Jean Rhys’s Racial Disorientation: “The Imperial Road” and the Question of Racial Identification in the 1970s

이정화 한국영어영문학회 2009 영어 영문학 Vol.55 No.3

“The Imperial Road” is Jean Rhys’s unfinished manuscript, rejected by publishers for its openly racist tone. Although it describes Rhys’s actual visit to Dominica in 1936, it is not a transparent recollection of the travel but a recreation informed by racial dynamics of the 1970s when she wrote the text. This paper examines the manuscript as a troubled (and troubling) response to what Rhys perceived as racial rejection from Dominica at the wake of political independence. Rhys’s representation of white Creole womanhood significantly depends on an interwoven configuration of racial dynamics and sexual politics, where an oppressive white European man facilitates a white Creole woman’s cross-racial identification with Afro-Caribbeans. However, the political and literary landscape of the West Indies in the 1970s made such cross-racial identification untenable. As a result, “The Imperial Road” is full of disturbing racial hatred, prejudice, and resentment. And yet, it also reflects Rhys’s honest and serious concern over a white Creole’s racial identity in postcolonial Dominica, raising a difficult question: How would a postcolonial age change a white Creole identity that belongs neither to the colonized nor to the colonizer (or both)? In “The Imperial Road,” unable to identify with Afro-Caribbeans, the white Creole is disoriented in time and space, lost at home, stuck between the past and the present, not knowing how to participate in a postcolonial homeland. Through the narrator’s racial disorientation, “The Imperial Road” exposes the white Creole’s fundamental dependence on other Creoles. “The Imperial Road” is Jean Rhys’s unfinished manuscript, rejected by publishers for its openly racist tone. Although it describes Rhys’s actual visit to Dominica in 1936, it is not a transparent recollection of the travel but a recreation informed by racial dynamics of the 1970s when she wrote the text. This paper examines the manuscript as a troubled (and troubling) response to what Rhys perceived as racial rejection from Dominica at the wake of political independence. Rhys’s representation of white Creole womanhood significantly depends on an interwoven configuration of racial dynamics and sexual politics, where an oppressive white European man facilitates a white Creole woman’s cross-racial identification with Afro-Caribbeans. However, the political and literary landscape of the West Indies in the 1970s made such cross-racial identification untenable. As a result, “The Imperial Road” is full of disturbing racial hatred, prejudice, and resentment. And yet, it also reflects Rhys’s honest and serious concern over a white Creole’s racial identity in postcolonial Dominica, raising a difficult question: How would a postcolonial age change a white Creole identity that belongs neither to the colonized nor to the colonizer (or both)? In “The Imperial Road,” unable to identify with Afro-Caribbeans, the white Creole is disoriented in time and space, lost at home, stuck between the past and the present, not knowing how to participate in a postcolonial homeland. Through the narrator’s racial disorientation, “The Imperial Road” exposes the white Creole’s fundamental dependence on other Creoles.

리스(Jean Rhys)의 『드넓은 사가소 바다』에서 현재시제의 서술이 갖는 서사적 함의

오은영 ( Eunyoung Oh ) 세계문학비교학회 ( 구 한국세계문학비교학회 ) 2015 世界文學比較硏究 Vol.51 No.-

모더니즘 문학의 가장 큰 특징으로 꼽히는 ‘의식의 흐름’은 주인공의 과거에 대한 기억과 현재의 상황이 씨실과 날실처럼 교차하면서 소설의 서사가 진행되는 서술 기법이다. 소설에서는 과거와 현재가 교차하더라도 현재의 사건 역시 과거시제로 묘사하는 것이 일반적이다. 그런데 20세기 초 모더니즘 문학의 범주 안에 포함되는 리스(Jean Rhys)의 소설 『드넓은 사가소 바다』(Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966)는 여느 모더니즘 소설들과 달리 소설의 서사에서 현재시제와 과거시제를 교차시켜 서사를 진행한다. 소설의 독자는 인물들 사이의 대화와 내적독백의 경우를 제외하고 과거가 아닌 현재시제로 된 서술이 낯설기 때문에 일단 주목하지 않을 수 없다. 본 논문의 초점은 모더니스트 소설에서 흔히 나타나는 과거사건과 현재사건의 혼재가 아니라, 리스의 마지막 장편소설이자 대표작인 『드넓은 사가소 바다』에서 현재나 과거의 사건의 묘사에 있어서 과거시제와 현재시제가 뒤섞여 사용되는 것의 의미를 추적하는 것이다. 리스는 주요 장면에서 제한적으로 현재시제를 사용함으로써 독자와 인물 사이의 거리를 무너뜨리기도 하고 점점 다가오는 파국의 느낌을 한층 강화시키기도 한다. 과거시제와 현재시제를 교차시키는 서사전략은 부주의하게 읽으면 간과하기 쉬운 부분이지만 소설의 주제와 밀접하게 연결되어 있다는 점에서 사소한 것이 아니다. 인물간의 대화나 인물의 내적독백인 경우에도 삽입구를 넣어서만 사용되는 현재시제를 소설 곳곳에 별다른 구분없이 사용함으로써 작가가 어떤 서사전략과 효과를 얻으려 했는지 살펴보는 것이 이 논문의 목적이다. Jean Rhys``s use of the present tense in her description of some parts of Wide Sargasso Sea seems to be partly related with some features of Caribbean Creole English. However, its dramatic and limited use needs much subtler explanation to fully understand the novel. In this novel, Rhys uses the present tense especially in three parts: the ending pages of the first section, Rochester``s hallucination-which happened as he was lost in the woods-in the second section, and the early parts of the third section. Surprisingly Rhys applies the present tense even for the incidents which obviously happened in the past. Although it is true that Rhys might have a different sense of English due to her origin, her use of the present tense in this novel is intriguing enough to be focused on. The past tense usually gives an impression of something fixed while the present tense a sense of constantly moving without any connection or fixity. The first-person narrations, Rochester``s as well as Antoinette``s, make the narrative very subjective and schizophrenic. This impression is reinforced by the use of the present tense by which the narrator seems to directly address the reader. Consequently this undermines the conventional distance between the reader and the narrator. The perspective of anyone in this narrative cannot be accepted as an authoritative voice. Through this narrative, Rhys deconstructs any sort of opposites including the binary feeling of real and unreal. Rhys seems to say that one should not believe the world ``made of cardboard,`` consisted of the opposites that human thinking is based on, as real. Rhys``s dramatic and limited use of the present tense effectively contributes to the building of the world that anything fixed falls apart.

진 리스의 반로맨스적 여주인공들: 『미스터 메켄지를 떠난 후』 와 『굿모닝, 미드나잇』 의 경우

박형주 ( Hyung Ju Park ) 한국현대영미소설학회 2014 현대영미소설 Vol.21 No.3

Jean Rhys questions the realities of women`s actual position in the capitalistic and patriarchal society with her counter-romantic heroines. The middle-aged poverty-stricken heroines of Rhys`s 1930`s novels, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939) depict the realities of women, which romance readers want to avoid and escape. Rhys holds crude pictures of ageing women contrary to romantic fantasies; thus, she serves to disillusion the patriarchal fantasy promising the happy endings of marriage and patriarchal protection described in romance novels. Romance provides women with patriarchal ideology of women`s roles as a daughter, a wife, and a mother. The ideal of woman as “an angel in the house” has been reflected in the tradition of western romance novels. At this point, we should consider the realities a woman faces as she has experienced the consequences of patriarchal marriage failure; as aresult, she cannot satisfactorily fulfill the roles that the society prescribes and demands to women. Rhys`s heroines are women excluded from patriarchal protection, alienated from family, without a husband or a father, and certainly escapees from the stultifying bonds of domesticity. In Rhys`s world, women`s independence has become futile, sterile, and rather sordid. They are trapped by ostracism of patriarchy, cultural alienation, relative poverty, and ageing. Rhys shows how middle-aged ignored and less privileged women in social stratification reflect the insecurities in which urban single women had in her works. With these novels, Rhys poignantly explores the relation between women`s age and the economic market, and demonstrates that the psychological effects of age on women who are well aware of the value of youth and her body. These silenced and objectified women are treated as a zombie, which is neither living nor dead, neither fully embodied nor entirely bodiless, as they age.

로체스터가 제인에게 말하지 않은 것: 『드넓은 사가소 바다』 의 이름 없는 영국인 남편

이귀우(Gui-woo Lee) 서울여자대학교 인문과학연구소 2018 인문논총 Vol.32 No.-

고는 진리스(Jean Rhys)의 『드넓은 사가소 바다』 (Wide Sargasso Sea)의 두 주요인물 중에서 이름 없는 영국인 남편으로 등장하는 남자 주인공을 분석한다. 샬롯 브론테(Charlotte Brontë)의 『제인 에어』 (Jane Eyre)를 페니미즘적, 포스트 식민주의적 관점에서 다시 쓰기를 시도한 리스의 작품에 대해서 기존 비평의 초점이 앙뜨와네뜨 (Antoinette)에 집중되는 경향이 있다. 하지만 리스가 브론테의 버사 (Bertha)를 앙뜨와네뜨로 다시 쓰기 위해서는 로체스터(Rochester) 도 다시 써야할 필요가 있었으며, 그 인물이 일인칭 화자로 나오는 부분은 앙뜨와네뜨가 일인칭 화자로 나오는 부분보다 훨씬 더 많은 분량을 차지할 정도로 비중이 높다. 본고는 리스의 작품 2부에 나오는이 일인칭 화자의 내적 독백을 분석함으로써 『제인 에어』 에서 로체스 터가 제인에게 솔직하게 말하지 않은 (또는 이데올로기의 특성상 충분히 의식하지 못하기 때문에 말로 표현하지 못한)채 남아있다고 리스가 상상하여 재구성한 영국인 남편의 성적·인종적 이데올로기를 설명하고자 한다. 리스는 이 인물을 단순하게 일차원적인 악인으로 묘사하기 보다는 그의 내밀하고 복합적인 심리를 재구성한다. 작가는 그의 서사를 통해 브론테 소설 이면에 있을만한 하부 텍스트, 즉 영국인 남편이 19세기 영국의 지배적인 이데올로기에 의해 앙뜨와네뜨를 인종화, 타자화하여 배제함으로써 자신의 제국주의적 남성 주체를 확립하는 과정에 어떤 복잡한 심리적 변화를 겪는지를 효과적으로 보여 주고 있다. This study attempts to analyze the nameless English husband in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys’s work is a rewriting of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and the critical emphasis has mostly given to Rhys’s rewriting of Bertha into Antoinette. Rhys, however, rewrites Brontë’s Rochester in order to imagine Antoinette in her native home of West Indies, and allocates more space for the husband’s narrative than Antoinette’s. This study distinguishes the nameless and younger version of Rochester by calling him Mr R, focuses on the husband’s interior monologues in Part 2, and reads the subtext of Jane Eyre, namely what Rochester did not tell Jane (or could not tell because he is not fully aware of his ideologies). Through her rewriting of Rochester, Rhys shows what 19th century’s dominant sexual and imperialist ideologies work to racialize and exclude the feminine as the Other in his quest for the subject-making, the quest for an imperial male subjectivity. Rhys does not present a simple one-dimensional villain, but lets the character reveal his own contradictory thoughts and inner feelings, self-doubts and guilt pangs involved in the process of his guest.

Jean Rhys's Nameless Englishman : The Imperial Quest for English Masculinity in Wide Sargasso Sea

Kim, Youngjoo 한국영미문학페미니즘학회 2003 영미문학페미니즘 Vol.11 No.2

Although the nameless English husband is not the central figure in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys's reimagining of the Rochester figure in Wide Sargasso Sea deserves more critical attention. While there is no doubt that Rhys emphasizes the cruelty and brutality with which the husband enacts the racial and sexual violence upon a white Creole woman, Rhys's revision of the Rochester/Bertha relationship resists any reading simplifying the Antoinette/Rochester relationship in the reinscription of the hierarchical dichotomy of the opposite terms between an imperial masculine self and a colonized female other. Rhys's narrative of the nameless Englishman chronicles the failed quest of the subject-making, the quest for a stable, unitary male subject. Beginning with the necessity to articulate and define his English masculine self, however, the husband's narrative betrays that he needs to mark Antoinette in the space of the alterity--both racial and sexual--in order to inscribe his English masculinity at the margins of Empire. Marked by ambivalent desire for and fear of the other, the nameless English husband's narrative undermines the fiction of the unitary English self and blurs polarized binaries between male and female, English and non-English, white and non-white, and the colonizer and the colonized. While raising questions on the concept of unitary English masculinity by drawing on the novels of her literary precursors such as Emily Bronte as well as Charlotte Bronte and building on her earlier work that examines imperial Englishness, Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea investigates the complicated dialectics between imperial masculinity and colonial femininity.

The Negative Flaneuse in Jean Rhys`s Voyage in the Dark

( Hyung Ju Park ) 한국영미문학페미니즘학회 2015 영미문학페미니즘 Vol.23 No.1

This paper examines Jean Rhys’s negative flaneuse and how it is embodied in Voyage in the Dark. Rhys explores the physical and psychological experiences of marginal urban women. Rhys describes how they are driven to position themselves as sexual commodities due to their deplorable conditions, while also addressing the fear in urban spaces experienced by her abject flaneuse. As a Creole immigrant and a chorus-girl, Anna Morgan in Voyage is exiled culturally and sexually. She is labeled as the embodiment of Creole laxity and is marked as a tart and a prostitute even before she enters prostitution. Anna slides into seduction and is degraded into poverty, drunkenness, and inept prostitution with neither the determination nor the resoluteness to prevent it. Anna is circulated as a sexual commodity through consumerist society by the insatiable longings of men and her own desires. Rhys depicts Anna’s fear, disgust, victimization, loss, and pain in her hallucinations. Rhys emphasizes the city’s hostility to women, which drives them into self-destructive ways such as drinking alcohol, sleeping with a chain of men, having an abortion, and succumbing to hysteria.

Assimilation Aborted and Fantasies Traversed in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark

( Joohyun Park ) 한국영미문학페미니즘학회 2019 영미문학페미니즘 Vol.27 No.3

Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark places Anna, a half-English, half creole from the West Indies, on the streets of London, and forces her readers to witness Anna’s repeated failures to assimilate. Through such failings, Rhys strips the abstraction from the potentially subversive force of hybridity. Anna is “not quite” and “less than” in both of her worlds. She identifies herself as a West Indian, but she knows that her whiteness prevents her from truly belonging to the region and its culture. The “stereoscopic vision” Anna possesses enables her to penetrate the exclusivism that bolsters the colonial world(s), but her critiques do not resolve her unbelonging for hybridity’s disruptive force works mostly on an epistemological level. Anna’s attempts to assimilate are aborted because she is a self-identified other―London offers no place for one whose tertiary alterity symptomatically reveals the fundamental flaw in the binary framing that undergirds imperial and nationalistic discourses. Through Anna’s failures to belong, Rhys betrays the fantastical nature of the master narrative maintains the imperial order and, thus “traverses” the fantasy that is the imperial/symbolic order. Anna the hybrid returnee fails to really “return,” but because she does, Rhys is also able to reveal that the concept of subversive hybridity is itself a fantasy.

