[In the following essay, Thomas places Rhys's Antillean narrative voice in The Left Bank and Other Stories within the context of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Dominican travel writing and the judges the effect of gender, class, ethnic, and racial stereotypes on Rhys and the reception of her short stories.]

In the preface to The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927), Jean Rhys's first book of fiction, Ford Madox Ford praises “the singular instinct for form possessed by this young lady,” a quality “possessed by singularly few writers of English and by almost no English women writers” (25). He represents her origins as Antillean and her aesthetic tastes as French, rather than Anglo-Saxon, having been formed by “the almost exclusive reading of French writers of a recent, but not the most recent, date” (24-25). Ford measures the sketches against the “neatness of form” he admires in these French writers. His ambivalence about her “terrifying” Antillean “insight and … terrific … almost lurid!—passion for stating the case of the underdog” is apparent in his construction of her having “let her pen loose on the Left Banks of the Old World—on its gaols, its studios, its salons, its cafés, its criminals, its midinettes—with a bias of admiration for its midinettes [Parisian working women] and of sympathy for its law-breakers” (24). On the one hand he thinks it a note “that badly needs sounding” (24); on the other he links it with the shortcomings of French youth who reject neatness of form, “determined violently not to be coldly critical, or critical at all” (25).

He tells an anecdote with a sexual subtext about Rhys's rejection of his advice to work more local color into her European sketches. Ford pressed Rhys, his ex-lover, to work the local color of Europe into the sketches

in the cunning way in which it would have been done by Flaubert or Maupassant, or by Mr. Conrad “getting in” the East in innumerable short stories from Almayer to the Rescue. … But would she do it? No! With cold deliberation, once her attention was drawn to the matter, she eliminated even such two or three words of descriptive matter as had crept into her work. Her business was with passion, hardship, emotions: the locality in which these things are endured is immaterial. So she hands you the Antilles with its sea and sky—“the loveliest, deepest sea in the world—the Caribbean!”—the effect of landscape on the emotions and passions of a child being so penetrative, but lets Montparnasse, or London, or Vienna go. She is probably right. Something human should, indeed, be dearer to one than all the topographies of the world.

(26)

On the excuse of his knowledge of the publishing business, Ford “butted in” his preface (26), “Rive Gauche,” the title piece, providing some of the topography and atmosphere he desired by writing sixteen pages of it in a twenty-page preface; Rhys's sketches are, as Coral Ann Howells notes, the Other Stories (31).¹

My first point of departure from this sexual/textual imbroglio is Ford's invocation of “descriptive matter.” The French realists recommended by Ford—Flaubert and Maupassant—aestheticized local color as “the essence of realism, the details and motifs characteristic of and appropriate to a particular setting” (Taylor 17). In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler argues that materiality is a “site at which a certain drama of sexual difference plays itself out” and suggests that “to invoke matter is to invoke a sedimented history of sexual hierarchy and sexual erasures” (49). The narrative voice of three linked sketches among the Other Stories—“Trio,” “Mixing Cocktails,” and “Again the Antilles”—identifies herself as Antillean, soon Dominican. Each of the sketches materializes Dominican sexual, racial, and class difference for a predominantly European and English-speaking audience. Capitalizing on the success of Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) in generating interest in her earlier fiction, Rhys chose to recirculate “Mixing Cocktails” and “Again the Antilles” virtually unchanged in Tigers Are Better-Looking: With a Selection from The Left Bank (1968).

I disturb some of the sedimented history of sexual, racial, and class hierarchy and sexual, racial, and class erasures mediated, and in some cases, effected in the stories by analyzing some of the ways in which Rhys's “local knowledge” of Dominica “is grounded in virtue of its material location, its source of production … its sphere of reception” (Rothfield, summarizing Rouse 58) and the generic form—local color—through which it is “realized.” Diana Brydon and Helen Tiffin argue of Rhys's fiction that she adopts a counterdiscursive textual strategy in relation to a European literary canon, and Tiffin has located an early example of it in “Again the Antilles” (“Rite of Reply” 72-77). My methodology, rather, relativizes Rhys's “local knowledge” to the textual and material “forms of practice which produce it” (Rothfield 58) and the “adaptation of locally situated practices to new local contexts” (Rouse, qtd. in Rothfield 59). I place Rhys's self-consciously Antillean narrative voice in The Left Bank and Other Stories in relation to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century travel writing about Dominica and examine the ambivalences and complexities of Rhys's gendered negotiations of Dominican autoethnographic expression in articulating a white Creole speaking/writing position.

My second point of departure is Ford's causal linking of Rhys's colonial origin and her “terrifying insight and a terrific—an almost lurid!—passion for stating the case of the underdog … with a bias of admiration for” the “midinettes” of “the Left Banks of the Old World” and “of sympathy for its law-breakers” (Preface 24). Ford implies that the insight and passion are part of Rhys's baggage as an Antillean; he conflates her colonial difference with particular sensitivity to class injustice and with disrespect for law. Carole Angier says that Ford “felt there was black blood in her” (656). Ford's “feeling” conforms with a stereotype of the white Creole—that white Creoles are often passing for white; Angier uses Ford's “feeling” to support her speculation that “black blood … was part of her [Rhys's] mystery and her difference, both as a woman and as a writer” (656). Stella Bowen's account of Rhys in Drawn from Life is unremitting in its invocation of a unrespectable working-class stereotype: the impoverished Rhys, unnamed, has in Bowen's eyes a “complete absence of any desire for independence,” and is “violent,” lacking respect for “patience or honesty or fortitude,” weak, part of an “underworld of darkness and disorder” (166-67). If one of the unspokens of Bowen's portrait is that she shares Ford's “feeling,” what I have read as class stereotype is conflated with racial stereotype. Rereading Ford's comments on Rhys's bias and sympathy, I note his representation of the effects of her insight and passion on her writing and her reader: release of her writing from captivity or constraint of aesthetic law; violent rejection of objectivity; terror in the reader at a menacing democratization of viewpoint in art.

