Transnational Jean Rhys

Lines of Transmission, Lines of Flight

Juliana Lopoukhine, Frédéric Regard, Kerry-Jane Wallart, Juliana Lopoukhine, Frédéric Regard, Kerry-Jane Wallart

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501361302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume investigates the frameworks that can be applied to reading Caribbean author Jean Rhys. While Wide Sargasso Sea famously displays overt forms of literary influences, Jean Rhys's entire oeuvre is so fraught with connections to other texts and textual practices across geographical boundaries that her classification as a cosmopolitan modernist writer is due for reassessment. Transnational Jean Rhys argues against the relative isolationism that is sometimes associated with Rhys's writing by demonstrating both how she was influenced by a wide range of foreign – especially French – authors and how her influence was in turn disseminated in myriad directions. Including an interview with Black Atlantic novelist Caryl Phillips, this collection charts new territories in the influences on/of an author known for her dislike of literary coteries, but whose literary communality has been underestimated.

Part One

Lines of transmission: Rhys’s continental transculturalism

1

The white Creole in Paris: Joséphine, Colette and Jean Rhys’s Quartet and Good Morning, Midnight

Elaine Savory

Ron Eyerman explains that cultural trauma theory emphasizes collective memory as a means of survival and strengthening both identity and lasting witness: ‘the notion of cultural trauma implies that direct experience of an event is not a necessary condition for its inclusion in the trauma process’ (2001: 12). Descendants of victims of the Holocaust and the Middle Passage inherit cultural trauma via collective memory. Eyerman notes here a marked ‘difference between black and white in social and historical understanding’ (17). Speaking of the United States, and the aftermath of the Civil War, he says: ‘Whites, regardless of whether chance had placed them in the North or South, shared a European cultural heritage, what would soon be identified as part of Western civilization’ (17). This white supremacy evades responsibility for causing cultural trauma.

Still, it may be argued that Rhys records personal and fictional trauma for white women, through sexual experience. She herself felt permanently an outsider to white communities and even when young longed to belong to the black world.¹ She often felt isolation and alienation. The colonial elite into which she was born in colonial Dominica, in 1890, certainly tried to co-opt her but she never fitted in.² She was even uncomfortable with her physical self as the palest of the children of her white Creole family, with blue eyes: no wonder, for she heard her mother say ‘black babies were prettier than white ones’ (SP 42). This memory, in her unfinished autobiography ([1979] 1990), is relevant to her self-exile. She suffered early sexual trauma, as indicated in her journal account of Mr Howard: it seems very likely this was not a fictive entry, but recorded an actual experience (Angier [1990] 1992: 26–9).³ Young white Creole girls in Dominica in Rhys’s time found their sexuality constrained within strict codes. Carole Angier, in her biography Jean Rhys, refers to an attempt by Rhys’s brother Owen to write a story about a character with some similarity to Rhys, who had an affair with a young man of colour in the island.⁴

But if interracial love was forbidden, as recorded in her notebook, an elderly child abuser was allowed access to the young Rhys by her mother. This molester spun stories that seem to contain faint echoes of the pornographic and sadomasochistic side of the Marquis de Sade’s fiction (though Sade is seen by some as a philosopher, his work clearly has the potential to inspire and justify abusive male sexual behaviour in those who read for the story). Rhys’s notes reveal the sexual, racial and class pathology in which she grew up in Dominica. It was a place in which a young girl could feel both a victim of history as a woman and, at the same time, part of a culpable racial and class elite. There was further trauma Rhys endured as a young woman. At sixteen, she left Dominica to finish secondary school in Britain, then briefly attended Tree’s Drama School in London (from where, the story goes, she was dismissed for her West Indian accent).⁵ She then defied her family and class expectations and became a chorus girl, thereby losing her class status. Even her race became somewhat indeterminate, as she was an exotic foreigner, despite her blue eyes.⁶ Her relationship with Lancelot Grey Hugh Smith, exploitative, rich and emotionally damaged, hurt her lastingly at and after its end. Her marriage to French-Belgian Jean Lenglet failed, in Paris, a city she loved. Her home, her shelter from trauma, was really in writing itself, the place which never failed her. This essay reads the sexual experience of two Rhys protagonists in Paris, fabled city of love: Marya in Quartet and Sasha in Good Morning, Midnight, in the context of mythologies and experience of the white Creole woman in Europe.

