SOURCE: Lonsdale, Thorunn. “Literary Foremother: Jean Rhys's ‘Sleep It Off, Lady’ and Two Jamaican Poems.” In Telling Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction in English, edited by Jacqueline Bardolph, pp. 145-54. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001.

[In the following essay, Lonsdale analyzes the reference to Rhys's “Sleep It Off, Lady” in Olive Senior's poem “Meditation on Red” and Lorna Goodison's poem “Lullaby for Jean Rhys.”]

Jean Rhys's influence as a literary foremother is acknowledged through intertextual links made by the Jamaican poets Olive Senior and Lorna Goodison in their poems “Meditation on Red” and “Lullaby for Jean Rhys” respectively. Senior and Goodison make reference to a specific, and hitherto critically neglected, short story by Rhys, “Sleep It Off, Lady,”¹ one that has distinct autobiographical resonance. Furthermore, in making the association with a short story which gives its name to the title of the collection in which it appears, both poets simultaneously invoke the entire collection. Commenting on Rhys's last story-collection, published in 1976, Thomas Staley alludes to its autobiographical overtones:

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.²

A reviewer in 1976 also stated that Sleep It Off, Lady is not so much a collection of short stories as a kind of autobiography”³ and it has been confirmed that the name of Miss Verney in the title story was “used by Jean Rhys in her youth on the stage.”⁴ This story contemplates the approach of death for Miss Verney, who, like Rhys in the last years of her life, lives a reclusive life in a cottage in an English country village. Staley adds:

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.⁵

It has been said of Caribbean women's writing that “one of the narrative perspectives used by many of the prose writers is that of the girl-child/adolescent, often detailing the alienating nature of adult/child relationships,”⁶ and Louis James, commenting on the links between the short stories of Rhys and Senior, states that while

Gwen Williams [Jean Rhys] watched the village children, and wished to be black; Olive Senior visited her middle class relatives with their education, and looked longingly at the European world of books. Both explore the tensions surrounding young women searching for an identity in the common historical and cultural experience of the Caribbean.⁷

These critics confirm the significance of childhood portrayals, but perhaps depictions of ageing in Caribbean fiction are equally important in the exploration of exclusion. Staley's association of the alienation of young and old alike in Rhys's fiction is interesting because, while it is frequently suggested that the search for identity and loss of innocence are common features in Caribbean fiction, the concomitant recognition of insignificance in old age may be equally appropriate. Beryl Gilroy's novel Frangipani House,⁸ Joan Riley's novel Waiting in the Twilight,⁹ Olive Senior's short stories “The View from the Terrace”¹⁰ and “The Chocho Vine,”¹¹ and Rhys's numerous short stories about ageing are examples that immediately come to mind.

Rhys's own reaction to her life in Cheriton Fitzpaine in Devon was often one of anxiety and suspicion; this paranoid inflection, evident in so much of her work, is apparent in “Sleep It Off, Lady” through the symbolic depiction of the grim reaper as a “Super Rat”¹² which the protagonist Miss Verney sees stalking around her shed. The autobiographical aspect of the story is further confirmed in letters Rhys wrote to her editor, Francis Wyndham. In one letter, she writes about the village, saying:

What I can't is to be left alone in a place like Cheriton Fitz which has to be seen to be believed. It is completely isolated yet not peaceful—full to the brim of very stupid gossip. Unkind too.¹³

And in another she mentions the mice in her cottage and her attempts to repulse them:

I spend hours building up a barrier of wood and stones quite useless of course. Also there are alarming sounds from above where the hot water pipes are (Things larger than mice?) But I pretend not to hear them. Altogether this is rather a nightmarish place and why it should have been chosen as a refuge I do not know […]. You know I would have shot off long ago before things got so complicated, for I realised pretty quickly that Cheriton Fitz Paine and this place would need a lot of iron will power, but you see I am even more terrified of landladies (lords) that [sic] I am of mice or solitude.¹⁴

In “Sleep It Off, Lady,” the rat appears after Miss Verney fails to have the much-hated shed in her garden demolished. Her failure to secure help with the shed, and subsequently the rat, serve to emphasize her insecurity and isolated position. Miss Verney's isolation is linked to her behaviour; and it is established that she is known locally for her drinking. A neighbour, who in the past has been relied on for help, suggests that the rat is merely a figment of her drunken imagination when he asks; “Are you sure it wasn't a pink rat?” and we are told that Miss Verney “knew that the bottles in her dustbin were counted and discussed in the village” (164). The only character who shows any compassion for Miss Verney is the doctor who warns her not to lift heavy things but; to her relief; makes no mention of her drinking.

