysteric (Angier 1992: 446). During Rhys's residence in Beckenham between 1946 and 1950, she was convicted on charges of wilful and malicious damage to property, assault (several times), and being drunk and disorderly (Angier 1992: 442-54).

6. Emmeline Pankhurst writes in her ghosted autobiography, My Own Story:

   There is something that governments care far more for than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy. From henceforward the women who agree with me will say, ‘We disregard your laws, gentlemen, we set the liberty and the dignity and the welfare of women above all such considerations, and we shall continue this war, as we have done in the past; and what sacrifice of property, or what injury to property accrues will not be our fault.

   (1914: 265)

   Amplifying her charge that courts discriminated against suffragette window-breakers, she comments:

   The smashing of windows is a time-honoured method of showing displeasure in a political situation. … Window-breaking, when Englishmen do it, is regarded as honest expression of political opinion. Window-breaking, when Englishwomen do it, is treated as a crime.

   (ibid.: 119)

7. Cf. N. K. Miller:

   I am arguing that the peculiar shape of a heroine's destiny in novels by women, the implausible twists of plot so common in these novels, is a form of insistence about the relation of women to writing: a comment on the stakes of difference within the theoretical indifference of literature itself.

   (1988: 39)

8. My formulation of arguments about symmetry and asymmetry of interests owes some debt to Luce Irigaray's ‘The blind spot of an old dream of symmetry’, Speculum of the Other Woman (1985a).

9. The term is borrowed from Homi Bhabha, who discusses the ‘ghostly repetition’ of the ‘time and space’ of black British peoples in the film Handsworth Songs: ‘in the historic present of the [Handsworth] riots, emerge the ghostly repetition of other stories, other uprisings. … There are no stories in the riots, only the ghosts of other stories’ (Bhabha 1990b: 306-7).

10. Accounts of Rhys's antipathy to feminism (Niesen de Abruña 1988: 327; Angier 1985: 121) usually uncritically recirculate David Plante's story:

    Letters from fans she asked me to read out to her and as I did she looked wistfully sad. If the letters enclosed reviews, she asked the title and the first line, then said, ‘Tear it up.’ When the title was ‘The Dark Underworld of Women’ or ‘The Woes of Women’ or had ‘women’ in it in any way, she'd grab the review from me and tear it up herself and throw it in the basket, laughing, and say, ‘No, I've had enough of that!’

    (Plante 1983: 39)

    This story can be read in many ways; it is usually only read as a confirmation of Rhys's anti-feminism.

11. Letter to Maryvonne Moerman, 22 June [1960] (Wyndham and Melly 1985: 187); letter to Francis Wyndham, 6 April [1960] (ibid.: 184).