JEAN RHYS (1894 - 1979)

JEAN RHYS

Life and work

Jean Rhys, whose real name was Ella Gwen Rees Williams, was born in 1894 in the West Indies, on the Island of Dominica, an island with a tormented and bloody history because during the 19^th century, Dominica passed from a slave to a colonial society, so the dominant language remained a French patois.

Rhys origins influenced her work: indeed, Dominica was an island of lush vegetation and natural beauty so in Wide Sargasso Sea dominate images of this primitive and beautiful island. The Dominican island reminded her of Judgement Day.

Jean Rhys was the daughter of a Welsh doctor while her mother was a Dominican Creole so Rhys Creole heritage remained important in her life.

Other influences on her writings were a religious training at school and the knowledge of Negro culture through the servants.

However, the colonial mentality with its aura of superiority was very present in her house: for example, her family was not sympathetic to her interest in the Negro culture but, at the same time, her mother was not enthusiastic about her fervent devotion, even though they went to Church every Sunday.

Even though Jean was nostalgic about her years spent in Dominica, she recognised that both in England and Dominica masculine aggression was common and the conflicting and unstable role of women who weren't understood by men.

As she came into adolescence, Jean felt unusual torment so began to write poetry in which she employed her favourite words: sea, sleep and silence.

So, her early years in the West Indies formed her imagination and shaped the restlessness of her identity because of the racial mixture and the cultural contrasts between colonial and native life.

She left Dominica at the age of 16 moving to London, where experienced a sense of displacement and cultural separation. So, the contrast between the West Indian culture and her life in England became the central theme of her fiction.

For example, the drastic climatic change, that nearly killed her, became a constant metaphor in her work meaning the psychological effects of England.

In addition to this, her father died shortly after the arrival in England and her mother was in bad health so Jean found herself completely on her own.

In this period Jean became a member of a musical chorus travelling troupe and, according to someone, she might become a successful actress but she began to meet men and, in few years, Jean became a victim of male exploiters, just as many other women.

So, her experiences led her to think that male domination is closely tied with financial dependence.

For this reason, money became a theme of major importance in Rhys' work.

At the end of the First World War Rhys met and later married Jean Lenglet.

The couple moved to Paris but had a lot of money problems and Jean there felt dislocated, fearful and , above all, isolated because of her shyness: so she began to drink.

In 1924 Rhys' husband was involved in a traffic of  works of art and imprisoned leaving Jean with no money and a child.

It was now that Ford Madox Ford came into her life and promised to help her in her activity of writer but at the same time they had a short love story that ended in bitterness (also because Ford was already married).

Ford launched Rhys' career but it was also their relationship that confirmed her suspicions about feminine vulnerability and male exploitation.

So, she began to give voice to the female condition through her works.

Her first novel was 'Quartet', followed by 'The Left Bank'.

When Rhys' husband was released they moved to Amsterdam but when divorced Jean returned to England, where met her future second husband: Leslie Smith who was important also to her professional life.

In Rhys fiction there is often a contrast between Paris and London: London is always dark and cold while Paris is bright and clear.

In these years she had the opportunity to return to her native island, Dominica, and see again the places of her childhood: maybe this visit provided the background for 'Wide Sargasso Sea', a short novel whose publication brought Rhys the success, even though she was more than 70 years old.

Jean Rhys died in 1979.

Her major works are:

The Left Bank (1927);

Postures [later called Quartet] (1928);

After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930);

Voyage in the Dark (1934);

Good Morning, Midnight (1939);

Wide Sargasso Sea (published in 1966 but written around 1930);

Tigers are Better Looking [collection of short stories] (1968);

Sleep it Off Lady [story collection] (1976).

WIDE SARGASSO SEA

Jean Rhys', literary masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea was inspired by Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s, the period of the emancipation of the slaves, when racial relationships were of the high tension. 

Rhys has not only developed the same romantic elements contained in Jane Eyre but she has combined them with important themes of literary modernism, namely: the emphasis on psychology, the sexual motivation and human alienation.

Wide Sargasso sea is divided into 3 parts corresponding to the 2 narrators: Antoinette Cosway and Edward Rochester.

