| Influential Rhys critics continue to argue that Rhys flowers as a colonial thinker in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966); yet, these same and other critics offer readings of Rhys's earliest Caribbean fictions (1927) that trouble this notion. This notion thus produces confusion in the criticism, and it has the further unfortunate effect of underwriting a polarization of the Caribbean texts and the rest, or European ones: already having hesitated to read any colonial fictions written before Wide Sargasso Sea, many postcolonial critics continue to pass over the European texts. Further, since three of Rhys's four modernist period novels are European, this polarization means that the modernist novels as a group have received scant attention from postcolonial critics. This dissertation redresses this strict distinction between Rhys's single Caribbean modernist period novel (Voyage in the Dark) and the rest, through an examination of the latter's colonial allusions.; In chapter 1, I am able to point to a colonial text in Quartet (1928), in the form of a critique of imperial identity and a postcolonial identitarian ethics. In chapter 2, I engage the debate about masochism in Rhys through a reading of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), which I argue is written after Conrad's (equally masochistic) colonial first novel, Almayer's Folly: I employ Gilles Deleuze's theory of masochism which presents the complex as an oppositional formation, suggesting that Mackenzie's intertextuality indicates that Rhys's masochistic investment follows from her focus on oppression generally, i.e., gender, class and imperial oppression. Chapter 3 joins those readings proving that Voyage in the Dark (1934) offers postcolonial insights as complex as those of Wide Sargasso Sea, arguing that the novel is a geopolitical exercise in reading, a challenge from Rhys to her readers regarding the fact of repressed metropolitan-colonial relations. Chapter 4 demonstrates that Good Morning, Midnight (1939) is a "flaneur novel," i.e., a novel about capital, arguing that modernist period Anglophone flaneur novels in general consider capital as a global and imperial phenomenon. Together, I say, these novels comprise a set, demonstrating both a focus on, and a conflictual retreat from the dislocating implications of, the fact of emerging subjects, histories and conditions. |
