Sanity and Strength in Jean Rhys's West Indian Heroines

Sanity and Strength in Jean Rhys's West Indian Heroines Judith Moore University of Alaska, Anchorage Jean Rhys's fiction has commonly been read, although with varying degrees of sophistication, as playing out ostensibly fundamental oppositions between such polarized entities as male and female, white and black, and England and the West Indies. Such oppositions have tended to bring with them unstated further pairs more overtly antagonistic and judgmental — good vs. bad, mature vs. childish — a tendency that has operated very strongly in the final assessments made of her fiction. Overall, such readings have tended to diminish Rhys's work, particularly by reducing her heroines to instances of pathology; an attempt to re-read it as a unity can illuminate not only Rhys's subtle craft but the complexity and strength of her moral vision. It is of course inarguable that gender is a significant site of conflict within Rhys's fiction as well as in the critical response to it, but its simple polarization is a critical imposition, often explicitly connected with Rhys's use of West Indian settings and characters, especially blacks. Francis Wyndham's summary of the childhood of Anna Morgan, heroine of Voyage in the Dark (1934) — "Memories of her childhood on a West Indian island, of kind coloured servants and tropical beauty, form a poignant accompaniment to her adventures in an icy suspicious land" (8) — is fairly typical, and this relentless insistence on antithesis is not confined to Rhys's early work. Elgin W. Mellown, in a general article on Rhys which treats all of the novels as manifestations of a single pattern, goes so far as to say even of Wide Sargasso Sea's Antoinette Cosway: "Here . . . spelled out clearer than in any of the previous novels, are the details of the life of the now familiar Rhys heroine [beginning with] a happy childhood in a tropical state of nature . . . "(133). This idealization of the tropics, however, is a misreading of Rhys's complex presentation of their significance for her heroines, and it produces serious consequences. The intricacy and ambiguity of Rhys's picture of a largely black but white-ruled society is reduced to the racist cliche of "kind coloured servants," and Rhys's victimized but resistant heroines are, for Mellown, with the only partial exception of Antoinette, "Woman with a capital W," whose male mirror opposites have also "basically the same psychology: they are creatures with physical desires who have the power of simple, logical thinking" (133). These are not, however, archetypes, but cultural stereotypes, and far from estranging them as immutable opposites, Rhys's work consistently brings them into subversive juxtaposition. Her perception of inextricable paradox is central to the story of her developing consciousness as she tells it in her significantly titled autobiography, Smile Please, whose first chapter describes 21 22Rocky Mountain Review the childhood experience of being photographed. Told to assume an appearance not spontaneously her own — "not quite so serious" — and to be still, "[s]he had moved after all," thus apparently imposing her reality on its intended falsification. Nevertheless, when she looks at the picture three years later, still recognizably a child, with a child's memory of the photography session, she finds the image a source of "dismay": "The eyes were a stranger's eyes. The forefinger of her right hand was raised as if in warning" (12-13). Neither the self photographed, the self presented by the photographic print, nor the three-years-older self looking at the photograph is privileged by this account. Each figures in a multi-dimensional reality of which appearance is merely one shifting factor, neither dismissible as a falsification — "a stranger" — or simply reliable as a truth — "warning." This experience grounds the Rhys of Smile Please in an essential dubiety, and the book goes on to locate this "world of fear and distrust" (24) specifically in the tropical home which her critics have so frequently characterized as "idyllic" (Blodgett 32) and "innocent" (Wyndham 12). The servant Meta, charged with minding a child she "didn't like . . . much anyway" (Rhys, Smile 20), never smiles, habitually walks too fast for the child to keep up, teaches her both terrifying superstitions and fear...