Paris was not outside Rhys’s linguistic or cultural space. French was in her history. As a result of European colonialism, both English and French are spoken in Dominica. In Rhys’s childhood, English-speaking whites looked back to ancestry in Britain, French-speaking to both an educated mixed-race group (the so-called ‘Mulatto Supremacy’⁷) descended from refugees from the Haitian Revolution and the poor majority, who spoke a local French Creole. Rhys could claim both languages quite naturally as part of her childhood experience. In Smile Please, she points out that mountains (‘Mornes’ in Dominica) have French names such as ‘Morne Diablotin’, and that the island was once French (SP 21). Francine, a ‘Negro girl’ Rhys played with as a child, always began a story with an exchange between teller and audience in French (31). Rhys thought the black community in Dominica (which spoke French Creole) was warmer and more fun than the white (50–1). In the chapter of her autobiography titled ‘My Mother’, a memory comes with two lines of French poetry (44). In the chapter ‘Poetry’ French poetry is quoted twice (including Victor Hugo’s ‘Un peu de musique’) and she says she was ‘assaulted’ by both French and English poetry at school (59). We also know Jean Rhys kept French poetry by her side throughout her writing life, and that Ford Madox Ford told her when in doubt about something she had written, to translate it into French and back to English again (Angier [1990] 1992: 134). Though just being married to Jean Lenglet, her first husband, who was French-Belgian, would not have bestowed skills in French, the relationship certainly would not have separated her from immersion in the language once she moved to France. Diana Athill, in her introduction to Smile Please, reminds us that Rhys translated two books from French to English (Athill 1979: 14–15).

There is certainly plenty of evidence to think of her work as in conversation with French writers and French cultural figures. Sometimes she references these in her texts. Specifically, this chapter argues, she is writing back to Colette, the Marquis de Sade and Joséphine de Beauharnais, implicitly or explicitly.

Contributing to a myth?: Joséphine de Beauharnais

Andrea Stuart’s biography of the woman she calls, with good reason, Josephine (without the accent) includes many details relevant to thinking about elements of the reputation of white Creoles in Paris.⁸ Joséphine, Napoleon’s first wife, was born Marie-Josèphe-Rose-de Tascher de La Pagerie (Stuart 2003: 4). Her birthplace, L’Habitation de La Pagerie, a plantation in Martinique, was and is a place of exceptional natural beauty to which her family was very much attached (5). Stuart says Martiniquan Creoles were ‘seen as coarse, clannish, impatient – and according to one observer “violently attached to their pleasures”’ and that she was ‘in many ways an exemplary Creole’, meaning she had sensuality and willfulness (19). Stuart also connects the ‘sensory splendor’ of Martinique to Joséphine’s evidently sensuous nature: ‘it was a world that had to be apprehended through the body, not the intellect’ (12). It was a world of violence. Violence was commonplace. White men declared their supremacy by sexual predation and other violence to those in their power, and duelled among themselves to test their place in the white male hierarchy. As for the white Creole girl, she was expected to accept a future as mother of white heirs to family wealth, the main support of white supremacy. She grew up at first playing with other children (including enslaved children) but before puberty, her training to be a planter’s wife had to involve not just admonitions but careful scrutiny. Stuart quotes a visitor to Martinique on young white Creole girls: ‘she is a bird in a cage who vaguely aspires to liberty but without suspecting the perils of that liberty once it happens’ (27).

Like Rhys in the early twentieth century, Joséphine left for Europe in her mid-teens, to become a wife in Paris. Stuart records that at this stage, Joséphine was not physically appealing, though she would eventually become ‘an essential pillar of […] Creole mythology’ (35), a leader of fashion in post-Revolution Paris, in a small and well-known group of women which included a Mme Hamelin, whom Stuart describes as a ‘witty and wild young Creole’ (155).⁹

Stuart does not think that she was in love with Napoleon, who boasted that he hurried sex with his mistresses and who, in Stuart’s words, was ‘never the most sensual of men’ (177). Stuart also argues that, much like Colette and Rhys, ‘Rose had learned through bitter experience the difference between passion and love’ (177). Stuart’s representation of Rose as a person of strength of will however makes it easy to think that becoming Napoleon’s Joséphine must have suited her. He eventually divorced her because he needed a son to carry on his line. So it is clear that even the most romantic and successful of white Creoles in Paris had come to a sad end with regards to a man she had trusted. Martinique is close to Dominica and it is likely Rhys would have heard of Joséphine. Rhys often indicates, in her fiction, the ways such a woman in Europe was thought exotic, different.

Ford Madox Ford played into this stereotype in his lurid portrayal of Lola Porter in When the Wicked Man ([1931] 2012). This was his revenge on Rhys for her negative portrait of him as a fat, pompous sexual predator in Quartet. It is one of his weakest novels.¹⁰ Ford gives Lola Porter ‘fiery Creole ancestry’ and upbringing (192) and a birth in Martinique. His narrator notes that ‘Creoles are as noted for their indolence as for their passion’ (192). The anger is certainly there in Lola, who is said to sometimes ‘let the tiger peep out from beneath her Creole nonchalance’ (197). Stella Bowen, Ford’s long-suffering partner, referenced this idea of the Creole woman when she said Rhys was ‘a doomed soul, violent and demoralized’ (Bowen [1941] 1984: 116).

