Jean Rhys

b. Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams, August 1890 (although Rhys often gave her birth date as 1894)

in Rouseau, Dominica

· mother: Minna Lockhart Williams, a Creole of Scottish and Irish descent; family were slave owning and had house burned down in 1830s

· father: William Rees Williams, Welsh ships doctor who settled in Dominica

· mother Catholic, father Anglican (grandfather was an Anglican priest and exposed to religious practices of black Dominicans who had roots in Africa

· attended convent school in Dominica

· at 16 – sent to private girls school in Cambridge, England; aunt was to provide supervision and familial connections

· passed entrance exams for Academy of Dramatic Art in London

· 1910 – father died and no financial support; mother wanted her to return to Dominica, but Rhys refused

· got a job in chorus of a musical and toured Britain using name of Ella Gray

· began affair with Lancelot Hugh Smith, a wealthy stockbroker from an established family who was 20 years her senior; she had an abortion; Smith continued to support her for several years even after their relationship was quelled

· ~1914 – she began a diary; drifted from modeling, theater work,

· 1917 met Jean Lengelet who was half-French and half-Dutch

· 1919 – they married and moved several times, living in Paris, Budapest, Prague, Brussels, Vienna

· first child, Owen, died

· Lenglet’s work was mysterious – worked for government but was also reported to have engaged in black market trading in foreign currency, embezzling, selling stolen art objects, and worked as a spy

· 1922 – returned to pairs and Rhys translated his articles into English for money; had a daughter, Maryvonne

· Maryvonne did not live with her mother until she was three

· editor was impressed with Rhys’ writing and asked to see her work; Rhys showed the editor her diaries

· diaries were edited and sent to Ford Maddox Ford, a writer and editor of a periodical of modernist writing, transatlantic review

· Ford suggested the pen name of Jean Rhys; writings became The Left Bank, and Other Stories; takes up underside, the marginalized figures

· 1923 – Lenglet was jailed and Rhys destitute; began an affair with Ford although Ford was living with the painter, Stella Bowen

· after the affair, Rhys wrote a novel of the ménage à trios, but editors fears libel charges from Ford and changed the names of characters and the title to Postures

· when Lenglet was released from jail, he wrote his version of the situation, called Barred, which Rhys translated despite passages which were critical of her

· 1927 Rhys left Lenglet and went to England; married Leslie Tilden Smith, a literary agent

· Smith very supportive of her writing; handled the domestic chores, typed her work and worked as agent with her publishers

· very productive period for Rhys; she wrote 3 novels in the 1930s and began a draft of Wide Sargasso Sea

· 1936 – returned to Dominica with Smith for a visit

· 1945 – Smith died

· 1947 - Rhys married Max Hamer, Smith’s cousin; Rhys stopped writing and many people believed that she had died

· 1957 – BBC dramatized Good Morning, Midnight and Rhys was “found” alive in Devon, England

· 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea was published to acclaim; Rhys was 76, made fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

· 1978 Commander of the Order of the British Empir

1927 The Left Bank, and Other Stories

1928 Postures (later published as Quartet (1929))

1931 After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie

1935 Voyage in the Dark

1939 Good Morning Midnight

1966 Wide Sargasso Sea

1979 Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography

Translations

1928 Francis Carco, Perversity

1932 Eduard de Neve [Jean Lenglet] Barred

Wide Sargasso Sea

· won Royal Society of Literature award, W.H. Smith award

· Sargasso Sea – geographical region, full of sargassum algae

· lore was that ships became entangled in the weeds and were pulled under water

· Carson’s article – the sea is outside time: plants live for decades, some for centuries

· see also Ezra Pound’s poem, “ Portrait d’ une Femme”

· know from her letters that Rhys worked on manuscript beginning in 1939, but destroyed it

· 1949 – “It’s about the West Indies about 1780 something” (Rhys)

to Francis Wyndham, 1958

This is to tell you something about the novel I am trying to write - provisional title “The First Mrs. Rochester.” I mean, of course, the mad woman in “Jane Eyre” …

I have no title yet. “The First Mrs. Rochester is not right. Nor, of course, “Creole.” That has a different meaning now. I hope I’ll get one soon, for titles mean a lot to me. Almost half the battle. I thought of “Sargasso Sea” or “Wide Sargasso Sea” but nobody knew what I meant. (135-6 in Norton Critical Ed., ed. Judith L. Raiskin

to Selma Vaz Diaz (1958):

I’ve read and re-read “Jane Eyre” of course, and I am sure that the character must be “built-up”. I wrote you about that. The Creole in Charlotte Brontë’s novel is a lay figure – repulsive which does not matter, and not once alive, which does. She’s necessary to the plot, but always she shrieks, howls, laughs horribly, attacks all and sundry – off stage. For me (and for you I hope) she must be right on stage. She must be at least plausible with a past, the reason why Mr Rochester treats her so abominably and feels justified, the reason why he thinks she is mad and why of course she goes mad, even the reason why she tries to set everything on fire, and eventually succeeds. (Personally, I think that one is simple. She is cold – and fire is the only warmth she knows in England.) (136—7)

to Diana Athill:

I came to England between sixteen and seventeen, a very impressionable age and Jane Eyre was one of the books I read then.

Of course Charlotte Brontë makes her own world, of course she convinces you, and that makes the poor Creole lunatic all the more dreadful. I remember being quite shocked, and when I re-read it rather annoyed. “That’s only one side – the English side” sort of thing.