Ford's comments on Rhys's bias and compassion, and his attribution of their origin, shaped the reception of Rhys's “Other Stories” in 1927. Gender, class, ethnic, and racial stereotypes circulate, especially in critical assessment of her partiality and sympathy. Rhys was advised in Nation and Athenaeum that she would need to “chasten her emotionalism” to achieve “universal values” (424). Promiscuity and emotionalism are stereotypical attributes of women, the working class, white Creoles, and black people. The “universal” is implicitly identified by the reviewer with hegemonic masculine, white, English, and middle-class “values.” In the Saturday Review of Literature, Rhys's stories were said to be “tinged with a slightly hysterical sentiment” (287). Here the excessive emotion (“sentiment”) is being implicitly racialized with the choice of the word “tinged.” Spirit possession is a reference point for the Spectator reviewer, who suggests that Rhys was “temporarily possessed by the souls of those she writes about” (772). A perceived want of control, “slightly” hystericized in the Saturday Review of Literature and by D. B. Wyndham-Lewis in the Saturday Review, who described the stories as “vivid, nervous sketches” (637), is being referred in the Spectator either to African-derived racial difference from a Christian European norm, or to a white Creole stereotype: susceptibility to contamination by “debasing” “superstition” (Rees). The New Statesman reviewer summed up the worldviews in Rhys's stories: “Love, fame, life itself—they turn, one and all, upon the question of paying for drinks” (90). The formulation has a number of reference points: an ethnocentric British construction of “the Left Banks of the Old World” as degenerate and the alcoholic disposition stereotypically attributed to the working class, black people, and the white Creole.

In the second part of this chapter I analyze the 1927 version of “Vienne,”² a story in which the narrator, Frances, expresses some sympathy for impoverished women and those thought to be compromised by their want of sexual virtue and criticizes the “huge machine of law, order, respectability” (V 241). Her husband, Pierre, employed as “secretary and confidential adviser” (210) to a Japanese member of the Inter-Allied Commission that was supervising the disarmament of Austria, becomes a law-breaker. Concentrating in particular on the interplay of narrative and ironizing authorial voices, I examine Rhys's representations of the cross-articulation of gender, class, and race on the “fringe of internationalisms” (Ford, Preface 12) in post-armistice Vienna, Budapest, and Prague, cities that had all been part of the Hapsburg Empire in 1914. Austria then “had ruled over fifteen races and given the law to central Europe” (Fisher 1267). H. A. L. Fisher writes that Austria's “[d]ynasty, army, empire disappeared in the whirlwind” of the First World War and the peace settlement. “The Hungarians declared themselves independent and were invaded by the Roumans. The Czechs and Slovaks broke away. The Serbs exploited their victory in the south” (1267). Austria lost territory to Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.

“I REMEMBERED THE ANTILLES”³

“Mixing Cocktails” and “Again the Antilles” are memories of a Dominican childhood, prompted by the homesickness which “descend[s] over” the narrator of “Trio” as she witnesses the spectacle three nonwhite compatriots make of their “pleasures” in a Montparnasse restaurant (83-84). Spectacle, as Mary Russo notes, is in the judgment of the beholder; it implies inadvertancy (213) and a transgression of the boundaries of the beholder's standards of propriety—physical, social, and moral. The stereotypically sensuous physicality of the narrator's compatriots and stereotypical suggestion of sexual precociousness in the girl in the group (“apparently about fifteen, but probably much younger” [“Trio” 83])—apprehended visually and aurally—activates through familiarity corporeal memories of Dominica. The physicality includes a mature man giving the girl “long lingering kisses” (84) and the apparent precociousness of the girl sitting “very close to the man and every now and then […] lay[ing] her head on his shoulder for a second” (83) and dancing to show her nakedness beneath her red dress. Judith L. Raiskin reads the relation between the two as sexual “exploitation of the young girl” (154), appropriately asking, “What is the economic relationship between the man with the ‘thick silver ring’ and the frumpy woman, and are the girl's sexual favors to the man part of the ‘family’ economics? What looks like a family is likely the bartering of the daughter; at the heart of the gaiety is weariness and a plea for help” (153-54).

That neither the narrative nor an ironizing authorial voice poses the question about the structural relations among the three suggests that the narrative and authorial voices “naturalize” them by referring them to racial stereotypes of sexuality. Dominica is remembered by the narrator of the three stories as sights, colors, sensations, sounds, voices, ritualized performances of her classed, gendered, racialized embodiment, and huge delight at the “undignified” spectacle of a dispute between a Papa Dom and a white English planter, Mr. Hugh Musgrave, conducted in the letters column of the Dominica Herald and Leeward Islands Gazette (“Again the Antilles” 95). The racial backgrounds of the nonwhite characters are epidermalized as shade and physiognomy: in “Trio” as “very black—coal black” (83), “coffee-coloured” (83), the “charming” face of a “fuzzy”-haired girl revealing “much white blood in her veins” (83-84) and in “Again the Antilles” as a “beautiful shade of coffee-colour” (93). The narrator's whiteness is indicated in “Mixing Cocktails” by nagging voices telling her “to come in out of the sun. … One would one day regret freckles” (89) and by the Englishness of a visiting aunt; in “Again the Antilles,” by the social familiarity with Mr. Musgrave, which allows her to know him to be “a dear, but peppery” (94). The discursive field within which whiteness is articulated in the stories is the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ethnographic discourse of white degeneracy in the tropics.

