The female experience_in_jean_rhys_voyag

1. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Department für Anglistik & Amerikanistik
WiSe 20/21
Modernism and the Female Experience:
Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys
Prof. Dr. Helge Nowak
Thesis Paper
Female Experience in
Jean Rhys’ Voyage in the Dark
and Wide Sargasso Sea
10.02.2021
Jasmin Sophie Vandeplas

2. 1
“Such terrible things happen…Why? Why?”
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Outcast, lonely, desperate, disturbed and deeply hurt women on their quest to survive in a cruel
world are topics that reappear in nearly all of Jean Rhys’ works. These themes of female
experience are also strongly present in one of her earlier novels, Voyage in the Dark1
(1934) as
well as her last, Wide Sargasso Sea2
(1966). Both narratives follow young women born in the
West Indies, trying to survive in patriarchal society. This essay aims to explore the differences
and similarities of female experience between the two as well as draw on autobiographical
reasons for the narratives. Of special interest will be an elaboration on the novels being failed
bildungsromane as well as a comparison to Jack (formerly named Judith) Halberstam’s theory
of shadow feminism.
VD is Rhys’ third published novel. It was, however, the first she wrote: “originally drafted
in 1911 in a diary form in a series of old black exercise notebooks” (Cunningham: 375). Young
Rhys, at the time 21 years old, very likely wrote therapeutically about her own traumatizing
experiences in VD. Ford Madox Ford, once Rhys’s lover, perceived her great talent for writing
as a “terrifying insight … and passion for stating the case of the underdog” (Ford as in
Greenblatt: 722) and Rhys said about her own work: “I have only ever written about myself”
(Rhys as in Greenblatt: 722). Her writing indeed is, semiautobiographical, all seeming to seek
the answer to the central question in WSS: “[Why do] such terrible things happen?” (WSS: 51).
VD & WSS are both novels about identity, about being an outsider and immigrant, about
not being ‘English’ enough as well as, if not most importantly, novels about power imbalances
between men and women. VD, moreover, is about abortion – written more than three decades
before its legalisation in the UK. VD’s Anna Morgan’s, as well as WSS’s Antoinette Cosway’s
white Creole heritage make them outsiders both in England and the West Indies. Both are
horrified by the darkness and coldness of England. Feelings of female loneliness, despair,
yearning for love, security, happiness, acceptance and, ultimately, a better life are central
themes. In both narratives, one finds parallels, even though the setting and societal background
of the protagonists are different. The most obvious difference is Antoinette’s status as a wife,
as legal property of a man.
In VD’s onset, a trope of circularity is introduced. Having come from the Caribbean to
London, Anna feels “almost like being born again” (VD: 7). Nevertheless, the novel does not
1
In the following referred to as VD.
2
In the following referred to as WSS.

3. 2
progress in a linear manner. Interrupted by remembrances and dream sequences of a happier
Caribbean childhood, senseless repetition prevails in Anna’s adult life; she meets with her
lovers, lives from day to day and tries to make ends meet. In her England, “the towns […]
always looked so exactly alike. You were perpetually moving to another place which was
perpetually the same” (VD: 8). One could read the ending of the novel and immediately start at
the beginning without disturbance. Rather than a resolution, an indistinct beginning is hinted
at: “starting all over again, all over again” (VD: 159). Arguably, this lack of positive
development makes VD a failed bildungsroman. It even makes the novel nihilist – what is there
to live for if everything that happens is so terrible? At some point in the novel Anna thinks:
“I’m nineteen and I have to go on living and living and living” (VD: 94). This representation of
a female protagonist unable to inhabit the literary form of a bildungsroman “foregrounds a
distinctive feminine modernist aesthetic during the transformations of European culture
between the wars” (Cunningham: 376). This is also reflected in WSS, published more than 30
years after VD. The former, set in the 19th
century, writes back to a canonical work of literature
– Jane Eyre. The latter, on the other hand is set in 1920ies bohemian London, yet both challenge
Victorian values and assumptions towards women and female experience within their subject
matter and due to a distinctly modernist form, such as the frequent use of hybridity, narrative
fragmentation, streams of consciousness’ and dream sequences.
In a bildungsroman, typically, a male protagonist matures due to negative experiences
and acquiring knowledge and education, which in turn makes him gain the ‘prize’ of a place in
society. Rhys’ heroines cannot achieve those goals because of the marginalized spaces they
inhabit: “instead of learning how to survive in the world, they are destroyed by it” (Dearlove:
24). In this sense one could argue that Rhys’ novels main goal is to historically exemplify and
document the terrible, lonely and abused life of young women. Or that Rhys wrote of
marginalized characters to process and manage her own misfortunes in life. Possibly, Rhys also
had feminist motives in mind, demonstrating the mistreatments of the members of her own
gender and thereby lobbying for a change in society. However, as Anne Cunningham also
argues, there is a
purposeful self-destruction at play in Rhys’s work: the Rhysian [sic] protagonist
demonstrates that a feminine subjectivity based on negation and failure is preferable to the
described choices available to women – even, and perhaps especially, to those women who
have a privileged relationship to a largely white patriarchal system. (376)
Rhys’s novels certainly do not feel like works of hope-inducing sisterhood of female
empowerment. Her protagonists passively accept being objectified and oppressed by males.
Even Antoinette, who puts up an impressive fight and even tries to win her husband’s love with
magic, in the end can only resolve to the ultimate self-destruction: suicide.

