[In the following excerpt, Gregg offers thematic analyses of two of Rhys's West Indian stories: “Again the Antilles” and “Fishy Waters.”]

“AGAIN THE ANTILLES”

“Again the Antilles,” first published in 1927, is also grounded in the specific political and historical context of postslavery Dominica. The short story covers the period from the 1830s to the 1900s. Dominican politics and culture provide the locus of an imaginative exploration of the interconnectedness of imperial/colonial politics, history, narrative, and the acts of reading and writing. For purposes of clarity and comparison, I shall first cite in chronological order some of the specific historical events of the period as recorded in accounts by historian Joseph Borome and the present-day Dominican writer Lenox Honychurch.

Borome notes that, by the late 1830s (the immediate postslavery period), the mulattoes comprised the majority in the Legislative Assembly in Dominica: “Two political parties, conservative and liberal, developed rapidly, supported by two newspapers, the Colonist (white) and the Dominican (colored) respectively. Acrimony and personal vituperation, which appeared to flow in the bloodstreams of Dominica politicians, continued to characterize deliberations, especially of the House.” After several decades, he continues, the volatile political situation was accepted as the norm, as the excerpt quoted from the Antigua Weekly Register attests: “The political disputes, engendering social discord and strife, of our neighbours in Dominica, have for so long a period been a reproach to the legislation and government of that island, as to cease to attract even an ordinary degree of attention” (“Crown Colony,” 120-21).

Lenox Honychurch highlights the “religious riots” of 1847:

On 4th May, a staunch Catholic member of the House of Assembly, T. F. Lockhart, introduced a bill to provide incomes for the Roman Catholic clergy. Mr. Lockhart's emotional address in the House caused much agitation among Catholics and this was heightened by the strong opposition of Charles Falconer, a fiery Methodist. He objected to any religious denomination receiving money from the government, especially in a poor island such as Dominica. Because of this, Falconer and his fellow Methodists became the targets of insult. … On the evening of 18th October, 1847 … a general riot ensued.

(Dominica, 106)

In the 1850s some leading whites sought to change the governmental structure in order to effectively remove the mulattoes. Their view is articulated by the printer of the Colonist, John Finlay, in the 1 July 1854 issue. He claimed that the government was

mostly composed of men who are entirely ignorant of the first principles of government, and whose only reason for going there is to aggrandise themselves, and to bring ruin on the more respectable classes of society. They are uneducated, ignorant and revengeful; and most of them have neither status [n]or property in the Island. The majority of these would-be-legislators, is made up of Journey-men Printers and Tailors, Bankrupt Shopkeepers, a Blacksmith and a few fourth rate Planters. Very few of them articulate English decently, and a still smaller number are able to write it with any degree of accuracy or propriety.

(qtd. Borome, “Crown Colony,” 121; emphasis added)

In 1865, Borome continues, a bill to make Dominica a Crown Colony was introduced in the Legislative Assembly. Falconer was part of a group that sailed to England to put their case against Crown Colony government to the secretary for the colonies. Despite this move, the new act for a modified Crown Colony status was put into effect. In 1871 Dominica and the other Leeward Islands became a federal colony.

In the 1880s William Davies emerged as “the most skillful colored political leader after Falconer.” He leased Falconer's old press and started the Dial in 1882. This newspaper folded for lack of funds in 1893. In that same year another newspaper, the Dominican Guardian, appeared. It was backed by Davies and other colored men. Adopting the motto “Fiat Justicia,” the newspaper proposed “to guard and protect our country from the tyranny of those who believe it to be their duty to add oppression to our misfortunes.” Like Falconer, Davies was fundamentally opposed to Crown Colony government. In 1898, when the resolution for Crown Colony government was passed, an editorial in the Guardian advocated civil disobedience. In 1905 another mulatto, A. R. C. Lockhart, started the Leeward Islands Free Press. The newspaper attacked Governor Hesketh Bell's “self-advertisement” and declared itself in favor of a federal union of all the West Indian colonies (122-39).