(I think too that Charlotte had a “thing” about the West Indies being rather sinister places – because in another of her book “Villette” she drowns the hero, Professor Somebody, on the voyage to Guadeloupe, another very alien place – according to her.)… (144)

“…It is a great crime to feel intensely about anything in England, because if the average Englishman felt intensely about anything, England as it is could not exist; or, certainly, the ruling class in England could not continue to exist.

Thus you get the full force of a very efficient propaganda machine turned on the average Englishman from the cradle to the grave, warning him that feeling intensely about anything is a quality of the subject peoples, or that it is old-fashioned, or that it is not done, or something like that. (Rhys, The Bible is Modern, in Norton, 148)

According to Rhys, the action of the novel occurs between 1834 and 1845

· slavery is outlawed in 1833 in the colonies

· Jamaica was colonized by Spain – the capital was Spanish Town

· 1670 – England claimed Jamaica – British brought in Africans for slave for the sugar can and coffee plantations

· slavery abolished in 1834

· plantation owners had to pay wages to workers – caused economic hardship; destroyed property values; without labour, there was no harvest, creating economic and social turmoil

novel is constructed in three parts:

· I – Antoinette’s voice

· II – Rochester’s voice

· III – “Bertha” in the attic

· Antoinette is child of Mr. Cosway’s second and much younger wife

· from French Martinique - outsider

· Cosway rumoured to be an alcoholic with bastard children from his relationships with the slaves: “He drank himself to death. Many’s the time when – well! And all those women! She never did anything to stop him – she encouraged him. Presents and smiles for the bastards every Christmas” (17).

· when Cosway dies, Antoinette’s life changes; security and finances are tenuous: “When I asked [my mother] why so few people came to see us, she told me that the road from Spanish Town to Coulibri Estate where we lived was very bad and that road repairing was now a thing of the past. (My father, visitors, horses, feeling safe in bed – all belonged to the past.) (9)

· economic hardship for the estate and for the area; lack of male protection; isolated from white society because her mother is French Caribbean

· Mr. Luttrell, the neighbour “swam out to sea and was gone for always” (9) to escape the situation. His house is “left empty, shutters banging in the wind. Soon the black people said it was haunted, they wouldn’t go near it. And no one came near us” (10).

· isolation from black community which is hostile, fearful and suspicious. Antoinette’s mother “still rode about every morning not caring that the black people stood about in groups to jeer at her, especially after her riding clothes grew shabby (they notice clothes, they know about money).” (10).

garden at Coulibri is Eden grown wild:

“Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible – the tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild. The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched. One was snaky looking, another like an octopus with long thin brown tentacles bare of leaves hanging from a twisted root….The scent was very sweet and strong. I never went near it.

All Coulibri Estate had gone wild like the garden, gone to bush. No more slavery – why should anybody work? This never saddened me. I did not remember the place when it was prosperous” (10-11)

· This is an Eden abandoned by God; get anarchy

· Godfrey and Sass stay on because the conditions at the estate are better than outside Coulibri; Christophine stays out of loyalty and care (12, 13)

· existing structures and hierarchies begin to break down:

“I never looked at any strange negro. They hated us. They called us white cockroaches.” (13).

Tia tells Antoinette:

“She hear all we poor like beggar. We ate salt fish – no money for fresh fish. That old house so leaky, you run with calabash to catch water when it rain. Plenty white people in Jamaica. Real white people, they got gold money. They didn’t look at us, nobody see them come near us. Old time white people nothing but white nigger now, and black nigger better than white nigger” (14)

· Outsiders in Creole community and rejected by black community; hostility and vulnerability take a toll on Antoinette. She has a nightmare and after her mother calms her,

“I lay thinking, ‘I am safe. There is the corner of the bedroom door and the friendly furniture. There is the tree of life in the garden and the wall green with moss. The barrier of the cliffs and the high mountains. And the barrier of the sea. I am safe. I am safe from strangers.’” 16).

Antoinette becomes further isolated; wanders at Coulibri, alone:

“And if the razor grass cut my legs and arms I would think “It’s better than people.’ Black ants or red ones, tall nests swarming with white ants, rain that soaked me to the skin – once I saw a snake. All better than people.” (16)

· get a reversal of the Biblical story where the snake brings consolation rather than temptation; mistrusts human encounters; it is people who create the instability and confusion for her

Begins to dissociate:

“Watching the red and yellow flowers in the sun thinking of nothing, it was as if a door opened and I was somewhere else, something else. Not myself any longer” (16).

In the absence of recognition from her family and her community, she begins to disappear

· Her mother marries Mr. Mason; Mason gets Coulibri for “free”, doesn’t have to buy it, as many English landowners bought derelict plantations.

“I was remembering that woman saying ‘Dance! He didn’t come to the West Indies to dance – he came to make money as they all do. Some of the big estates are going cheap, and one unfortunate’s loss is always a cleaver man’s gain” (17).

· Antoinette’s mother gets physical and financial security, she imagines.

· From Antoinette’s point of view, Mr. Mason provides financial security, but his failure to understand the cultural, racial and political nuances leaves the family vulnerable

· The convent and the strict Catholicism provides structure and comfort for Antoinette:

“However, happily, Sister Marie Augustine says thoughts are not sins, if they are driven away at once. You say Lord save me, I perish. I find it very comforting to know exactly what must be done” (34).

Jane Antoinette

well born well born

suffers early loses suffers early loses

lives with relatives cared for by aunt and step father

Lowood convent

no happiness, but order no happiness, but order

the dream – (35)