The Creoleness of the narrator is articulated through allusion to Stradanus's allegorical painting of America discovered by Amerigo Vespucci as a naked woman in a hammock strung between two trees; the hammock, cannibalism, and the canoe paddle in the painting suggest stereotypically the Carib Indian. America's indolence is suggested by the proximity of the sloth in the shade she enjoys. Dominica was by the late nineteenth century home to the last group of “yellow” Carib Indians in the Caribbean islands. The (implicitly clothed) narrator remembers herself having spent most of the days at the rural retreat of her family in a hammock on the verandah, swinging “cautiously” and dreaming. She is the foregrounded figure, who looks out at the sea and the landscape in the background. Rhys alludes to the European construct of Carib resistance to European settlement and domination of Dominica: “A wild place, Dominica. Savage and lost” (“Mixing Cocktails” 88). The white colonial presence is marked by technology: steamers (which carry, among other cargo, the Times Weekly Edition for her father), a telescope, and “unloaded shotgun” (88).

The white person in a hammock on the verandah of an estate house also resonates within a Dominican discursive context. In an 1877 editorial in the Dominica, A. R. Lockhart critiques the “most silly” and “most fallacious” essentialist stereotype of the lazy “Negro” circulating in supposedly “enlightened Europe.” He attributes low valuation of physical labor by African Caribbean people to the racial division of labor in the period of slavery and its “deep-rooted” cultural signifiers:

To the Negro under the old slave system the conception of respectability and honour was inseparable from that of idleness and a luxurious life. To his limited vision, bounded by the narrow surroundings of his plantation home, where

Massa 'neath the shade would lay,

While we poor niggers toiled all day,” [sic]

the personification of all earthly happiness was “Massa” swinging in his hammock and sipping sangaree, while the spectacle of the field gang, toiling wearily beneath the ardent rays of the West Indian sun, typified the beast of burden, the acme of degradation.

([3])

His usage of the term “nigger” to cite racism is typical of the strategy of elective members of the assembly. In “Mixing Cocktails” the continuing racialized class division of labor on the estate in the post-emancipation period is visible only in the figure of Ann Twist, the cook, “the old ‘Obeah’ woman” (91). Linked with the blackness of night, she embodies stereotypically the superstition of evil that haunts the narrator's identifications with the othernesses of place.

The ethnographic discourses of white Creole degeneracy and the degeneracy of the English abroad attributed a racial decay to the effects of tropical acclimatization. Standard reference books as early as the 1810s cite the “enervating influence of the sultry climate” (Rees); the signifiers of this lack of robustness were disease; sickliness; excessive appetites, especially for alcohol, sex (Stepan 103), and spicy food; idleness; and luxurious life. The supposedly biological effects on gait, complexion, eyes, intelligence, and fibers were documented minutely (Edwards, vol. 2: 7-16). The vulnerability was both physical and moral; the fear that white people would “go native” in an “alien … cultural environment” produced the idea, argues Nancy Stepan, “that the Anglo-Saxons' very refinement required the greatest possible physical, social, and sexual distance from the peoples they increasingly governed abroad. It was a theory of social control and separation that harmonized well with the British and German colonial policy of maintaining sharp boundaries, socially, between themselves and ‘natives’” (102, 104). Native, in Stepan's account, means nonwhite.

The discourse of tropical degeneracy was mobilized in turn-of-the-century tourist discourse about Dominica and, … by William Davies in his refutation of James Anthony Froude's representations of race relations on the island. Fannie D. Ward's 1894 travel account is titled “In Drowsy Dominica”—she draws no distinctions among the racial groups in describing the people as “a trifle lazy” ([3]). In 1895 the Canadian journalist Kathleen Blake Watkins comments on the exotic roses in the Botanical Gardens in Roseau: “They lack the perfume our roses have, and looked indeed poor fragile blossoms out of all place here in this sun-burnt spot.” ([3]). Her account emphasizes decay and neglect in colonial Roseau, and she praises highly the enterprise and refinement of the colored owner of Wall House estate, J. Cox Fillan. Watkins uses the Dominican horticultural troping of Englishness.

The discourse of white tropical degeneracy is invoked ambivalently in the performance of the narrator of “Mixing Cocktails”; more straightforwardly, the narrator of “Again the Antilles” attributes Mr. Musgrave's “peppery” temperament to “much indulgence in spices and cocktails” during his “[t]wenty years in the tropics” (94). Two signifiers of degeneracy circulate uncritically in “Mixing Cocktails”: the “comfort” of the father is bound up with the chess problem in the Times Weekly Edition and the cocktails his narrator-daughter prepares ritually for him each evening, and the narrator luxuriates in “languid” indolence (89) for a large part of the day. In “Mixing Cocktails” the English aunt will try to indulge the father by flattering his horticultural efforts, a syncretic blending of roses and hibiscuses. It is the aunt, unaccustomed to the heat, who drowses. The story's title puns on “cocktails.” A cocktail is a “person assuming the position of a gentleman, but deficient in thorough gentlemanly breeding.” The Oxford English Dictionary definition of a “cocktailed horse” refers to “a known stain in his parentage.” The narrator's mother is never individualized in the story. Rather, Rhys quotes a nagging voice that “spoiled” the narrator's pleasure: “One was not to sit in the sun. One had been told not to be in sun. … One would one day regret freckles” (89); “I am speaking to you; do you not hear? You must break yourself of your habit of never listening. You have such an absent-minded expression. Try not to look vague. … So rude!” (89).