The narrator of Rhys's “Again the Antilles” is an unnamed West Indian living in a foreign country. She recalls the editor of the Dominica Herald and Leeward Islands Gazette—Papa Dom:

A born rebel, this editor: a firebrand. He hated white people, not being quite white, and he despised the black ones, not being quite black. … “Coloured” we West Indians call the intermediate shades, and I used to think that being coloured embittered him.

He was against the Government, against the English, against the Island's being a Crown Colony and the Town Board's new system of drainage. He was also against the Mob, against the gay and easy morality of the negroes and the “hordes of priests and nuns that overrun our unhappy Island,” against the existence of the Anglican bishop and the Catholic bishop's new palace.

He wrote seething articles against that palace which was then being built, partly by voluntary labour—until, one night his house was besieged by a large mob of the faithful, throwing stones and howling for his blood. … In the next issue of his paper he wrote a long account of the “riot”: according to him it had been led by several well-known Magdalenes, then, as always, the most ardent supporters of Christianity.

(CS [Jean Rhys: The Collected Short Stories], 39-40)

The collation of Papa Dom's grievances provides a “thick description” of the political and social issues of nineteenth-century Dominica. The Papa Dom figure of Rhys's story strongly suggests Falconer. At the same time, this character and the story as a whole are constructed according to the recurrent Rhysian techniques of layering or eliding different time periods and the deliberate fictionalization of historical figures. The references to the “religious riot” suggest the 1840s, while the political concerns cited cover a period extending to the 1890s. The mulatto figure of Papa Dom may also suggest William Davies and A. R. C. Lockhart.

By placing “riot” in quotation marks, the Rhys narrative suggests that Papa Dom uses words (and his newspaper) as a means of inventing or distorting “real” situations and labeling or attacking those with whom he disagrees. Within the context of Rhys's writing, this is particularly ironic, since her own construction of the mulatto does precisely that. In addition, the mulatto does double duty for the Creole—the despised Other, patronized, belittled, labeled as hate-filled, and the oppositional figure whose very existence questions the premise of European racial and cultural supremacy.

These uses of the mulatto figure are clearly shown in the narrator's recall of a feud, carried out in the newspaper, between Papa Dom and the transplanted Englishman Hugh Musgrave, a member of the governing class. According to the narrator, Hugh Musgrave, who had been in Dominica for twenty years, “employed a great deal of labour, but he was certainly neither ferocious nor tyrannical” (40). Papa Dom, writing under such pseudonyms as Pro Patria, Indignant, Liberty, and Uncle Tom's Cabin, “let himself go,” while Mr. Musgrave replied, “briefly and sternly.” The exchange between the two increases publication of the newspaper and the feud intensifies. Papa Dom writes:

“It is a saddening and a dismal sight … to contemplate the degeneracy of a stock. How far is such a man removed from the ideals of true gentility, from the beautiful description of a contemporary, possibly, though not certainly, the Marquis of Montrose, left us by Shakespeare, the divine poet and genius.

“He was a very gentle, perfect knight …”

Mr. Musgrave took his opportunity:

Dear Sir: he wrote

“I never read your abominable paper. But my attention has been called to a scurrilous letter about myself which you published last week. The lines quoted were written, not by Shakespeare but by Chaucer, though you cannot of course be expected to know that, and run. …

“It is indeed a saddening and a dismal thing that the names of great Englishmen should be thus taken in vain by the ignorant of another race and colour.”

Mr. Musgrave had really written “damn niggers.”

Papa Dom was by no means crushed. Next week he replied with dignity as follows:

“My attention has been called to your characteristic letter. I accept your correction though I understand that in the mind of the best authorities there are grave doubts, very grave doubts indeed, as to the authorship of the lines, and indeed the other works of the immortal Swan of Avon. However, as I do not write with works of reference in front of me, as you most certainly do, I will not dispute the point.

“The conduct of an English gentleman who stoops to acts of tyranny and abuse cannot be described as gentle or perfect. I fail to see that it matters whether it is Shakespeare, Chaucer or the Marquis of Montrose who administers from down the ages the much needed reminder and rebuke.”

I wonder if I shall ever again read the Dominica Herald and Leeward Islands Gazette.

