Abstract

Jean Rhys’s novels present an intriguing case study for thinking about the status and meaning of fragmented text. With their polyvocal, nonlinear narration, often presented through interior monologues, novels such as Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight exemplify modernist fragmentation while intimating a deeper sense of pain and loss than most accounts of such fragmentation acknowledge. In spite of the strong undertone of psychological damage it conveys, the fragmentary nature of Rhys’s writing is sometimes celebrated by critics as evidence of a subversive stance, either in Rhys or in her characters. Such a response is not peculiar to Rhys studies, of course, but part of a broader trend in feminist criticism. Molly Hite provides a succinct summary of this trend, describing it as a “strain of feminist criticism” that “has demonstrated that the decentering and destabilizing tendencies of recent experimental writing have a great deal in common with the feminist project of overturning culturally constructed oppositions” (16). While this trend is generally beneficial, when it is applied to Rhys’s novels it often leads to overly optimistic accounts of her characters as actively resisting such “culturally constructed oppositions.” In turning our traditional expectation of agency on its head, these accounts value Rhys’s incisive wit and social criticism, but they also underrate the characters’ unsavory but fundamental helplessness.

Comments

This is the author-accepted manuscript of Linett, M. “‘New words, new everything’: Fragmentation and Trauma in Jean Rhys,” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 51, no. 4, Winter, 2005, pp. 437-466. Copyright Duke University Press, the version of record is available at DOI 10.1215/0041462X-2005-1006.

Date of this Version

12-1-2005

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