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166 Affliction in Jean Rhys and Simone Weil Tamar Heller In this chapter I read Jean Rhys’s searing portrayal of an alienated, alcoholic heroine in her novel Good Morning, Midnight (1939) through the lens of the philosophy of Simone Weil (1909–1943). Weil, a Frenchwoman who died in exile in London during the Second World War, shared with her contemporary Rhys an intense interest in deracination ; much of her work, like her last book, L’enracinement (in English The Need for Roots), addresses, as do Rhys’s novels with their uprooted, drifting heroines, the dispossession of the socially marginal. Unlike Rhys, however, whose critical stock has risen in recent years, Weil is less visible in our day than in the 1950s and ’60s, when her work influenced such major thinkers as Albert Camus, who called her “the only great spirit of our time” (qtd. in Panichas, xvii). One reason for the decline in Weil’s popularity might be that her life and work, unlike Rhys’s, does not obviously invite feminist interpretation. In contrast to her Sorbonne classmate Simone de Beauvoir, Weil never explicitly addressed gender issues, and the trajectory of her short life—a Jewish Marxist increasingly attracted to Catholicism, she became so ascetic that she died at thirty-four of self-starvation—has seemed to some feminists, such as the theologian Ann Loades, an example of how religion can be hazardous to women’s health.1 At the same time, however, during the last few decades Weil has been rediscovered by such feminist scholars as the philosopher Andrea Nye and the political scientist Mary Dietz.2 Here, by applying Weil’s insights into the psychological effects of oppression to the situation of Sasha Jansen, the protagonist of Good Morning, Midnight, I demonstrate the relevance of Weil’s thought to two important and related fields in contemporary feminist thought: the study of trauma and the study of the emotion which is its common corollary, shame. Feminist discussions of trauma—an area I will call feminist trauma theory—explores women’s psychological and somatic response to gender-related violence, powerlessness , and inequality. Though exploring such personal and familial traumas as sexual abuse, feminist trauma theory necessarily has a macrocosmic dimension, ex11 Affliction in Jean Rhys and Simone Weil | 167 amining the link between women’s health and what Ann Folwell Stanford calls “social pathologies” linked not only to gender but to race and class. While there has been groundbreaking work among feminist social scientists on such pathologies—I would single out as exemplary Becky Thompson’s study of minority and working-class women and eating disorders, A Hunger So Wide and So Deep—increasingly feminist literary critics such as Suzette Henke and Patricia Moran have also examined the representation of trauma in women’s fiction and its connection to disabling cultural messages about femininity, messages which are often further complicated by social prejudices relating to racial, class, and national identity.3 Moran’s study of the “aesthetics of trauma ” is particularly relevant to this discussion, as it specifically reads Rhys’s work as the transformation of the raw material of personal trauma—including, in Rhys’s case, her seduction as a teenager by a family friend—into narratives punctuated by unexorcised pain and culturally inflected anxieties about female sexuality. Moreover, in noting that Rhys’s protagonists are typically in “the grip of a disabling and dehumanizing sense of shame” (116), Moran suggests the link between feminist trauma theory and a theorization of the sense of worthlessness and self-hatred that scars women who are victims of emotional, physical, and sexual violence. An example of feminist literary criticism that further explores the link between trauma and shame is the work of J. Brooks Bouson, whose most recent book, Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writing (2009), defines “embodied female shame” as the “shame about the self and body that arises from the trauma of defective or abusive parenting or relationships and from various forms of sexual, racial, or social denigration of females in our culture” (2).4 It is my contention in this essay that Weil’s theorization of shame, though it does not explicitly address gender, nonetheless offers us a vocabulary through which to understand the transformation of what Bouson calls “various forms of sexual, racial, or social denigration of females” into a deadening sense of shame that causes its female victims to accede to and reproduce their own devaluation. Proclaiming “I have no pride—no...

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