(41)

The Englishman's disavowal of Papa Dom's reading and his calling the mulatto a “nigger” derives from his recognition of the English Book as a signifier of authority and his Englishness as a sign of difference. It is useful and interesting to compare the fictional Englishman's contempt for the mulatto's inability to identify accurately an English text with the view of John Finlay, the printer of the Colonist, that the inability to speak and write English “with any degree of accuracy or propriety” ought to disqualify “ignorant” men from having a say in the government of Dominica and from becoming legal and political human beings.

As we have already seen, erroneous attribution, misreading, and imperfect recall in Rhys's writing are strategies that pry the text loose from its individual author(ship), disseminating or evacuating its material into a larger discursive matrix. Such a move calls attention to its indissoluble fusion with political and social authority. In Bakhtinian terms, Papa Dom, the West Indian mulatto who, lacking propriety and accuracy, takes the name of the Fathers in vain, deploys the “authoritative discourse” as “internally persuasive discourse” and adjusts it to the specific political and historical situation of British colonialism in the West Indies (Dialogic, 340-48). Papa Dom appropriates the properties of the highest echelons of the English literary tradition, invoking its claims of universal humanism and transcendental authority in order to expose and condemn the ethnocentrism of the English gentleman in the West Indies. By polemically drawing the privileged metropolitan literary language into the contact zone, the mulatto indicts the Englishman for his betrayal of the values embodied in the authority he espouses. This double inscription and repetition expose the flaws and contradictions embedded in the ideology of European supremacy. By laying claim to these texts, Papa Dom disarticulates given signs and rearticulates them so that they may mean differently. He deterritorializes the language and literature of Europe and uses them as a site for cultural intervention. Embedded in Papa Dom's rereading and rewriting is the figuration of the West Indian writer who uses “privileged texts as the object of conscious rather than reactive processes of cognition” (Wynter, “Beyond Miranda's Meanings,” 365).

The narrator implicates herself in her own dramatization of the social, political, and cultural conflicts by wondering (an implicit longing) whether she will “ever again read the Dominica Herald and Leeward Islands Gazette.” In one sense, in her account of the feud between Papa Dom and Mr. Musgrave, the narrator's sympathies clearly lie with the latter as she ridicules the former. Here again we see the Creole figure whose identity depends upon the simultaneous belittling and appropriation of the mulatto as an oppositional figure and as a means of expressing ressentiment toward the metropolitan subjectivity to whom she also feels some affinity.

“FISHY WATERS”

Almost fifty years after “Again the Antilles,” Rhys's work takes up the same preoccupation with newspapers and debates about race, history, and writing in the West Indies. These debates provide the context for a horrifying tale of alleged child abuse. Yet the struggle for legal and discursive representation among distinct social groups, which comprises the major part of the narrative, conceals or obliterates the event itself. The structure of the story analyzes the ways in which subjectivities are simultaneously constituted and canceled by discourses of race, gender, and history. The protagonists are absent and, except for a brief letter from Mr. Longa, voiceless; the little child whom he allegedly abused is unable to speak. Their story is told through indirection and innuendo, through gossip and silence, through juridical and other forms of official or public discourse. In a sense, then, it is the social text that is the protagonist. Given the structure of the short story, it will be necessary for me to paraphrase and quote at length.

The story opens with a month-long debate in the Dominica Herald centering on race, writing, and history. Under the pseudonym “Disgusted,” someone who is not white asserts that Mr. Longa, an Englishman, was cruelly treated and ostracized because he was a socialist and that he was accused of child molestation on a “trumped-up charge”: “In this way, they plan to be rid of a long-standing nuisance and to be able to boast about their even-handed justice. The hypocrisy of these people, who bitterly resent that they no longer have the power over the bodies and minds of the blacks they once had (the cruelty of West Indian planters was a by-word), making a scape-goat of an honest British workman is enough to make any decent person's gorge rise” (CS, 298).