The narrator reworks the voice's invocation of “Other People” (90) one is supposed to be like. The nagging voice is recognizably that of a middle-class mother anxious to regulate the desires, manners, and respectability of a recalcitrant daughter. Her efforts at regulation are represented as a “passionate” levelling up (89), and what is desired is a maintaining of position in a racialized and classed social hierarchy. The negative attributes she fixes her attention on are some of those stereotypically attributed to the white Creole: a “want of proper objects for exercising the faculties” and “aversion to serious thought and deep reflection” (Edwards, vol. 2: 14, 15). The racial and class anxiety of the family is reflected in its mobility within Dominica. The “very new” “house in the hills” is “an hour's journey by boat and another hour and a half on horseback, climbing slowly up”: it proffers a “sensation of relief and coolness” (“Mixing Cocktails” 87). The movement from town to estate marks a claim to social prestige, the classed labor economy of the estate preserving social distance from subjected nonwhite races.

The narrator's perceptions of the sea work intertextually to destabilize the color constancy vision of tourist discourse about Dominican waters. The superlative blueness of the sea around Dominica is a staple of tourist discourse. Froude, for instance, notes its “deeper azure” hue by comparison with the sea surrounding other Caribbean islands (142); Watkins observes a “sea of such deep and exquisite azure as we had never seen yet—blue with violet depths in it, violet with blue depths” ([3]). In “Mixing Cocktails” the sea is one of the objects of the narrator's dreaming; her descriptions of it discount “natural” or “local” color. These are terms from art criticism. “Colour constancy,” the Oxford Companion to Art explains,

seems to combine a tendency to see things the colours they are remembered to be and a tendency to compensate for changes in illumination and viewing conditions. Colour constancy is favoured by the “object attitude” of perception when colours are noticed incidentally to the perception of objects rather than by the aesthetic attitude when they are attended to for themselves. …

In the language of painting the term local colour is used for the “natural” colours of objects towards which colour constancy vision tends to approximate. … [The Impressionists] have striven to discount colour constancy and to see and depict each area of the visual field in accordance with the constitution of the light actually reflected from it upon the eye. This is a way of looking at the environment which requires considerable effort to counteract ingrained habits of practical “object-recognition” seeing.

(Osborne 261)

In the morning the sea in “Mixing Cocktails” is “a very tender blue, like the dress of the Virgin Mary”; at midday “[t]he light made it so flash and glitter: it was necessary to screw the eyes up tight before looking. Everything was still and languid, worshipping the sun.” The sky becomes “hard, blue, blue” (89). The narrator is projecting maternal attributes on to the blues—“very tender,” “hard” (88, 89)—in a good mother/bad mother dichotomy. The descriptions of the blues attest, too, to intimate awareness, local knowledge, and an aesthetics of color different from the “practical ‘object-recognition’ seeing” of travel writers. In “Giotto's Joy,” Julia Kristeva argues that

centered vision—identification of objects—comes into play after color perceptions. The earliest appear to be those with short wavelengths, and therefore the color blue. Thus all colors, but blue in particular, would have a noncentered or decentering effect, lessening both object identification and phenomenal fixation. They thereby return the subject to the archaic moment of its dialectic, that is, before the fixed, specular “I,” but while in the process of becoming this “I” by breaking away from instinctual, biological (and also maternal) dependence. … chromatic experience can then be interpreted as a repetition of the specular subject's emergence in the already constructed space of the understanding (speaking) subject.

(225)

Rhys's charting of the narrator's day through her local perception of the color of the sea performs in general terms a repetition of the fashioning of the gendered, classed, heterosexed, white Creole subject in the already constructed space of the speaking subject. Interestingly this remembered process of subject-formation entails a verbal cue from her aunt about the “exquisite” color of the sea and the narrator's contextualization of it in a recitation of tourist discourse. The recitation—“It is purple sea with a sky to match it. The Caribbean. The deepest, the loveliest in the world. …” (“Mixing Cocktails” 90)—is represented as part of the leveling up. Misquoting the recitation as “‘the loveliest, deepest sea in the world—the Caribbean!’” (Preface 26), Ford cites it approvingly as Rhys's closest approximation to local color, understood in a literary critical sense.

In “Again the Antilles,” set in Roseau, the narrator gazes back at Papa Dom from her family's garden. He has a habit of looking “solemnly out of his windows” (93). In women's writing a woman's look from a window is often used to figure her desire to transcend the materiality of her gendered social position. Nancy Armstrong describes this materiality as the “knowledge housed, as it were, in the body of the woman” (245). Rhys's positioning of the colored Papa Dom at his windows suggests his desire to transcend the materiality of his racialized social position and the solemnity of the knowledge housed, as it were, in the racial othering of his body by white settlers, and his own racial, class, moral, and religious othering of “the Mob” and “negroes” (“Again the Antilles” 94). Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tourists often describe the scenery of Dominica as awe-inspiring; the narrator finds Papa Dom, the middle-class editor of the Dominica Herald and Leeward Islands Gazette, “awe-inspiring” (93). As Raiskin observes: “Rather than a subject deep in thought, he becomes an object of her gaze and later of amused memory of island life” (119).

The narrator's performance of her racialized class in relation to both Papa Dom and Mr. Hugh Musgrave is based on a highbrow knowledge of Chaucer's General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English and relies on the knowingness of a similarly highbrow audience to achieve its full comic effect. Here I should confess my own unashamed vulgarity—I had to look up a Chaucer text in Middle English to discover the extent of the joke. I was compelled to study Chaucer (and Shakespeare and Milton) in my honors year at the University of Queensland in 1976, but my literary education in Australia has never included learning any of The Canterbury Tales by heart. Raiskin, Tiffin, and Jordan Stouck, who have written at some length about “Again the Antilles,” assume, like Papa Dom, that the white man, Mr. Hugh Musgrave, quotes Chaucer accurately, which he does not.

