JEAN RHYS 1890-1979
Jean Rhys was born Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams on the small island of Dominica in the West Indies. Her father was a Welsh doctor; her mother, a Creole (that is, a white West Indian) descended from wealthy, slave- holding plantation owners. Rhys was educated at a convent school in Roseau, Dominica, before, at the age of seventeen, leaving Dominica to attend the Perse School in Cambridge, England; she returned to her birthplace only once, in 1936. Her feelings toward her Caribbean background and childhood were mixed: she deeply appreciated the rich sensations and cross-racial engagements of her tropical experience, yet she was haunted by the knowledge of her violent heritage and carried a heavy burden of historical guilt. As a West Indian she felt estranged from mainstream European culture and identified with the suffering of Afro-Caribbeans, yet as a white Creole she grew up feeling out of place amid the predominantly black population of Dominica.
After studying briefly at the Academy of Dramatic Art in London, Rhys worked as a traveling chorus girl, mannequin, film extra, and?during World War I?volunteer cook. In 1919 she left England to marry the first of three husbands, and for many years she lived abroad, mainly in Paris, where she began to write the stories of her first book, The Left Bank: Sketches and Studies of Present-Day Bohemian Paris (1927). It was published with an introduction by the established novelist and poet Ford Madox Ford, who was for a time her lover. Ford grasped the link between her vulnerability as a person and her strength as a writer; he perceived her 'terrifying insight . . . and passion for stating the case of the underdog.' Rhys declared, 'I have only ever written about myself,' and indeed much of her writing is semiautobiographical. Her fiction frequently depicts single, economically challenged women, rootless outsiders living in bohemian London or Paris. Her early 'sketches' were followed by her first novel, Postures (1928, reprinted as Quartet in 1969), in part an account of her affair with Ford; After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930), about sexual betrayal; Voyage in the Dark
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(1934), an account of a nineteen-year-old chorus girl in London who has come from Dominica; and Good Morning, Midnight (1939), another first-person narrative of a lonely drifter, this time in Paris.
She published nothing more for many years, dropping out of sight and often living in poverty, until, following the enthusiastic reception of a radio adaptation of Good Morning, Midnight in 1957, she began to work in earnest on her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). In this novel, set in Jamaica and Dominica in the 1830s and
1840s, Rhys returns to her Caribbean childhood and, in a brilliant act of imaginative sympathy, creates a West Indian prehistory for the first Mrs. Rochester, the madwoman in the attic of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Altogether Rhys worked on the novel for twenty-one years, amid bouts of depression, loneliness, and alcoholism, but its immediate acclaim gave her the recognition she had so long been denied. She continued to publish works of fiction and autobiography and in the year before her death received the Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
During the long period when she was writing Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys produced only two published stories, both of which draw like the novel on her Caribbean youth. In 'The Day They Burned the Books,' set in the West Indies, a white girl who only partly understands the painful entanglements of class, race, and cultural prejudice tells how a lower-class Englishman has accumulated a trove of books he values for their cultural prestige, while his mulatto wife, embittered by her husband's racism, comes to despise them as emblems of British imperial oppression. 'Let Them Call It Jazz' also has a first-person female narrator, but this time she is a West Indian mulatto, who speaks in West Indian English of her struggle against racial and class barriers after immigrating to London, an outsider in the metropolitan heart of the empire, ultimately jailed?as was Rhys for a few days after assaulting a neighbor?in Royal Holloway Prison. The shattering of a stained-glass window in this story?like the book burning in the first story and the house burning in Wide Sargasso Sea? represents an eruption of Afro- Caribbean rage in response to the circumscriptions and deceptions of white racism.
Whether working in Standard or West Indian English, Rhys is one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century, her language spare yet lyrical, her sentences exactingly written and rewritten to suggest the most in the fewest possible words. Her writing is almost painfully alert to sensory detail, sensitive to the terrible fears and frustrated longings of marginalized people, and fierce in its unmasking of the social and psychic consequences of racial and gender oppression.
The Day They Burned the Books
My friend Eddie was a small, thin boy. You could see the blue veins in his wrists and temples. People said that he had consumption1 and wasn't long for this world. I loved, but sometimes despised him.
His father, Mr Sawyer, was a strange man. Nobody could make out what he was doing in our part of the world at all. He was not a planter or a doctor or a lawyer or a banker. He didn't keep a store. He wasn't a schoolmaster or a government official. He wasn't?that was the point?a gentleman. We had several resident romantics who had fallen in love with the moon on the Caribees2? they were all gentlemen and quite unlike Mr Sawyer who hadn't an 'h' in his composition.3 Besides, he detested the moon and everything else about the Caribbean and he didn't mind telling you so.
1. Wasting of the body associated with tubercu-in the southeastern West Indies, now called the losis. Lesser Antilles. 2. Or Caribbees: old term for the group of islands 3. His pronunciation marks him as lower-class.
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He was agent for a small steamship line which in those days linked up Venezuela and Trinidad4 with the smaller islands, but he couldn't make much out of that. He must have a private income, people decided, but they never decided why he had chosen to settle in a place he didn't like and to marry a coloured woman. Though a decent, respectable, nicely educated coloured woman, mind you.
Mrs Sawyer must have been very pretty once but, what with one thing and another, that was in days gone by. When Mr Sawyer was drunk?this often happened?he used to be very rude to her. She never answered him.
'Look at the nigger showing off,' he would say; and she would smile as if she knew she ought to see the joke but couldn't. 'You damned, long-eyed, gloomy half-caste,5 you don't smell right,' he would say; and she never answered, not even to whisper, 'You don't smell right to me, either.'
The story went that once they had ventured to give a dinner party and that when the servant, Mildred, was bringing in coffee, he had pulled Mrs Sawyer's hair. 'Not a wig, you see,' he bawled. Even then, if you can believe it, Mrs Sawyer had laughed and tried to pretend that it was all part of the joke, this mysterious, obscure, sacred English joke.
But Mildred told the other servants in the town that her eyes had gone wicked, like a soucriant's6 eyes, and