“Don't go moving the furniture about, will you? Don't lift heavy weights. Don't …” (“Oh Lord,” she thought, “is he going to say ‘Don't drink!’—because that's impossible!”) … “Don't worry,” he said.

(167)

It is also the doctor who, after her death, confirms that she had died of a heart condition and acknowledges the prevalence of the condition: “‘Very widespread now—a heart condition’” (172). Carol R. Hagley describes it as “symbolic of the broken heart of the aged and the neglected.”¹⁵

The shed, which, like the rat, forewarns of death, appears in Miss Verney's dream as “a very smart, shiny, dark blue coffin picked out in white”; with typical Rhysian concern for female appearance, “it reminded her of a dress she had once worn” (162). Miss Verney's association of the coffin with something she might wear suggests some awareness of the significance of the coffin. The dress, a voice in her dream tells Miss Verney, can be put away soon, and the implication is that the dress has a forthcoming use. This episode is reminiscent of Anna's dream at the end of Voyage in the Dark,¹⁶ where a child's coffin accentuates the trauma of Anna's abortion.

James Lindroth argues that “there begins between the rat and the woman a contest for continued possession, not just of the shed, but of life, since from one perspective the rat embodies the threat of the blue coffin's enveloping darkness.”¹⁷ Miss Verney's death is signalled from the opening of the story when she confides to her friend Letty her own surprise that “‘I've been thinking a great deal about death lately. I hardly ever do, strangely enough’” (159), and the implication is that she understands it to be a premonition, irrespective of Letty's disclaimers.

Unable to secure help with the rat, Miss Verney is left to deal with the problem herself; ironically, the physical exertion required in the struggle against it precipitates her death. The struggle, first to demolish the threatening ugly shed (read: coffin) and then to battle against the rat (read: death) emphasizes, then, Miss Verney's desire to live. She changes her hitherto careless housekeeping habits and becomes obsessively house-proud. Ultimately, she collapses trying to secure the lid of her dustbin. Miss Verney's death might have been avoided if Deena, the “bovine”-faced girl (168) from one of the council houses opposite Miss Verney's cottage, had not refused to help her. Perhaps it is because Rhys wanted to reinforce Miss Verney's isolation that her depiction of Deena is unusually judgemental. Most of Rhys's depictions of children are sympathetic and emphasize their excluded positions, but equally their compassion for other outsiders. Thomas Staley mentions this omniscient understanding in his consideration of the last four stories in Rhys last collection, of which “Sleep It Off, Lady” is one:

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 façade of hypocrisy and prejudice which society erects to protect itself.¹⁸

Unlike Rosalie in “Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers”¹⁹ or Kim and the girl-narrator in “The Day They Burned the Books,”²⁰ or even Phoebe in “Goodbye Marcus, Goodby Rose,”²¹ whose awareness of “the whole enterprise of life” is foregrounded, Deena in “Sleep It Off, Lady” is portrayed as thoroughly unsympathetic, so much so that “Miss Verney had long ago given up trying to be friendly. So much did the child's cynical eyes depress her that she would cross over the road to avoid her” (168). After her collapse, Miss Verney asks Deena for help but, through a narrative device of innocent repetition much favoured by Rhys in her depictions of children, Deena merely repeats her mother's words:

“It's no good my asking mum. She doesn't like you and she doesn't want to have anything to do with you. She hates stuck up people. Everybody knows that you shut yourself up to get drunk. People can hear you falling about. ‘She ought to take more water with it,’ my mum says. Sleep it off lady,” said this horrible child, skipping away.

