In studying Jean Rhys questions of identity frequently surface, both in
relation to Jean Rhys and in relation to her heroines. Veronica Marie Gregg
says in Jean Rhys's Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole
(University of North Carolina PRess, Chapel Hill, 1995) that:
"There seems to be a wide range of interpretive options for an analysis of Jean
Rhys's writing: West Indian, Third World, British, Euro-American, European,
feminist, postcolonial. Regardless of the theoretical models used, many
critiques take for granted, or as a point of departure, a psychobiography of
the writer herself: her birth in the West Indies, her peripatetic life, her
being a british or colonial women writer, or a writer who does not seem to
fit anywhere. . . . In 1950 Francis Wyndham put forward the theory of the
composite heroine, observing that "essentially the novels deal with the same
woman at . . . different stages of her career.". . . This has been the single
most influential approach to the Rhys texts. The notion of a composite heroine,
referred to as the Jean Rhys woman, has often led to a conflation of "heroine"
and author" (3).
Within this context Jean Rhys's identity, as well as her heroines identities are
considered. Gregg notes that the merging of author and heroine often results
in negative personal attributes being attached to Rhys (3). However, Rhys's
personal situation is also used to suggest she has greater insight than others
into inequities in European social structures. I think the use of Rhys's
personal cultural location to both attack and praise her indicates a difference
in critism based on cultural beliefs. Those who attack her as a person because
her texts seem autobiographical are attacking the idea that specific cultural
and historical situations play an important role in the construction of
literature, which implicates that there is a universal standard to which authors
should aspire. This universal standard is likely to be a European one. Those
who praise Rhys for her insights based on cultural location are rejecting the
concept of universality by recognizing the importance of culture.
The idea of a composite Jean Rhys heroine, however, also indicates
a deeper concern with identity because Rhys's heroines do share many
characteristics. For example, Teresa F. O'Conner says in Jean Rhys: The
West Indian Novels (New York University Press, New York, 1988)that
"When the room is all that one of Rhys's heroines has, one knows that she has
reached the limit of destitution, isolation, and hopelessness. However, in
__Wide Sargasso Sea__, more than in any of Rhys's other novels, the causes
for that finale are not simply the result of a passive and self-destructive
personality. They are social and historical as well. Unlike her predecessors,
Antoinette has not locked herself up" (195).
The room essentially has the same symbolic meaning for all of Rhys's heroines.
Another common symbol for the heroines of Rhys's novels is clothing, a symbol
closely associated with identity. Gregg says of the incident in Wide Sargasso
Sea when Antoinette and Tia get into a fight over three pennies and Tia
subsequently steals Antoinette's dress:
"A focus on dress is threaded through the narrative to inscribe an
examination of the roles of Creole women within the racialized hierarchies
of plantation society of the nineteenth-century West Indies. When Tia switches
the dresses, leaving Antoinette her shabbier one, the text reverses in a
microcosmic way, the white-over-black paradigm, destabilizing categories of
victim/victimizer, haves/have-nots. Tia's action consummates the discursive
invention of Antoinette as a "white nigger." Forced to put on Tia's dress,
Antoinette, the poor white, takes on the mantle of the nigger" (90).
(It must be noted here that though the dress is a symbol in the context of
class and race, the symbol is predominately concerned with the placement of the
Creol within European hierarchies rather than with the placement of the black
woman within a colonized culture).
Similarly in Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight
dress becomes an important symbol. For Anna in Voyage in the Dark
clothing represents a way to change who she is: "Out of this warm room that
smells of fur I'll go to all the lovely places I've dreamt of. This is the
beginning" (28)" (Gregg 122). But for Anna's landlady, Anna's new clothing
is symbolic of sexual promiscuity. And the gigolo in Good Morning, Midnight
mistakes Sasha for a rich woman because of her clothing.
Nancy R. Harrison in Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women's Text (The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1988) uses clothing to compare the seuxal hierarchies in England to racial hierarchies in the Caribbean, suggesting a similarity in situation between Anna's relationship to Walter and a slave's relationship to her master (81-2).