My research on Dominican journalism poses questions about the motive for Rhys's misrepresentation of the historical Papa Dom, Augustus Theodore Righton, as a “born rebel … a firebrand” (93). The narrator of “Again the Antilles” lists a range of issues on which the fictional Papa Dom took a fiery stand. They do not match Righton's public record. Rhys's Papa Dom, for instance, opposes the imposition of Crown Colony rule in 1898. (Two of the not saids of Rhys's story are that Crown Colony rule disenfranchised at island level the propertied men of all racial groups who had enjoyed the vote and disempowered the elected opposition.) Righton took a compliant stand, although he did publish a letter from A. R. Lockhart, “No Crown Colony: Views of an Elective on the Question of the Hour.” In the obituary of Righton in the Leeward Islands Free Press, A. R. Lockhart describes him as “a man of exceptional kindliness of temperament, absolutely free from malice or ill-will to his fellow creatures,” but expressed reservation about the absolute value of this character attribute (“Death of Mr. Righton” [2]). There was a Mr. Christopher Musgrave living in Dominica during Rhys's childhood. A distant relative of Rhys's through his marriage, he was Dominica's registrar and provost marshal. Rhys's Mr. Hugh Musgrave is a planter.

A dispute involving Joseph Hilton Steber and the name of Christopher Musgrave may have supplied Rhys with a motif for “Again the Antilles”: the narrator writing that she “used to think that being coloured embittered” Papa Dom (93). This characterization racializes and personalizes Papa Dom's political stands on matters of public concern. In October 1902, Steber remarked in a paragraph on government budget priorities in the Dominica Guardian on the increase in Christopher Musgrave's salary, when “[n]o greater efficiency is secured or promised thereby,” at a time when “the proper administration of justice is seriously hampered by an unholy amalgamation of the Magisterial districts, and the poorer classes are denied free medical attendance, except in extreme cases” (“Up to Date” [3]). He suggested in another paragraph that Musgrave was rumored to be an applicant for the registrarship of Antigua, commented on his lack of professional qualifications in law, and stated that Musgrave's departure for Antigua would not “be the cause of any regret” in Dominica (“Up to Date” [3]). Steber's comments and an editorial on discrepancies in the increases in official salaries, “The Civil Service List,” were interpreted by “A Dominican” in a letter to the Dominican as an example of Steber's “disgraceful habit of abusing and making unwholesome remarks” against “respectable persons in this community.” Musgrave was defended as being “a hard-working official,” “unblemished,” and Steber's “Unmerited Attack” was attributed to a “personal antipathy” contingent on “the colour question” (“An Unmerited Attack”). Steber responded to “A Dominican” in a paragraph in the Dominica Guardian: “The letter is foolish and puerile in the extreme, and as we consider ourselves to be above any personal animus in what we chose to write in the discharge of our duty to the public, we do not think we are called upon to offer any explanation” (Paragraph [4]). “[T]he colour question” had been featured in the Dominica Guardian during September and October in editorial comment and letters to the editor concerning the establishment of a “White People's Club” in Queen's Lodge in Roseau, the racial exclusivism of which was an unwritten rule (Impartial, “Colour Question Dying Hard”). Steber essentialized racism as “the inherent curse of the white man” (“Colour Question”); his correspondent, “Impartial,” who defended the establishment of the club, described “‘racial hatred’” as the personality of colored people (“Colour Question Dying Hard”).⁴

Righton, the historical Papa Dom, wrote in his first editorial in the Dominican that the “legitimate and only proper use to which a Journal professing to be an exponent of public opinion (and known to be such) can be put, is to make it strictly impartial.” Discharging this function, he wrote, would “compel us to keep clear of faction” and to “maintain a conscience void of offence” (3 July 1880: [2]-[3]). The paper's motto was “Be Just and Fear Not.” “All men are not supposed to have the same opinion,” wrote “A Disgusted Dominican” in the Dominica Guardian in August 1893, “but unfortunately for Mr. Righton he has none of his own, except that being the public printer, he is bound to cast his honour aside for fear of losing the contract printing” (“C'est Manicou”). The letter writer was complaining specifically about the coverage in the Dominican of the “Laplaine atrocities,” the shooting of protestors against taxation levels. Papa masks were worn at Carnival in 1894. Even in Trinidad, the Dominican under Righton's editorship was renowned as “invariably” leaning “towards the Government and enjoy[ing] whatever loaves and fishes the Government had to give” (“An Editor's Complete Apology to Another”).

Rhys may have tried to create a composite colored journalist figure, but to give him the nickname of a journalist reviled for dishonoring his public duty and the interests of the majority of the population is mischievous, or it could be a last (or first) twist in the story's thematic of knowingness. Living and publishing in Europe and under a pseudonym, Rhys is not accountable to the Dominican community for historical misrepresentation or mischief. How many of Rhys's audience outside Dominica, and the Caribbean, could fault her (white) narrator on historical detail, or, indeed, recognize that Papa Dom was an influential historical figure?⁵ What authority and authenticity of detail do readers assume in the narrator? Is the mischief a joke on these readers? Rhys's pseudonym, and even her married name in 1927, Ella Lenglet, occlude the potential interestedness of her representation of the range of issues on which Papa Dom campaigned. Raiskin notes: “Papa Dom's political positions are rendered almost ridiculous by the way the narrator lists them[.] … Each of Papa Dom's objections is given the same weight, and his political positions become mere personal characteristics, part of his crankiness. He is a ‘born rebel’; that is, his dissatisfactions are a product of his personality, not of specific political problems” (119). Two of the listed political stances are opposition to “the Island's being a Crown Colony” and to “the Town Board's new system of drainage” (“Again the Antilles” 93-94). Rhys's father, William Rees Williams, and uncle, Acton Don Lockhart, were leaders of the campaign in favor of Crown Colony rule, and her father was Crown-nominated chairman of the Town Board from the late 1890s until his death in 1910. The Roseau River was prone to flooding. Various methods of improving drainage were proposed and tried during Rees Williams's tenure as chairman (“The Roseau River Embankment”).