(171)

It is Deena's last words, “Sleep it off lady,” that are resurrected by both Olive Senior and Lorna Goodison in their poems and combined with biographical elements from Rhys's life. Goodison's poem “Lullaby for Jean Rhys” alludes specifically to the title of the short story and to Deena's spiteful advice, but here reconciliation is promised. The first line of the poem, “Sleep It Off, Lady,” is capitalized, thus emphasizing the cruelty of Deena's words. In direct contrast to the malice in Rhys's story, the poem continues in the true sense of a lullaby, a soothing song to put children to sleep, with a fairy-tale night-nurse offering a “dark potion” as the prescribed panacea. Goodison's night-nurse, “dressed in rain forest colours / used stars in her hair,” unites the image of Christophine from Wide Sargasso Sea with that of Cinderella's fairy godmother, but, unlike Wide Sargasso Sea, where Christophine's love-potion fails to return the Rochester character to Antoinette, the promise here is of “dancing / atop hard-headed trees / with a man who is virile / and anxious to please.”²² This image, while alluding specifically to Wide Sargasso Sea, captures the thematic concerns of much of Rhys's fiction, in which female protagonists constantly search for the right man but never find him. In “Lullaby for Jean Rhys,” the suggestion is that he will be available.

Like Miss Verney, who is told that a use for her dress is imminent, in Goodison's poem Jean Rhys is told to “straighten your night-dress / wear your transparent slippers,”²³ as here, too, an important occasion is approaching. This image in Goodison's poem, which can be linked to Miss Verney's dream in “Sleep It Off, Lady,” also has a direct intertextual connection with Antoinette's nightmare at the convent:

I am wearing a long dress and thin slippers, so I walk with difficulty, following the man who is with me and holding up the skirt of my dress. It is white and beautiful and I don't wish to get it soiled. I follow him, sick with fear but I make no effort to save myself; if anyone were to try to save me, I would refuse. This must happen. Now we have reached the forest. We are under the tall dark trees and there is no wind. “Here?” He turns and looks at me, his face black with hatred, and when I see this I begin to cry. He smiles slyly. “Not here, not yet,” he says, and I follow him, weeping. Now I do not try to hold up my dress, it trails in the dirt, my beautiful dress.²⁴

Rhys uses her protagonists' dreams to foretell the bleak developments in her plots; in her poem, Goodison envisions happy endings, and in the last line of the poem she re-works the opening line and Deena's judgemental words, and entreats: “Sleep now Miss Rhys.”²⁵ Goodison's “A Lullaby For Jean Rhys,” unlike her earlier poem “A Jean Rhys Lady,”²⁶ which focuses on the ravages of drugs and alcohol and their connection with Rhys's work, is much more compassionate and although, as with “A Jean Rhys Lady,” it invokes Wide Sargasso Sea, it can be linked to this specific short story, drawing upon images from the story as well as from Rhys's best-known novel.

In an interview in 1991, Goodison was asked about her two Rhys poems, and it was suggested to her that:

Obviously, you consider Jean Rhys important, or you feel strongly about her. But in the first poem [“A Jean Rhys Lady”] the images of claws, flames, drunkenness, representing violent or destructive features are in sharp contrast to the second poem, a lullaby about sleep.²⁷

Goodison comments on the impetus for “Lullaby for Jean Rhys” and says “‘Lullaby’ was just before Jean Rhys's death […]. It's just a dreamer's attempt to make something right in a world over which I have no control.”²⁸ The making something right suggests that Goodison felt compassion for the conflicted self that Rhys represented through her characters and so wrote a poem which reconciles Rhys's two worlds, the Caribbean and England. She does this by using the title of, and words from, a story which has distinct autobiographical overtones, which highlights the protagonist's alienation, and which is set in the English countryside, by incorporating imagery from a European fairy-tale and by uniting these elements with powerful images from Wide Sargasso Sea, which itself emphasizes the Caribbean and the disjuncture between England and the Caribbean.

