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Rhys matters: new critical perspectives

2014; Association of College and Research Libraries; Volume: 51; Issue: 12 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5860/choice.51-6617

1943-5975

Mary E. Wilson, Kerry L. Johnson,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

In the middle of the night you wake up.You start to cry.What's happening to me? Oh, my life, oh, my youth… There's some wine left in the bottle.You drink it.The clock ticks.Sleep… (GMM 90)A typical evening for Good Morning, Midnight's Sasha Jansen.A hotel room populated by familiar objects; a mind plagued by familiar thoughts.The ticking clock provides the soundtrack for Sasha's life, doling out her moments one by one, measuring the time as it slips away.The clock's mechanical insistence tracks countless moments of misery, exhaustion, and self-abuse.Yet its recurring presence seems to offer some comfort: it lulls Sasha to sleep.This painful contradiction is a familiar aspect of Jean Rhys's interwar novels.Their treatment of quintessentially modernist themes such as internal division, the boundary between internal and external, isolation, and the struggle for control, have long secured Rhys her position as an important modernist writer.But the ubiquitous figure of the clock, presiding over the lives of her protagonists and shaping Rhys's depiction of their experience, has largely gone unnoticed.More than simply a recurring motif or resonant image, clocks offer a valuable point of access to her innovative work with temporality and form in the novel.This essay will investigate the ways Rhys uses clocks to mobilize emerging twentieth century concepts of time and synthesize them into a structuring force.While most modernist authors reject the homogenizing force of clock time and fragment their narrative in order to portray an individualized experience of private time, Rhys embraces both these modes.She is able to harnesses the new symbolic power of the clock and combine it with modernist literary techniques in order to present a simultaneously intimate and distant portrait of the modern subject.It is impossible to discuss modernism without Flynn 2 addressing temporality.It is impossible to fully discuss modernist literature's temporal experimentation without addressing Rhys.Published within the space of ten years, Quartet (1929), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939) exhibit a complex relationship to one another and to the author's life.Each novel takes place in London, Paris, or both, and features a female protagonist struggling to survive one tumultuous relationship after another.The proximity between the events in the characters' and the author's lives have often drawn attention away from Rhys's craft and inventiveness. 1 Although Rhys did not explicitly publish these novels as a series, examining them as a unit provides unique access to her formal experimentation.The protagonists are markedly similar and each book takes up a different period of a woman's life.When Voyage in the Dark begins, 19-year old Anna Morgan has recently emigrated from the West Indies to England.She struggles to make a living as a chorus girl until she takes up with an older, wealthy man, Walter Jeffries.Narrated in the first person from Anna's point of view, the novel depicts in painful detail the emotional experience of this naïve young girl who, lacking financial, social, or familial connections, attempts to navigate this minefield of a relationship and survive its tragic aftermath.Anna's thoughts drift from her European present to her Caribbean past and back again, mapping the narrative onto repetitive cycles of memory.This novel demonstrates an internal version of temporality at odds with the painful progression of real time.At its conclusion, in which Rhys originally planned for Anna to die, the doctor, "like a machine that was working smoothly," deems her "ready to start all over again in no time" (187).Echoing this directive the novel concludes with Anna repeating the phrase "starting all over again, all over again…" (188).In the end, Rhys's protagonist submits to the machine-like authority figure and looks forward to a living death of inescapable repetition.