The humor of “Again the Antilles” turns on exposure of the relative lacks of highbrow English cultural capital of Papa Dom and Mr. Hugh Musgrave. In admonishing Musgrave for an act he considered “tyrannical,” Papa Dom bemoans the “degeneracy of a stock” in Musgrave and his removal “from the ideals of true gentility.” He mistakenly attributes the line “He was a very gentle, perfect knight” to Shakespeare, misquotes the line from a modern translation of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, and mistakenly places the second Marquis of Montrose as Shakespeare's contemporary. In rebuking Papa Dom for a perceived libel, Musgrave attributes the line from the General Prologue correctly, but in trying to upstage the editor by quoting it in context in Middle English, he mixes modern and Middle English. Uncrushed, not recalling a “correct” Middle English version, and not having works of reference, Papa Dom insists that “in the minds of the best authorities there are grave doubts, very grave doubts indeed, as to authorship of the lines, and indeed the other works of the immortal Swan of Avon” (“Again the Antilles” 97). He mistakenly assumes that Musgrave—and the implication is, that he being white—“certainly” has the necessary reference books. Papa Dom has censored Musgrave's letter, altering the last phrase of a sentence, so that it reads: “It is indeed a saddening and dismal thing that the names of great Englishmen should be thus taken in vain by the ignorant of another race and colour.” Musgrave had written “by damn niggers.” His letter is ambiguous—the “great Englishmen” could be Chaucer, Shakespeare, even himself—and the Biblical allusion unwittingly implies the godlike status he thinks is his right and English culture's right over the nonwhite population. Raiskin argues: “If Papa Dom exercises any control over the debate by his role as the paper's editor, the narrator, as ‘editor’ of this text, takes that power back. If Papa Dom edits out Musgrave's insult of ‘damn niggers,’ the narrator puts it back into the text” (119).

There is, as I have already noted, relatively radical Dominican textual authority for the practice of citing the offensive term to name white racism, but while this object of naming racism is achieved by Rhys, the genre of the sketch—local color—also produces humor from the citation for an implied cosmopolitan and urbane audience anticipating curiosities and strangeness to confirm their “normality” (Taylor 17). For Cheryl Alexander Malcolm and David Malcolm the story is “an affectionate reminiscence exposing a sense of loss” (6). Raiskin positions the narrator as an expatriate Dominican proferring “a bit of nostalgia, an ironic little snippet of the ridiculous and bizarre situations that are the legacy of British colonialism in the tropical islands” (118). Humor was the response of the narrator's social circle to the incidents, and one would be straining the argument to suggest that their delight is intended to expose their racism, or would have done in 1927. Even though, as Helen Tiffin argues, Papa Dom, and by extension Rhys, challenge the “deployment” of Shakespeare and Chaucer “as authorities in the service of racist superiority” (“Rite of Reply” 75), the textual strategy of calling on the knowingness of an audience to pick the errors in the allusions of two characters, objects of racism in markedly differing degrees, activates “a corporate subjectivity,” those with the highbrow cultural competence in an English tradition to be “‘in the know,’” or with reasonably ready access to a Middle English text of Chaucer's poem. The strategy is, as Peter Bailey notes with reference to popular knowingness in the music hall, “more in the nature of a transaction or co-production” (146). For some in an “English” Dominican audience of Rhys's generation or that of her parents the highbrow knowingness could well reflect ironically on the local discourses of black and colored “improvement” through education and competence in the dominant culture.

Musgrave and recent critical commentators on “Again the Antilles” do not pick up Papa Dom's error concerning the Marquis of Montrose. It is as if the historical allusion is a flat spot in Papa Dom's original comment on Musgrave, immaterial enough to pass over. I had never heard of the Marquis of Montrose. The racialized contest between Musgrave and Papa Dom is fought over Papa Dom's assumption of having acquired fluency in English culture. This suggests the centrality of English literary education in the production of the colonial subject, but also the anxieties that circulate in the white colonial subject about the closure through education of the social and class gap between the white and, in the instance of “Again the Antilles,” the colored colonial subject. Musgrave's racist appellation of Papa Dom reasserts a social and racial distance.

Dominican autoethnography and the discourses of a politically dominant culture and travel writing ground Rhys's local knowledges of the Caribbean and Creoleness in The Left Bank and Other Stories, and reveal the ambiguities, ambivalences, and complexities entailed in their sources of production, and their spheres of reception. In “Trio,” “Mixing Cocktails,” and “Again the Antilles,” Rhys centralizes the gaze of the white Creole narrator. At the end of “Trio” the narrator acknowledges the party of three she observes to be her “compatriots” (85). That the story is titled “Trio” (and not “Quartet” or “Foursome”) preserves her distance from the group, who remain objects of her disciplinary and stereotyping gaze. Rhys represents the racial, gender, and class dynamics of turn-of-the-century Dominican middle-class culture more minutely in “Mixing Cocktails” and “Again the Antilles.”

“THE HUGE MACHINE OF LAW, ORDER, RESPECTABILITY”

In “Vienne” the English narrator, Frances, reconstructs episodically and anecdotally the period in which she lived in Vienna and visited Budapest and Prague in the early 1920s. The story opens:

Funny how it's slipped away, Vienna. Nothing left but a few snapshots.

Not a friend, not a pretty frock—nothing left of Vienna.