Olive Senior's poem “Meditation on Red” not only refers to “Sleep It Off, Lady” but also includes numerous references to Rhys's work, short stories and novels alike. Essentially, her poem is an homage to her literary predecessor and, even if she does chide her mentor for her lack of enthusiasm for her English surroundings, Senior acknowledges a debt of gratitude:

But I'll
be able to
find my way
home again
for that craft
you launched
is so seaworthy
tighter
than you'd ever been
dark voyagers
like me
can feel free
to sail.
That fire
you lit
our beacon
to safe harbour
in the islands.(29)

Senior transforms Anna's voyage in Voyage in the Dark around here to “dark voyagers / like me” and uses the title of Rhys's third novel to suggest that her own future as a writer is assured because Rhys paved the way, even if it was at personal cost to herself: “that craft / you launched / is so seaworthy / tighter / than you'd ever been.” Senior also includes a slight joke here at Rhys's expense (about her drinking).

Olive Senior locates her poem in Devon and relies heavily on events in Rhys's life, detailed in her published letters, and which Rhys fictionalized in “Sleep It Off, Lady.” Rhys's life is portrayed in the poem through nautical imagery, the metaphor of a rudderless boat without a safe harbour highlighting the unstable quality of her existence: “You (destiny: / storm-tossed),”³⁰ and relates to Rhys's own comments in her letter to Francis Wyndham about being “such a storm tossed boat.”³¹ The nautical metaphor, with undertones of biblical imagery, is continued with the “Arrival / at Land Boat Bungalows / at flood time,”³² (“Land Boat” being the name of Rhys's cottage) and the “perpetual flooding / so much drink / flowing / so much tears.” The watery imagery and the near-drowning of drink and tears recalls Rhys's own drinking and despair and Deena's final words before Miss Verney is left to die alone in the cold. Equally, Senior notes that Rhys's inability to adjust to England left her “so much /on the edge of / but never quite / under / that quilted / green / comforter” of Devon. It is an image which relies heavily on aspects of Rhys's life and her alienation from her surroundings. The contrast between green and red is the axis on which the poem revolves. Senior invokes Rhys's last collection and the short story itself when she describes her visit to Rhys's grave in Cheriton Fitzpaine, Devon, in “Meditation on Red”:

I come
to the churchyard
at Cheriton Fitzpaine
Devon
knowing
you're there
Lady
sleeping it off
under that dark
grey
stone(33)

Like Goodison, but unlike Rhys's fictional Deena, Senior offers comfort and has “come to / wake you / with spring flowers”; like Goodison again, she acknowledges the importance of the Caribbean for Rhys when she lists the flowers she knows Rhys would have favoured:

you would prefer
a blanket
of red
—flame of the forest
hibiscus
heliconia
poinsettia
firecracker
bougainvillea—

While recognizing the importance of the Caribbean for Rhys and identifying with Rhys's sense of dispossession (“I'm as divided / as you were / by that sea”), Senior also reflects on the value of Rhys's English rural surroundings and the writer's lack of enthusiasm for them. The poem scolds Rhys for being emotionally blind and for not noticing the beauty of her immediate environment, for not seeing “the rolling downs / patchworked / in emerald, peridot / mint, celadon.”³⁴ The colours of the English countryside, which contrast with the red in Rhys's work, emphasize the contrast between England and the Caribbean; like Goodison, Senior dwells on Rhys's inability to come to terms with her divided experience of England and the Caribbean.

Jean Rhys has influenced many other Caribbean poets, including Derek Walcott, Jean Binta Breeze, and Anthony McNeill,³⁵ but connections are usually made in relation to her most famous novel and not to her short fiction. Lorna Goodison and Olive Senior incorporate references to Rhys's short stories and to her own life, and there is a strong sense of her sadness and exile. These later women poets not only pay homage to the work, but to the woman as well.

