Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- Note on Ellipses
- Introduction
- 1 Jean Rhys and Her Critics
- 2 Feminist Approaches to Jean Rhys
- 3 The Caribbean Question
- 4 Writing in the Margins
- 5 Autobiography and Ambivalence
- 6 ‘The Day They Burned the Books’
- 7 Fort Comme La Mort: the French Connection
- 8 The Politics of Good Morning, Midnight
- 9 The Huge Machine of Law, Order and Respectability
- 10 Resisting the Machine
- 11 The Enemy Within
- 12 Good night, Day
- 13 Intemperate and Unchaste
- 14 The Other Side
- 15 The Struggle for the Sign
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
5 - Autobiography and Ambivalence
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- Note on Ellipses
- Introduction
- 1 Jean Rhys and Her Critics
- 2 Feminist Approaches to Jean Rhys
- 3 The Caribbean Question
- 4 Writing in the Margins
- 5 Autobiography and Ambivalence
- 6 ‘The Day They Burned the Books’
- 7 Fort Comme La Mort: the French Connection
- 8 The Politics of Good Morning, Midnight
- 9 The Huge Machine of Law, Order and Respectability
- 10 Resisting the Machine
- 11 The Enemy Within
- 12 Good night, Day
- 13 Intemperate and Unchaste
- 14 The Other Side
- 15 The Struggle for the Sign
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Summary
Bauman's rereading of modernity and postmodernity is primarily concerned with what those movements have meant for Jews marginalized and displaced by hegemonic European culture, but his work sheds light on Rhys’ position and concerns. Bauman draws on Derrida's philosophical critique for his cultural analysis, arguing that modernity's drive has been to create and enforce order: ambiguity and ambivalence are anathema to it. Jean Rhys does not, of course, talk in terms of modernity or the Enlightenment, but she has a very similar view of European, particularly English society's refusal to accept difference or ambiguity. This coercive intolerance is a constant theme in her writing. In Voyage in the Dark Anna's stepmother Hester has
an English lady's voice with a sharp cutting edge to it. Now I've spoken you can hear I'm a lady. I have spoken and I suppose you now realise that I'm an English gentlewoman. I have my doubts about you. Speak up and I will place you at once. Speak up, for I fear the worst. That sort of voice. (VD 50)
In ‘Outside the Machine’, a short story written probably in the fifties, set in an English clinic near Versailles, the impoverished expatriate Inez Best sees ‘the fat, fair woman in the bed opposite’ giving her a ‘sharp sly, inquisitive’ stare:
An English person? English, what sort of English? To which of the seven divisions, sixty-nine subdivisions, and thousand-and-three subsubdivisions do you belong? […] My world is a stable, decent world. If you withhold information, or if you confuse me by jumping from one category to another, I can be extremely disagreeable, and I am not without subtlety and inventive powers when I want to be disagreeable. Don't underrate me. I have set the machine in motion and crushed many like you. Many like you … (TABL 81)
The talkative chorus girl in the next bed fares better:
The fat woman opposite – her name was Mrs Wilson – listened to all this, at first suspiciously, then approvingly. Yes, this is permissible; it has its uses. Pretty English chorus girl – north country – with a happy independent disposition and bright, teasing eyes. Placed! All correct. (TABL 84)
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- Information
- Jean Rhys , pp. 32 - 38Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012