The letter draws a sharp response from a named reader:

Who is “Disgusted”? Who is this person (I believe people) who tries to stir up racial hatred whenever possible? Almost invariably, with gloating satisfaction, they will drag in the horrors of the slave trade. Who would think, to hear them talk, that slavery was abolished by the English nearly a hundred years ago? They are long on diatribes, but short on facts. The slave trade was an abominable one, but it could not have existed without the help and cooperation of African chiefs. Slavery still exists, and is taken for granted, in Africa, both among Negroes and Arabs. Are these facts ever mentioned? The bad is endlessly repeated and insisted upon; the good is ridiculed, forgotten or denied. Who does this, and why?

(299)

The following week, “Disgusted” identifies himself as a store proprietor: “It is sometimes said that African chiefs probably had a good deal to do with the slave trade, but I never heard before that this was proven. In his typical letter I noticed that Mr. MacDonald places all the blame on these perhaps mythical Africans and says nothing about the greed of white merchants or the abominable cruelty and indifference of white planters. The treatment meted out to Mr. Longa shows that their heirs and successors have not changed all that much” (299).

Another pseudonymous writer, “Fiat Justicia,” brings the debate to a close by invoking the power and authority of the British juridical system that governs the colony: “I hate to interfere with the amusement of your readers, but I must point out that according to English law it is highly improper to discuss a case that has not been tried (sub judice). In this country the custom seems to be more honoured in the breach than in the observance” (299). The letters to the newspaper are followed by a “personal” letter to Caroline, who, it is inferred, lives in England. It is written by an English expatriate, Maggie, whose husband, Matthew Penrice, is “main witness for the prosecution” in the case against Mr. Longa.

In the ensuing courtroom drama, the prosecution charges Mr. Longa with molesting the child and claims that Matthew Penrice rescued her and took her to a woman who was in his pay. The child herself is unable to talk. The doctor explains the child's silence as trauma, saying: “I have known cases when, after a frightening and harmful experience, the mind has protected itself by forgetting” (306). The lawyer for the defense refuses such an explanation on racial and social grounds: “Do you really think that this interesting but rather complicated theory could apply to a Negro child, completely illiterate, only eleven or twelve years of age? Is it not more likely that she remains silent because she has either been persuaded or threatened—probably a bit of both—not to talk?” (306). He also questions Mr. Penrice's decision to take the child to his former servant instead of to a doctor. In countering the lawyer's argument, the doctor insists that the result of illiteracy is not an uncomplicated mind.

Mr. Longa's lawyer reads a letter from the defendant saying that he saw the child crying and meant to frighten her because the children had been nuisances and he disliked them. He said he did not hurt her but did mean to frighten her. He also stated his decision to leave the island. In summing up, the judge observed that it was difficult to obtain direct evidence in the island because of the deep distrust of the police and the law. He settled the case by accepting Mr. Longa's decision to leave.

Matthew Penrice is attacked by a group of people outside the courthouse. When he goes home, he tells his wife that the little girl will be given an opportunity to “start again.” Maggie later reads a letter from the Syrian woman who is taking care of the child: “Thank you for the money you sent. I will keep it faithfully and carefully for her when she grows up and thank you from my heart for giving her to me. You would be pleased to see her. She is getting quite fat and pretty and hardly ever wakes up screaming as she used to do. I now close and say no more from my overflowing heart” (310).

When Maggie confronts her husband with the rumor that he was the one who abused the child and then blamed Longa because of his status as an outcast, Matthew Penrice dismisses it. However, he insists on leaving the island at all costs. He then considers the matter completely settled: “He … took up a book; but Maggie … saw that he never turned a page. … She was trying to fight the overwhelming certainty that the man she was looking at was a complete stranger” (311).

The letters to the editor, to Caroline, to Matt Penrice, Mr. Longa's letter to the court, the hearing, and the rumors—all form part of the competing discourses that stand in for and construct the “event.” What, then, is the story? Is it that Matt Penrice abused the child and paid off her guardian, then became a witness for the prosecution, using as a scapegoat a supporter of the British working class? Why does he seem a stranger to his wife? The wealth of information conceals more than it reveals. The “people” whom the story is “about” are absent and enigmatic. What is not said and who does not speak are important—the white man of an “inferior” class, a carpenter and a socialist, the young girl who is illiterate. The sociopolitical realm of the postslavery West Indies of the late nineteenth century and the representational discourses are the substance that constitutes and disassembles individual subjectivities.