Notes

1. In Sleep It Off, Lady (London: André Deutsch, 1976): 157-72.

2. Thomas F. Staley, Jean Rhys: A Critical Study (1976; London: Macmillan, 1979): 127.

3. Cited in Cheryl Alexander Malcolm, Jean Rhys, A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne, 1996): 124.

4. Dorothy Colmer, “Autobiography and Fiction in Jean Rhys's Short Stories,” in Short Fiction in the New Literatures in English, ed. Jacqueline Bardolph (Nice: Faculté des Lettres, 1989): 87.

5. Staley, Jean Rhys, A Critical Study, 127.

6. Denise deCaires Narain and Evelyn O'Callaghan, “Anglophone Caribbean Women Writers,” Into the Nineties, Post-Colonial Women's Writing, ed. Anna Rutherford, Lars Jensen & Shirley Chew (Mundelstrup & Sydney: Dangaroo, 1994): 626.

7. Louis James, “The Other Side of the Mirror: The Short Stories of Jean Rhys and Olive Senior,” in Short Fiction in the New Literatures in English, ed. Bardolph, 89.

8. Beryl Gilroy, Frangipani House (Oxford: Heinemann, 1986).

9. Joan Riley, Waiting in the Twilight (1987; London: Women's Press, 1992).

10. In Arrival of the Snake-Woman (1989; Harlow: Longman, 1994): 90-111.

11. In Discerner of Hearts (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995): 135-54.

12. Sleep It Off, Lady, 172. Further page references to this story are in the main text.

13. Jean Rhys, Letters 1931-1966 (London: André Deutsch, 1984): 244.

14. Letters 1931-1966, 246-47.

15. Carol R. Hagley, “Ageing in the Fiction of Jean Rhys,” World Literature Written in English 28.1 (Spring 1988): 124.

16. Voyage in the Dark (1934; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987).

17. James Lindroth, “Arrangements in Silver and Grey: The Whistlerian Moment in the Short Fiction of Jean Rhys,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 5.2 (Summer 1985): 130-31.

18. Staley, Jean Rhys, A Critical Study, 127.

19. In Sleep It Off, Lady, 11-22.

20. In Tigers Are Better-Looking (London: André Deutsch, 1968): 40-46.

21. In Sleep It Off, Lady, 25-30.

22. Lorna Goodison, “Lullaby For Jean Rhys,” I Am Becoming My Mother (London: New Beacon Books, 1995): 37.

23. Goodison, I Am Becoming my Mother, 37.

24. Wide Sargasso Sea, intro. Francis Wyndham (1966; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968): 50.

25. Goodison, I Am Becoming my Mother, 37.

26. In Tamarind Season (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1980): 20.

27. Lorna Goodison, “Heartease,” in Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English, ed. Frank Birbalsingh (Warwick University Caribbean Studies; London: Macmillan, 1996): 155.

28. Lorna Goodison, “Heartease,” 155.

29. Olive Senior, “The View from the Terrace,” in Arrival of the Snake-Woman, 51-52.

30. Olive Senior, “Meditation on Red,” Gardening in the Tropics (1985; Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1994): 44.

31. Jean Rhys, Letters, 277.

32. Olive Senior, “Meditation on Red,” 45.

33. Senior, “Meditation on Red,” 49-50.

34. “Meditation on Red,” 44.

35. Derek Walcott, “Jean Rhys,” Collected Poems, 1948-1984 (1986; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992): 427-29; Jean Binta Breeze, “Red Rebel Song,” Spring Cleaning (London: Virago, 1992): 2-6; Anthony McNeill, “The White Shell,” Jamaica Journal 22.3 (August 1989): 59.

Additional coverage of Rhys's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: British Writers Supplement, Vol. 2; Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 1945-1960; Concise Dictionary of World Literary Biography, Vol. 3; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 25-28R; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 35, 62; Contemporary Authors–Obituary, Vols. 85-88; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 2, 4, 6, 14, 19, 51, 124; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 36, 117, 162; DISCovering Authors Module: Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Ed. 3; Literature and Its Times Supplement, Ed. 1; Literature of Developing Nations for Students, Vol. 2; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; Short Story Criticism, Vol. 21; Twayne's English Authors; 20th Century Romance and Historical Writers; and World Writers in English, Vol. 1.