Locating difference : alternate narratives of race, gender, class and nationality in the works of Jean Rhys
Date
1995
Authors
Stouck, Jordan
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Abstract
In this thesis, I examine several of Jean Rhys's narratives for ways in which they locate and sustain cultural and gender-based difference. The problem which initially presented itself to me concerned the fact that singular critical approaches towards Rhys's work appear to consistently suppress certain thematic strands in order to emphasize others. Traditional feminist interpretations, for example, while producing some extremely valuable theorizations on gender in works such as Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea, nevertheless ignore the considerations of race and nationality which surround Rhys's creole heroines. In response to this problem, I adopt an approach similar to those used by recent postcolonial theorists, in which Western critical approaches are juxtaposed so as to reveal the particular agendas and limitations of each. This strategy of opposing feminist, psychoanalytic, post-colonial and, in a mor e limited form, class-based analyses allows me to preserve the thematic discontinuities within Rhys's work and, hence, to arrive at a new understanding of this author's cultural critique. I consequently focus my exploration on those works which emphasize the dislocations within colonial and postcolonial societies by narrating the experiences of creole or mulatto heroines. After examining in detail three short stories and two of Rhys's novels , I conclude that each narrative represents the displacement of homogenized subject positions through differently positioned voices. For example, my first textual analysis examines Rhys's short story, "Again the Antilles," to determine that the text displaces race and nationalistic debates with the voice of the female, creole narrator. Ultimately, I conclude that disruptive reading strategies not only allow one to recover the thematic complexity of Jean Rhys's work, but that new concepts of time, historical narrative, objective knowledge and social role-playing emerge from the rupture of patriarchal/imperialist thought.