Place And Identity In Jean Rhys's Fiction

Jean Rhys(1890-1979)is a writer who has been both canonized and marginalized.As a descendant of white Creole in the West Indies and later migrating to Europe,Rhys experienced great traumas of exile,loss of home,and loss of sense of belonging.These experiences make place and identity a central concern in her work.Combining theories of place and perspectives of space,this dissertation focuses on the three most prominently featured places in her work—England,France and the West Indies,and seeks to address the complicatedly intertwined relationships between place and identity in her three representative novels.This dissertation borrows from the discussions of place in cultural geography and humanistic geography,and sees place as both a material and abstract existence,with both grounded and fluid,heterogeneous features.The meanfulness of place derives from emotions and experiences of individuals and their communities,but it is also socially produced and constructed.While it is defined and constructed by individuals and their groups,place can also shape and strengthen their identities in return.Place is space that has accumulated meaning.The two of them are imbricated and require each other for definition.In traditional Rhys studies,there has been a long standing schism between her earlier “European” novels set in England and continental Europe and her later masterpiece set in the West Indies.In taking place as a key,this dissertation seeks to give an all-around view of Rhys' s work and shows how she is deeply affected by the “sense of place” and propelled by her experience of place to engage in writing.Chapter One focuses on Voyage in the Dark and the West Indian Creole identity,and discusses the colonial other's tension-fraught experience both of the place in England and the English identity.The English landscape and cityscape in the protagonist's experience is homogenizing,constraining,excluding,and they reveal a hostile and abusive nature towards her.Through the protagonist's recall of her home island,two distinctly different places and spaces,England and the Caribbean,come into collision.The imperial space is penetrated and infiltrated by the Caribbean geography and space,the colonial history also becomes a presence.The hostility andoppression of imperial space can be seen as a direct result from the protagonist's racial,national and sexual transgression.The clashes of her transgressive identities with the homogenized English identity correspond to the two conflicting and juxtaposed places and spaces.Excluded from both the West Indian home and the mother country,she could only inhabit in liminal spaces with liminal identities,with nowhere to belong and no end of limbo.The novel shows Rhys' s critique of the inherent violence and constraining force of the imperial space and the English identity.Chapter Two features Good Morning,Midnight and focuses on the female flaneuse character's spatial practice in Paris.In presenting the flaneuse's experience and observation,Rhys portrays the marginalized groups and their resistance towards spaces of exhibition,consumption and imperial-capitalism.In the(semi)public space and places in Paris,the flaneuse is subjected to disciplining gaze and special code of conduct,and suffers intense anxiety in regulated and prescribed female identity in space and place of consumption.The exhibit space and its power mechanism connect the flaneuse with the social destitute,the objectified women and the exiles displaced from their countries due to European wars and imperial conquests.Rhys presents the identities of the places in Paris as ambiguous and heterogeneous,which parallels the ambiguous backgrounds and identities of the characters.The ambiguity of the identities of both the place and characters indicate the fundamental unreliability in judging by appearances,by what is exhibited.Thus the exhibited,commodified and marginalized groups are also able to achieve a certain form of resistance by transforming their appearance and identities.Chapter Three takes on Wide Sargasso Sea as a “Writing Back” masterpiece,focusing on the three estate houses in the novel and discusses how Rhys presents the West Indian place and people in their resistance against imperial domination to regain their identities.The white colonist husband racializes and sexualizes the West Indian landscape and projects an identity of female sensuousness and madness onto his Creole wife.He is simultaneously attracted to the place,the Creole other and dominated by the fear of contamination and the threat to the purity of his Englishidentity.Therefore,through control of space and usurpation of place he achieves control of the identity of the other.In the contention for space and resistance against imposed identities,the colonial estate and garden turn wild and desolate as a way to reverse colonization,and the imprisoned and displaced colonial other destroys the symbol of imperial authority,regains the memory of her identity and returns to the place where she belongs and where the colonist becomes haunted.From imperial centers to the depth of colonies,the mobile and uncertain characteristics of place and identity in Rhys' s work show her rejection of rigid identity categories of race,gender,class and national origins and orthodox judgments.What she perceives as the disorientation,ambivalence,heterogeneity and de-centeredness in identity construction is also what becomes so characteristic of our postmodern times.In this sense,she is not only a border-crosser,a category-breaker,she is also far ahead of her time.