Heroic revision : the triumph of Jean Rhys's dark voyage
Date
1985
Authors
Haig, Jane E.
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Abstract
Despite the recent focus of feminist criticism on women's writing as a confrontation with and revision of dominant (male) traditions, the fiction of Jean Rhys remains largely neglected by such studies of a distinctively female literary mythos. Critics generally continue to read Rhys's work as simply a repeated pattern of failed heroism -- the woman-as-victim -- rather than a revised heroic of female survival. The power and success of Rhys's fiction, however, depends upon perceiving her oeuvre not as a literal duplication of Rhys's own "underdog'' experience in a man's world, but as a complex narrative process in which sexual difference translates into textual differences of genre, structure, and voice. From Quartet (1928) to Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Rhys proposes a fictional dialogue with convention in which anger and sexuality become sources of female creative power.
Initially conceived as an antagonistic personal dialogue with Ford Madox Ford, Quartet begins Rhys's quest for a whole new fictional language that might resolve the disjunction between feeling and form for a woman writer in a male-dominated culture. Thus Chapter One examines Ford's The Good Soldier 1n order to outline the literary and cultural background against which Rhys struggled to develop her unique fictional mask. In The Good Soldier a systematic structure of signs reveals a concept that is untenable for a woman writer, a social metaphor which Rhys, when she begins her own ''tale of passion," must radically revise. Demonstrating what Rhys's writing 1s not, The Good Soldier makes both the structural and thematic terms of Quartet more explicit.
Following this analysis of Ford's text, Chapter Two demonstrates how Quartet substitutes for The Good Soldier's idealism a dynamic "female realism." Consciously manipulating historical "fact," Rhys's autobiographical fiction proposes a countermythology to Ford's nihilistic rationalizations. First conceived of by Rhys as a four act play, Quartet develops as a kind of discussion drama that explores the ambiguity of female initiation into a patriarchal social and symbolic realm. Marya's compulsive sensibility suggests the heroic possibilities of passionate "passivity."
Rhys's final novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, revises Charlotte Bronte's compromise with Victorian morality and conventional literary structures by imagining the story of Bronte's mad woman in the attic. The dynamic narrative of Antoinette Bertha Rochester becomes the culmination of Rhys's writing throughout which the erotic impulses of her heroines constitute the moral urgency of the fiction. Wide Sargasso Sea is an erotic dream narrative that exposes a radically different female imagination. Analyzing both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea as novels of female development, Chapters Three and Four reveal the depth of Rhys's artistic vision -- her ability to subvert the involuntary codes of Bronte's realism and thus to revolutionize traditional concepts of female culture and identity. Rhys translates Bronte's Gothic restraint into Romantic excess creating, at the same time, a n 1nternalized quest motif, an authentically Female literature.
The process of Rhys's fiction identifies and, finally, explodes the characteristically feminine signification of desire, "a room of one's own" -- both Marya's inner-space and Antoinette's attic prison. In her last novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys's fictional narration is liberated from the confines of personal space and expresses a more liberated desire: the firing of Thornfield Hall. Ironically, then, Rhys's first novel, Quartet, deconstructs Ford's fictional myth by imposing a characteristically female realism. Conversely, her final novel transposes the mimetic impulse of Jane Eyre -- a standard text in Victorian realism -- into mythopoesis. Discovering the "other'' texts of conventional literature and patriarchal culture, Rhys's fiction develops from realism to myth. But her final "dream truth" is, significantly, the expression of an other reality. As opposed to the modernist myth of perpetual alienation, Rhys's final myth of heroic revision derives from a triumphant affirmation of the significance of female relationships -- to language, to other texts, and to each other.