In the first part of the novel Rhys describes the life of a Creole child, Antoinette, in Jamaica, surrounded by a climate of violence, confusion and tragedy linked to the black and white relationships and the wide cultural gap between them.

Antoinette feels herself as part of her island and her attraction to the wild and the exotic confirms her affinity.

When a group of blacks burns down the Coulibri Estate that Mr Mason (her mother's new husband) had restored, Antoinette and her family escape.

But the whole black rebellion becomes a personal betrayal when her black friend Tia hits her in the head with a stone.

Tia's act, however, confirms Antoinette' s separation from the black culture, for which she felt affinity.

So, Antoinette was completely isolated between two worlds, two races, two cultures and rejected by both.

The story told by Antoinette ends in a convent school that becomes for her a refuge but, at the same time, a place of death.

The second part of Rhys' novel is the account of an Englishman, Edward Rochester, beginning after his marriage with Antoinette in Granbois, Dominica.

The early period of their honeymoon is quite happy and full of passion but later comes the mistrust, conflict and separation.

For Edward and Antoinette their honeymoon is a journey, both metaphorical and real.

Edward is pleased to have captured an exotic woman with a lot of money but he doesn't love her.

From the beginning Edward is aware that he must depend upon her while she leads him into a world not only wild but menacing.

In the end, their journey is a failure because of Edward inability to accept any dependence.

His sense of responsibility for her comes from his code of honour, not from love.

For Antoinette their trip is an escape to recapture some lost tranquillity of childhood and avoid the responsibilities of her marriage.

As Antoinette leads Edward into the natural landscape, he sees for the first time the wide cultural and emotional gap which separates them

And as he begins to know more his wife, she appears alien and strange to him, and he gradually begins to identify her with the blacks.

The mysterious jungle reveals their passions and fears.

For example, from the beginning Edward finds himself in a world seductive and at the same time hostile, menacing, so distant from his English world.

So Edward starts to transfer this sense of hostility on Antoinette.

Antoinette wants to bring Edward into her world, to live wildly and passionately surrounded by nature but Antoinette's is a world that her husband can't neither understand nor accept.

So, Edward and Antoinette remain in their isolation.

The letter Edward receives from Daniel Cosway, who claims to be Antoinette's half-brother (the son of her father by a black woman), talks about the madness of Antoinette's mother.

Edward's reaction to this letter reveals his feelings for Antoinette: indeed, Edward realize that he doesn't love her.

For this reason Antoinette visits Christophine (the wise old native who practices obeah, that is, black arts): she realizes the usefulness of Antoinette's desperate struggle to capture Edward's love and suggests her to escape to England.

Antoinette imagines England as cold, snowy, menacing, isolated: it's an image contrasting sharply with the warmth of her native land.

However, Antoinette prays Christophine to practice obeah in order to bring Edward back to her because she is unable to accept the fact that their union was for Edward just a business transaction: there is no unifying element to join them.

While Antoinette visits Christophine , Edward meets Daniel Cosway who tells him about the madness of Antoinette's mother and her relationship with the black boy, Sandi.

When Edward knows about this, gets angry.

Only at this moment Antoinette tells him, for the first time, about her family and this description deepens his fears of Antoinette's possible madness.

Later, Antoinette places the drug which Christophine gave her in Edward's wine glass and he drinks it.

So, Antoinette raised the passion in Edward but couldn't create a love for her that doesn't existed.

Indeed, the next morning, when the effects of the drug ceased, Edward realised of having been brought over the edge of passion and control and for this reason he takes the black servant Amelie to bed, as an act of revenge and in order to demonstrate to himself the power of his maleness.

But this action destroys Antoinette, increasing her isolation and getting her mad.

The third part of the novel is settled in England and confirms Antoinette's unhappy destiny: indeed, she dies in the fire of her house.

In the novel the fire and the flames are a symbol of passion, the same as for the colour red, in contraposition to the white.

The fire of the attic in which Antoinette had been confined  is a way to find the freedom and her identity through death that can be followed by a rebirth.

Antoinette's search for identity is symbolized in her looking at herself in mirrors.