4. 3
This lacking representation of female empowerment is why Rhys’s works fit the
definition of Halberstam’s “shadow feminism” (4). This concept helps to understand the
function of Rhys’s obvious failed feminization. Halberstam describes the concept as following:
This feminism, a feminism grounded in negation, refusal, passivity, absence, silence, offers
spaces and modes of unknowing, failing and forgetting as part of an alternate feminist
project, a shadow feminism which is nestled within more positivist accounts and unravelled
their logics from within. This shadow feminism speaks in the language of self-destruction,
masochism, and anti-social femininity. (124)
In other words, for Halberstam, shadow feminism is resistance by failing to perform in
conforming, socially acceptable and even self-affirming ways.3
In doing so, the ‘shadow
feminist’ questions definitions of self and societal conformity while at the same time using
masochism and radical passivity to turn the violence of oppressive patriarchy back upon the
oppressor like a mirror-image. (cf. Halberstam: 137)
In WSS, Rhys radically alters her perspective. Her four previous novels, including VD,
were set in the “lax, anything-goes world of European Bohemians” (Sanders: 623) and dealt
with women wanting to “explore the implications of their sexuality and, ultimately, with women
adrift and women exploited” (Sanders: 623). In WSS, Antoinette also experiences loneliness,
victimization and exploitation. However, Rhys’s previous themes are revisited with a new
intensity and savagery by interrupting the narrative with a male voice.
Antoinette’s ‘self-to-other’ transformation, which ultimately ends in her falling into
madness and death – forced onto her by the patriarchs of her family – is one of the main themes
in WSS. The narration is written partly in Antoinette’s husband’s voice (for he is never named
Mr. Rochester), which shows Jane Eyre’s Byronic hero from an entirely different angle. The
couple is obviously mismatched and set up for failure from the start; him being unable to
understand and cope with his young wife’s passion for her Caribbean island as well as her
sexual appetite. He is irritated by her “[l]ong, sad, dark alien eyes. […] not English or
European” (WSS: 37) and in the end is the one who finally breaks Antoinette and makes her a
mere shadow of herself: “Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else,
calling me by another name” (WSS: 95).
In VD, it is Walter who takes Anna’s virginity and after not wanting to see her again
drives her to sleeping around with many more men. Nevertheless, he keeps supporting her
financially and even helps out in her most dire hour, even though he has no legal obligation to
3
Halberstam does not include Rhys in her analysis, but for example names Yoko Ono’s performance art Cut Piece
to be such a representation of shadow feminism. Ono sits on stage and the audience cut her clothes off of her bit
by bit. By eventually sitting, passively, vulnerable and naked, “her own body [is used] as a battleground to draw
out the sadistic impulses that bourgeois audiences harbor toward the notion of woman” (137). Through this, the
artist creates awareness and turns the violence of oppressive systems “back upon themselves like a funhouse
mirror” (137).

5. 4
do so (he pays for her abortion). In WSS, on the other hand, the husband can be seen as the
ultimate villain. He drives his wife into madness, because he cannot withstand the societal
conditioning of his Victorian upbringing. He resolves into locking her up in an attic and even
wants to commit the ultimate adultery of polygamy (which is left to be narrated by the canonical
text). In this sense, Antoinette’s faith seems worse than Anna’s: at least she is free and can
“start all over again” (VD: 159). For Antoinette, the only option is suicide, which can also be
interpreted as the ultimate shadow feminist move. In the canonical text, Jane must overcome
many challenges within her narrative “in order to attain the goal of mature freedom. [She]
achieves this goal, but Antoinette does not. On the other hand, Jane’s is a limited goal, that of
marriage, whereas Antoinette goes beyond this” (Jenkins: 164). Antoinette takes her faith into
her own hands and strives for the ultimate self-destruction, to which she is driven by the
circumstances of female experience in a male-dominated world.
In both novels, the female protagonists encounter a large amount of physical as well as
psychological suffering, for one of them this ends in a near-death experience, for the other it
ends in self-induced death, as her only way to freedom. Rhys’s novels portray young women
as victims of patriarchal society. The setting of one novel almost a century before the other with
similar outcomes for both women can also be interpreted as strong societal criticism. WSS and
VD are both failed bildungsromane and many aspects of Halberstam’s shadow feminism are
represented. Especially Anna is very passive, absent, silent and simply lets things happen to
her. Antoinette, moreover, is the epitome of self-destruction. Maybe this quality of representing
cruel oppressive patriarchy and the toll it takes on the young women of Rhys’s writing is what
Ford referred to as a “terrifying insight” (Ford as in Greenblatt: 722) in her early days of
authorship. Jean Rhys managed to record the lives of women who fell under the radar in
haunting ways that until today hold readers in awe and offers the possibility to reflect upon
today’s treatment of women that fall through the cracks – like in a mirror image.

6. 5
Works Cited:
Cunningham, Anna. 2013. “’Get on or Get Out’: Failure and Negative Feminity in Jean Rhys’
Voyage in the Dark”. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 59.2: 373–394.
Dearlove, Judith. 1997. “The Failure of the Bildungsroman: Jean Rhys and Voyage in the
Dark”. The Jean Rhys Review 8.1–2: 24–30.
Greenblatt, Stephen. 2018. “Jean Rhys, 1890–1979” The Norton Anthology of English
Literature / Volume F: The Twentieth Century and After. London: W.W. Norton &
Company. 721–728.
Halberstam, Judith. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke UP.
Jenkins, Hilary. 2001. “Critical Responses” to Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Penguin Student
Editions). Ed. Hilary Jenkins. London: Penguin Group. 159–168.
Rhys, Jean. [1934] 2000. Voyage in the Dark. London: Penguin Group.
––––––––. [1966] 2001. Wide Sargasso Sea (Penguin Student Editions). Ed. Hilary Jenkins.
London: Penguin Group.
Sanders, Andrew. 2004. “Post-War and Post-Modern Literature.” The Short Oxford History of
English Literature. Oxford: OUP. 586–662.