Colette’s sensuous woman and the white Creole

The French writer Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, subsequently Madame Henry Gauthier-Villars, 1873–1954) might also have had Creole ancestry. From her mother, she heard her grandfather, Henry Landoy, was called ‘The Gorilla’ for his African blood. Judith Thurman, Colette’s biographer, writes that at ‘the end of her life, in a passing phrase, Colette described her mother’s antecedents as “cocoa harvesters” from the colonies, “colored by island blood”, with frizzy hair and purple fingernails’ (Thurman 1999: 6).¹¹ She also said her ancestors ‘came from a warm island […]. There! I have a stain of black in my blood. Does that disgust you?’ and described her father, Henry Landoy, as a ‘quadroon’ (7). Whether or not this can be proven, there is a consciousness of race inherent in this statement, similar to that in the Caribbean. It is also present in something else Colette says in ‘Music-Hall Sidelights’ (My Apprenticeships), when she speaks of a chorus girl called ‘Misfit’ (this is also the title of a short story). ‘Misfit’ dislikes summer audiences because they have a lot of foreigners, ‘rough teutonic beards, oriental hard blue-black hair pads and oily skins, and impenetrable negro smiles’ (Colette 1967: 207).

Like Joséphine, Colette contributed to the construction of the idea of the French woman as sexually open and passionate, with her definite hint of something offshore, less constricted by mores of class, church and state: though had she been raised in the Caribbean, her sexuality could not have been so open and free and she could not have so openly challenged the idea of male sexual supremacy. Colette broke the rules in both life and art. She had a famous affair with her second husband’s son, Bertrand de Jouvenel, when she was forty-seven and he was sixteen. She fictionalized such love more than once, perhaps most famously in Chéri (1920). There were, as Thurman points out, numerous examples of sexual relationships between older women and younger men in French literature and life, but in Colette’s fiction, there is great sensuality: a sort of textual equivalent of Josephine’s elegant, unrestrained muslin.¹²

In Colette’s texts, women have orgasms, draw attention to their passion by making cries, notice more or less skilled ways of male kissing. In the story ‘The Victim’, a woman speaks about a man who loves her but whom she cannot love: ‘I’ll die without knowing whether he kisses good or bad, if he makes love good or bad. When he kisses me, my mouth becomes like … like … nothing. It’s dead, it doesn’t feel anything. My body either’ (1991d: 193). In Le Pur et l’impur (The Pure and the Impure), a kind of creative non-fiction discourse on sex and love, Colette is wonderfully direct and detailed about physical sensations: ‘she turned her head from side to side on the white cushion, her lips parted, like a woman threatened with a paroxysm of pleasure’ (Colette 1968: 35); in the original text, ‘Elle tournait de côté et d’autre sa tête sur le coussin blanc, agitée, la bouche entrouverte, comme une femme que le plaisir menace’ (Colette [1941] 2004: 25). The French phrase ‘comme une femme que le plaisir menace’ is far more powerful than this English translation ‘threatened with a paroxysm of pleasure’.

She represents a man who has had many female lovers being utterly dismissive, even rude about them all, saying they did not spare him a single embrace (and calling them ‘bitches’), but Colette’s narrator adds: ‘he did not say embrace, but used a blunter term that refers to the terrible paroxysm of male sexual satisfaction’ (Colette 1968: 38); in the original text, ‘Il n’usa point de ce dernier mot, mais d’un autre plus bref, et qui se rapporte au terrible traumatisme du plaisir viril’ (Colette [1941] 2004: 28). There is something important in the French delivery of the idea of male climax as the specific trauma of ‘manly pleasure’ (plaisir viril). For if there is such a thing, there is certainly female pleasure also, and that is experienced internally, out of sight, without the outward appearance of conquering anyone.

But men who want to believe in conquest might dislike being reduced to spent creatures after sex is done. Colette’s narrator goes on: in the translation by Herma Briffault, ‘rarely have I encountered in a woman the kind of hostility with which a man regards the mistresses who have exploited him sexually. The woman, on the contrary, knows herself to be an almost inexhaustible store of plenty for the man’ (Colette 1968: 38). In the French, this reads, ‘grenier d’abondance de l’homme, la femme se sait à peu près inépuisable’ (1932 as Ces Plaisirs. 1941 as Le Pur et l’impur; [1941] 2004: 28), which gives a better sense of the extent of female resources. One promiscuous man the narrator knows says of women, ‘they allow us to be their master in the sex act, but never their equal. That is what I cannot forgive them’ (Colette 1968: 58); in the original, ‘Être leur maître dans le plaisir, mais jamais leur égal. Voilà ce que je ne leur pardonne pas’ ([1941] 2004: 48). Colette’s literal words ‘to be their master in the pleasure but never their equal’ may refer to male and/or female pleasure but is definitely about the sexual act as inherently about power or loss of it.

Reading Colette and Rhys together

Both Colette and Rhys tackled the difficult question of how to write honestly and boldly about female sexuality, in societies where women (including their readers) are contained in social restrictions.¹³ What first brings them together is the freemasonry of the woman writer. There are distinct parallels between them in their accounts of the beginning of their craft. Colette talks about the role of writing in Mes apprentissages:

For I had ju...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: On reading Rhys transnationally
• Part One: Lines of transmission: Rhys’s continental transculturalism
• Part Two: Lines of flight: Rhys’s transnational legacy
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint