Jean Rhys and the Fiction of Failed Reciprocity

This paper reframes Jean Rhys’s critique of bourgeois culture in her second novel, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, in terms of theories of the gift. On the one hand, Mackenzie genders the ideological separation of gifts and exchanges that Marcel Mauss argued was peculiar to Western culture and works to counter the concomitant failure of reciprocity between the sexes. On the other hand, the novel echoes Derrida’s revision of Mauss, rendering the gift and especially its male and female characters’ desire for the gift impossible. Ultimately, gift theory helps us to rethink motifs in and beyond Mackenzie, such as Rhys’s “masochism” and her representation of men and women as victims, and to illuminate the paradoxes at the heart of gifts of money and contractual relations more generally in her fiction.