(193)

Two things that have “slipped away” from her life, although their loss is not directly stated, are her husband and the child who must have been conceived in Vienna. Frances's narrative does mention marital tension. Rhys implies a causal link between the loss of husband and child and Frances's sense that she has left “respectability behind” (243) when Pierre breaks the law and they become fugitives from justice. Respectability, as it is lived and guarded among signs of international modernity and nostalgia for an imperial past, is a major thematic in Frances's narrative. Despite Frances's explicit contempt for the “hypocrisy” that sustains the cultural “fiction of the ‘good’ woman and the ‘bad’ one,” what contemporary feminist critics term the virgin/whore dichotomy, she anxiously upholds it “against all […] sense of fairness and logic” in order to keep up her own appearance of respectability (197). It is a fiction she links with an “old-fashioned” nostalgia (197) for the signs of imperial glory and patriotism, and one that Rhys's authorial voice judges in her punning choice of name for the “jeune fille” (young girl) whose “virtue” must be protected (197-98). Ironically the pregnant Frances comes to realize that respectability will be her surest protection from an unspeakable fate (240), although the “fate” is suggested in her comment about some of the women who frequent the “exciting and gay,” and “[v]ery vulgar” Radetzsky Hotel: “All the pretty people with doubtful husbands or no husbands, or husbands in jail (lots of men went to jail—I don't wonder. Every day new laws about the exchange and smuggling gold)” (200-201). They are among the women “of the moment” for newly rich, philandering men (200), subject to the critical gaze of women like Frances. Frances fears a return to poverty and its weakening effects on her character. The limit of her sympathy for the “pretty people” is apparent when the prospect of her becoming like them is unspeakable.

The features of postwar modernity in “Vienne” are an international diplomacy in which its male agents and functionaries exploit demoralized and impoverished local women and measure cities in terms of the women's sexual availability; “amateur” prostitution or female participation in casual sex, a topic I discuss at length in chapter 4; “blanks” in communication between people because of language barriers (199); and a superficiality of relationship in which racial, gender, sexual, and class stereotypes circulate in the making of meaning in everyday encounters. Howells, indeed, reads The Left Bank and Other Stories as Rhys's “feminised version of [T. S. Eliot's] The Waste Land” (32). Rhys ironizes the ways in which characters, including Frances, denigrate other people as foils for their own self-regard and national or ethnic self-regard, and as objects of their sanctimony. Frances and Pierre, who come to represent conspicuous “new money” acquired through currency speculation, are apparently threatened with bankruptcy; Pierre faces charges of theft. Frances remembers telling Pierre that “somehow” she “would find the money to pay his debts” (239), probably by approaching friends, family, and acquaintances—a seemingly characteristic last resort (224-25). This personal financial history is allusively set alongside economic conditions in Austria. In October 1922 the League of Nations rescued Austria from bankruptcy (Fisher 1268).

The name Blanca von Marken, that of Frances's landlady's daughter, the “jeune fille,” carries multiple resonances from French, German, and English. It suggests that she is blank(er), white(r), or shinier at core, free(r) of blemish, shinier because of the family's inheritance of wealth (in German, marks). In a later story, “Temps Perdi,” Rhys uses the word “blank” to signify a tabooed epithet. The girl's Christian name could indeed, in a show of narrative “respectability” and observance of censorship law, carry this, among other significations. The blankness, linked with “blanc” as a racial signifier in French, suggests that the girl is empty, featureless, void of personal interest, lacking. Blanca von Marken meets Lysyl, a dancer with whom Frances and Pierre's flatmate, André, has had casual sex, on the stairs one morning, and Madame von Marken “protest[s]” to Frances (V 197). Lysyl has “a wonderfully graceful body” (196), but her face, according to Frances, shows the traces of her class origin. Frances speaks of “a brutal peasant's face,” which makes André apprehensive that she is not “‘chic’ enough” (196). Blanca and, at second-hand, her mother have to have interpreted Lysyl's facial features, personal style, and presence on the stairs as signs of her being a “‘bad’” woman (197), a contaminating and alien influence in the home of General von Marken.

Madame von Marken had already been “hurt” (198) by Frances's impiety towards the “old-fashioned” virtues (197) of the once dominant, now threatened social ideology observed in the sitting room of the flat in the display of a portrait of former emperor Franz Josef and portraits representing the family lineage. They suggest a conspicuous exhibition of conservative loyalties to empire, prewar social hierarchy, and pride in bloodline and upper-class whiteness, identified with purity. Madame von Marken expresses her outrage first to Frances, reminding her of her feminine role in preserving the innocence of children and domestic respectability and purity and castigating the laxness of the foreign housewife. Frances apologizes, though ashamed of her show of deference to a schematization of women she inwardly abhors; she rehangs the portraits, but feels out of place in the sitting room, retreating from its “gloomy and whiskery and antimacassary” atmosphere to spend her daytime leisure in her bedroom and enjoying the sensuous pleasure of lilacs in the Prater (198-99). Her characterization of the sitting room significantly highlights a “gloomy” foreignness, masculine bodily presence, and a feminine presence only in the “antimacassariness,” a maintenance of a fastidious show of concern for domestic cleanliness. André, too, apologizes to Madame von Marken, relishing the show of piety to masculine chivalry and protection of young feminine innocence; he also dumps Lysyl, when another course that would have preserved a show of respectability would have been to keep their sex more private. His ethic of the “chic,” though, does not rule out trying to seduce Frances.

