Jean Rhys and the Novel As Women's Text

Nancy R. Harrison

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469639826
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

Is a woman's writing different from a man's? Many scholars -- and readers -- think so, even thought here has been little examination of the way women's novels enact the theories that women theorists have posited. In Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women's Text, Nancy Harrison makes an important contribution to the exchange of ideas on the writing practice of women and to the scholarship on Jean Rhys. Harrison determines what the form of a well-made women's novel discloses about the conditions of women's communication and the literary production that emerges from them. Devoting the first part of her book to theory and general commentary on Rhys's approach to writing, she then offers perceptive readings of Voyage in the Dark, an early Rhys novel, and Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys's masterpiece written twenty-seven years later. She shows how Rhys uses the terms of a man's discourse, then introduces a woman's (or several women's) discourse as a compelling counterpoint that, in time, becomes prominent and gives each novel its thematic impact. In presenting a continuing dialogue with the dominant language and at the same time making explicit the place of a woman's own language, Rhys gives us a paradigm for a new and basically moral text. Originally published in 1988. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Index

Alphabetization is letter-by-letter. Names of fictional characters are followed by parenthetical reference to the works in which they appear.

• Abel, Elizabeth, xiii, 117, 118, 119
• Acting: and dream work, 138-40; and reading, 21-22; and speaking, 25; on stage, 20; and writing, 20-25
• Adams, Robert M., 33
• Aesthetics, 5, 45, 130, 249-55, 258 (n. 25)
• After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, 61, 120–24
• Alvarez, Albert, 54, 61-63, 70-71
• Amélie (Wide Sargasso Sea), 150, 183-84, 202
• Annette. See Mason, Annette
• Antoinette. See Mason, Antoinette
• Ardener, Edwin, 50-51, 261 (n. 11)
• Ardener, Shirley, 50-51, 261 (n. 11)
• Arnold, June, 17
• Athern, Louise Montague, 43
• Athill, Diana, 63, 265 (n. 1)
• Audience: female, 1-25; male, 62, 70; for men’s texts, 10; of readers, xii, 2, 22; theater-going, 1, 2, 10, 20-21; for women’s texts, 6, 7, 10
• Austen, Jane, 11, 57
• Authority, xvi
• Authors. See Writers
• Authorship, 14, 15, 144
• [Auto]biography: defined, xv, xvi, 5, 43-45; Rhys’s novels as, xvi, 61-63, 110; women’s novels as, xi, xv, 1, 18, 40-48; Woolf’s works as, 263 (n. 29)

• Baptiste (Wide Sargasso Sea), 220, 222, 223, 229-30, 244
• Bart, Lily (The House of Mirth), 16, 22-24
• Beardon, Maudie (Voyage in the Dark), 72-73, 222
• Beauvoir, Simone de, 52, 261 (n. 2)
• Bernini, Gian, 33-34
• Bertha. See Jane Eyre; Mason, Antoinette
• Bitzer, Lloyd, xi-xii
• Blanks: in discourse, 50, 53, 65, 97, 261; “Mr. Blank,” 64, 76, 77, 99; within Rochester, 194, 209. See also Gaps (in discourse)
• Books: The Arabian Nights, 59, 114; father-b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• To be our own audience: The theater of the woman's text
• Reading as Seeing: A spectacular view of our selves
• The Displaying Text: The Woman's novel as [Auto]biography
• The Fundamental Conversation
• Getting back to the spoken word: Voyage in the dark
• The Intratext
• The Woman writer as reader: The dream-text of Wide Sargasso Sea
• The other side: “Rochester's” Narrative in Wide Sargasso Sea
• Postscript
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Index