말대꾸하기: 리스의 『사중주』와 포드의 『훌륭한 군인』

이정화 ( Jung Hwa Lee ) 한국영미문화학회 2014 영미문화 Vol.14 No.3

This essay examines Jean Rhys``s first-published novel Quartet as her attempt to talk back to her former mentor, Ford Madox Ford, analyzing the novel as a rewriting of Ford``s The Good Soldier. It has become a critical commonplace to read Quartet as a thinly-disguised autobiographical account of Rhys``s affair with Ford. However, I do not mean to undertake the impossible task of measuring how truthfully Quartet represents what ``really`` happened. Instead, the essay discusses the ways in which Rhys discoursively redeems the unequal power relation that she experienced as Ford``s protegee and mistress. Quartet describes the devastating effect of Heidler``s mastery and control on the helpless and victimized heroine. Bringing to the fore his hypocrisy and egotism, Rhys challenges the authority of an English gentleman, which Ford idealizes in The Good Soldier. In so doing, Rhys emerges as a writer equal to Ford, talking back to an authority figure.

진 리스의 반페미니즘에 대한 비판적 고찰

최선령 ( Sun Ryoung Choi ) 한국근대영미소설학회 2019 근대 영미소설 Vol.26 No.3

This paper has the purpose of rethinking Jean Rhys’s anti-feminism by focusing on her third novel, Voyage in the Dark, and “Vienne,” a short story written in the early phase of her literary career. Even after the great success of Wide Sargasso Sea that is Rhys’s masterpiece and known as such among Caribbean Literature as well, she has received little attention from feminist critics. Despite the strong relevance to feminist concerns of the issues raised by her works, Rhys was problematic for feminist critics both because most of her heroines were led to helpless failure and repetitive rejections, and because Rhys herself overtly denied any affiliation with the women’s liberation movement. In fact, Rhys’s most essential concern is undeniably the problem of power and economic hegemony in society rather than that of sexuality and feminity. She was not interested in feminism as a theory or movement, and did not try to analyse her protagonists in terms of psychology or social studies. However, because she had no preconceptions or frame of reference, she was also able to delve deeply into and face what the woman or feminity is.

No/Mad(ic) Woman: Antoinette/Bertha in Wide Sargasso Sea

Song, Ho Rim(송호림) 새한영어영문학회 2011 새한영어영문학 Vol.53 No.4

Analyzing Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which creates the untold story of the mad woman, Bertha, appearing in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), this essay digs into how patriarchal power supported by binary reasoning of the Western cognitive framework ideologically defines nomadic subjectivity as madness. In her novel, Rhys assumes that Bertha is ideologically categorized as mad due to her nomadness, and she renames Bertha to Antoinette in order to wash off the disgraceful stigma of the character as a mad woman have her heard as a nomad: Rhys attempts to make an opportunity to speak of madness rather than speaking about madness so that she explores nomadness, or nomadic subjectivity, that has been repressed as madness by the Western cognitive framework. To show Antoinette’s nomadness, the essay focuses on how Antoinette drifts between the native and the white, magic and reason, and madness and no-madness. Investigating how her husband Rochester from England responds to her nomadness, the essay also features ways in which patriarchal ideology excludes and represses nomadness to keep their privilege. Rochester’s behavior in the West Indies proves that madness is an arbitrary concept changeable according to the master ideology of society. It is patriarchal violence to imprison Antoinette, a nomad, in the attic of Thornfield Hall since it is no more than securing patriarchal power. Rhys proposes a new interpretation of the ending of Jane Eyre in which Bertha sets fire to the Thornfield Hall. Whereas Bertha’s act, in Jane Eyre, is read as suicide by her madness, Antoinette’s firing, in Wide Sargasso Sea, is a necessary and righteous act to escape the prison and continue her nomadic journey. That ending makes Antoinette a fascinating no/mad(ic) woman that Rhys wants to value against Western patriarchal ideology.