Earning her keep: Women and money in the post-colonial novel (France, Dominica, Marguerite Duras, Toni Morrison, Jean Rhys)

Three twentieth century novels provide insight into the freedom enjoyed, but also the rage sparked, by women who earn or at least understand money. The novels under consideration are Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Marguerite Duras's L'Amant (The Lover, 1984), and Toni Morrison's Paradise (1998). In each case, female characters live on the margins of a society that has been shaped by colonialism and organized by financial interests, race, and gender. The heroine is viewed as an "other" by various groups within that society, but she must nevertheless enter it to secure money. Her fate depends upon her ability to support and represent herself in a society that is always ready to inscribe her as an object, rather than a subject, of economic exchange.; Chapter 1 considers the literary context of a woman seeking money in the public sphere, which suggested prostitution in many nineteenth century American, English and French texts. Chapters 2 and 3 explore Wide Sargasso Sea, in which Rhys undermines the colonial English divide between femininity and knowledge of production. The Creole heroine who knows the source of English money disproves the Englishman's belief in feminine and racial purity, for which he silences and imprisons her. In Duras's L'Amant, the subject of chapters 4 and 5, the French heroine in colonial Indochina asserts her desire for money without sacrificing her life or her voice. However, she uses her community's interest in money to hide her more transgressive desire for a racial other, suggesting that a colonial society readily reduces various threats to its stability to a desire for money. Chapter 6 considers Morrison's Paradise, in which two communities alienated from the U.S. mainstream---one all-female and one all-African American---struggle to maintain both isolation and wealth. But money links the communities, sparking a return to the gendered and racial violence they hoped to escape. Each novel allows its heroines to glimpse a paradise in which wealth can co-exist with something threatened by wealth---spirituality, or ancient knowledge, or racial fluidity---before a violent ending asserts a return to the colonial status quo.