Jean Rhys: The French Connection?

Abstract

This essay examines Rhys's relationship with France as evinced in her autobiographical works and early fiction. It analyses the way in which Rhys, adopting a position of self-imposed artistic marginality and social isolation, refuses to endorse popular utopian visions of Paris as an all-embracing, alternative aesthetic homeland and a realm of erotic liberation. Paris instead becomes synonymous with maternal, not sexual, love. This offers a sense of resolution and closure for Rhys on a personal level (she connects metonymically with her own estranged mother); but her particular representation of the maternal realm also furthers her quest for a technically innovative form of writing. This is characterised by chronological disturbance, narratorial instability, fragmented interior monologue, and a subversive rewriting of other canonical texts: traits common in much modernist writing of the period. Rhys additionally employs narrative and syntactical structures mimicking the natural rhythms of the maternal body, and, ever the radical, draws on French literature for her revisionary writing, thus aligning herself tangentially with an already dissident French literary canon. Rhys's French connections enable her to explore women-centred themes within the context of modernism and still retain her unique nonconformist voice.