Rhys juxtaposes the pieties of various characters, most of which rely on the production of woman as a moral or aesthetic sign. The von Markens, representing old money, worship empire, bloodline, patriarchy, and cleanliness, all of which are contingent on the family production of “good” women. The Japanese officials with whom Frances has social contact through Pierre venerate militarism, patriotism, and “good” women as wives. Colonel Ishima dehumanizes Viennese women (assumed to be sexually available) as “‘war material’” (209). His ugly treatment of them makes Frances hate him, and to dehumanize him and Kashua as being like monkeys. Anne McClintock argues that monkeys in Victorian culture were allied with classes of people “collectively seen to inhabit the threshold of racial degeneration” (216). More closely to the 1920s, the hypermasculine “brutal Hun” of First World War anti-German propaganda was processed as ape-like. Frances notes the Japanese men's admiration for the German army and German control of women. André, a representative of the modern, idolizes the chic, seeking to acquire it through sexual attachments to beautiful women. Frances relishes the charming or pretty object, and herself as such. The inauthenticity of her experience of place and time is highlighted by the “dominance of looking” (and being gazed at as woman) “in modernity” (Rauch 85).

“Charming,” “pretty,” and “lovely” are Frances's favorite epithets, used variously to describe women as aesthetic objects, her bedroom, dresses, cities, and Hungarians. She reserves “graceful” for women's figures (V 196, 202). The reduction of Frances to the roles of looker and object of the gaze, to cite an argument of Walter Benjamin's, “compensates for the loss of experience and the debilitation of agency in an industrialized environment” (Rauch 85). The “pretty” takes on the quality of a fetish, a transcendental anchor in modernity. Rauch explains: “The individual's psychological adaptation to a fragmented world … proceeds by libidinally investing the various broken pieces of the past and treating them as souvenirs of a blissful experience of wholeness. Meaning in this modern world of fragments is now formed by the subject's conception of these fragmentary pieces as fetishes, as means for a substitute experience of bliss” (82). Frances reminds herself, “keep your eyes glued on the pretty face […] so much better not to look” closely. Looking closely might take her into a moral domain in which she would have to confront the play of her own “prejudice[s]” in her judgments of what is ugly. Looking closely, she decides, is “[s]tupid” (V 201). When Frances recalls she and Pierre becoming rich she febrilely hails “great god money,” which makes available

all that's nice in life. Youth and beauty, the envy of women, and the love of men. Even the luxury of a soul, a character and thoughts of one's own.

(222)

Looking back, Frances realizes the fragility of her “joy of life” in 1921; her “joy of life” is “cracky” (202). It makes her largely oblivious before her change of fortune to the weaknesses of her marriage. At one point in her pregnancy she experiences “a calm sense of power,” dreaming she might be “mysteriously irresistible, a magnet, a Femme Sacrée” (236). Rhys ironizes Frances's pieties, her investments in illusions. Frances, Rhys highlights, has a habit of abjectly turning away from the “ugly,” particularly if it might attach itself to her. Her habit of not enquiring too closely into any possible dubiousness in her circumstances or herself means that she does not ask herself why André and other men who try to seduce her think she may be sexually available, “‘bad’” for their sexual pleasure, and that she does not pursue closely the question of the origins of her and Pierre's new wealth. When she wants to escape her seeming fate of crossing beyond the boundary of respectability she denigrates Fate as an “old hag” (256).

In Rhys, Stead, Lessing, and the Politics of Empathy, Judith Kegan Gardiner misquotes Ford's description of Rhys's compassion as an “almost terrific sympathy with the underdog” and affirms this view (24). What makes it “almost terrific” in “Vienne” for Gardiner are the narrator's “contradictory” “moral pronouncements,” based on “inconsistent” “attitudes to sexual roles and the double standard” (30). Gardiner's difficulties in distinguishing narrative and authorial voice in the story are apparent in the problem with pronouns in her summation: “Rhys pities victims of gender and class oppression, but she does not always enlist our sympathies, alienating us from the narrator's judgments by her misogyny, self-pity, self-hatred, and sporadic vindictiveness. Arbitrarily, she shifts between empathetic inclusions and angry rejections of herself, us readers and the people snapped in her fictional photographs, outbursts that she deleted in the later version” (31). In context the “misogyny, self-pity, self-hatred, and sporadic vindictiveness” could be the narrator's or Rhys's, although I think Gardiner means it to be the narrator's. Rhys certainly makes the deletions referred to in the last sentence. It is not clear whether in Gardiner's view the narrator or Rhys makes the shift between “empathetic inclusions and angry rejections.”

I suggest that an ironizing authorial perspective in “Vienne” examines the interestedness of Frances's narrative and the limits of Frances's sympathy and gaze, including her gaze at herself. Ford's comments on Rhys's bias and sympathy are reductive, breezily passing over the complexities of her ironization of point of view and of her moral investigations of narrative voice. “Vienne” is the final story in The Left Bank and Other Stories. Placed at the collection's end, it raises new questions about the earlier stories, particularly about what the narrators see, the values that structure their points of view, the limits of their sympathies, and the constitutive silences, blindnesses, or gaps in their storytelling.

Notes

1. The anonymous reviewer of The Left Bank and Other Stories in the New York Times Book Review observed that “the book takes its title from Ford Madox Ford's preface” (28).

2. Rhys published three versions of “Vienne.” An early, much shorter version of the 1927 story was published in transatlantic review in 1924. Rhys edited the 1927 version for inclusion in Tigers Are Better-Looking: With a Selection from The Left Bank (1968).

3. “Trio” 85.

4. I describe the furor over the club in more detail in “Jean Rhys, ‘Human Ants,’ and the Production of Expatriate Creole Identities.”

5. My research on Dominican journalism was facilitated by the purchase from the British Library, a deposit library of the British empire, of microfilmed runs of Dominican newspapers. The purchase was made from an Australian Research Council small grant, which also, among other things, financed some casual teaching relief for a semester, to enable me to read the runs.