A comparison between Jean Rhys and Una Marson

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Voyage into the Metropolis:

Exile in the Works of Jean Rhys and Una Marson.

In Jonathan Miller’s 1970 production of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” the character of Caliban was cast as black, therefore reigniting the link between the Prospero/Caliban paradigm as the colonizer/colonized. It was not a new idea, indeed Shakespeare himself envisaged the play set on an island in the Antilles and the play would have had great appeal at the time when new territories were being discovered, conquered, plundered and providing seemingly inexhaustible revenue for the colonisers. What is particularly interesting, however, is how powerful the play later becomes for discourse on colonialism. This trope of Caliban is used by George Lamming in “The Pleasures of Exile” where he likens Prospero in his relationship with Caliban, to the first slave-traders who used physical force and then their culture to subjugate the African and the Carib, overcoming any rebellion with a self righteous determinism. In “The Pleasures of Exile” Lamming sees Caliban as:

          “Man and other than man. Caliban is his convert, colonized by language, and excluded by language. It is precisely this gift of language, this attempt at transformation which has brought about the pleasure and the paradox of Caliban’s exile. Exiled from his gods, exiled from his nature, exiled from his own name! Yet Prospero is afraid of Caliban. He is afraid because he knows that his encounter with Caliban is, largely, his encounter with himself.”

The Prospero/Caliban paradigm is a very relevant symbol for the colonizer/colonized situation of the West Indies but it nevertheless remains a paternalistic position. Where does that leave women of the Caribbean? It could be argued that the Caribbean woman has been even further marginalized. That in making Caliban the model of the Caribbean man it is therefore providing him with a voice. Yet nowhere in the Tempest is there a female counterpart, rendering the Caribbean woman invisible as well as silent and ignoring an essential part of their historical culture. Another issue raised here, is that Caribbean literature has for many years been  male dominated. Just as the colonizer sought to ignore and marginalize their savage ‘Other’ so the Caribbean male has ignored their female counterpart. Opal Palmer Adisa, in exploring this issue, believes that it is “out of this patriarchal structure, designed to make her an object, part of the landscape to be used and discarded as seen fit by the colonizer, that the Caribbean woman has emerged.”

It was out of such a ‘patriarchal structure’ that Jean Rhys and Una Marson emerged. The writing of both women revise and expand theme and personae, subverting a colonial and patriarchal culture. Both  women “may exist in different ethnological and ontological realms but they both exist in worlds which have, at one time or another, attempted to censure, silence or ignore the ideals and interests of women” Like many of their male Caribbean counterparts to succeed them, their writing was greatly influenced by voyaging into the colonial metropolis and living in exile. In this essay I will discuss  the importance of that journey in seeking to find a voice, an identity, and even a language to challenge established notions of Self, gender and race within the colonial structure. But essential to their experience is their struggle. Naipaul recognised, in Rhys, the themes of  “isolation, an absence of society or community, the sense of things falling apart, dependence, loss”. This could also be said of Marson.

Jean Rhys was born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams on 24th August 1890, in Roseau, Dominica to a Creole mother of Scottish descent and a Welsh father who was a doctor. Rhys left Dominica in 1907, aged sixteen and continued her education in a Cambridge girls’ school and then at the Academy of Dramatic Art which she left after two terms. Rhys experienced feelings of alienation and isolation at both these institutions and these feelings were to stay with her for much of her life. Upon pursuing a career as a chorus girl under a variety of names Rhys embarked on an affair with a man twenty years older than herself and which lasted two years. It is broadly accepted that this early period of her London life formed the structure for Voyage In The Dark, and like all of Rhys’s novels, explores homelessness, dislocation, the marginal and the migrant. The character of Anna, like most of her female protagonists exists in the demimonde of city life, living on the wrong side of respectability. What Rhys does effectively in this novel is to centralize the marginalized, those subjects “who belong nowhere, between cultures, between histories.” 

                                                                             

Una Marson was born in rural Jamaica in 1905. Her father was a well respected Baptist minister and as a result of his standing within the community Marson had the opportunity to be educated on a scholarship at Hampton High School, a boarding school for mainly white, middle class girls. After finding employment as a stenographer, Marson went on to edit the ‘Jamaican Critic’, an established literary publication, and from 1928-1921, her own magazine ‘The Cosmopolitan’. Having established herself as a poet, playwright and women’s activist Marson made the decision to travel to Britain. Her achievements in London were impressive; a social activist within the League of Coloured Peoples which led to her taking a post as secretary to the deposed  Emperor Haile Selassie and later she was appointed as a BBC commentator. In reality, however, Marson, like Rhys found the voyage into the Metropolis very difficult. Facing blatant racial discrimination like ‘so many West Indian women migrants of the 1950s, Una found herself blocked at every turn. She complained and cried; she felt lonely and humiliated,’.   In spite of many literary and social connections she remained an isolated and marginal figure. Her poetry displays the uncertainty of cultural belonging where her language ties her to colonialism yet also provides her with a powerful tool with which to challenge it.

In placing Rhys alongside Marson as pioneering female writers, it is important to explore the notion of nationality, of being Caribbean and to question the grounds upon which such ideas are constructed. Both women were writing at the same time, having been born and educated in the British colonies. Both these writers, whose lives span the twentieth century, are situated at the crossroads of the colonial and post-colonial, the modern and post modern, where the threat of fascism and war result in anti colonial struggles and eventual decolonisation across the world. Their voyages from the colonies into the metropolitan centre generate similar experiences. What is clear with both is that by journeying into the metropolis, as women, they occupy a double marginal position within an already marginalized community. Their journey can be seen as an exploration of displacement where, according to Edward W. Said, the intellectual exile exists ‘in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old, beset with half involvements and half attachments, nostalgic and sentimental at one level, an adept mimic or a secret outcast on the other.’ Rhys and Marson, having left the Caribbean are asking us to consider what it means to write from the margins. Within their work, both women challenge notions of women’s place within society and women’s place as a colonized subject in the metropolitan centre.

The protagonist, Anna Morgan, in Voyage in the Dark, reflects Rhys’s own multi indeterminate, multi conflicted identity. Anna, like Rhys is a white descendent of British colonists and slave traders who occupy a precarious position of being “inbetween”. Hated by the Blacks for their part in oppressing the slaves and continuing to cling on to that superior social position, they are also regarded by the ‘mother country’ as the last vestiges of  a degenerate part of their own history best forgotten. Moreover, 1930s England, still under the shadow of Victorian moral dicta, continued to judge harshly a young woman without wealth, family, social position and with an odd accent.

Throughout the novel Anna is identified with characters who are “usually objectified and silenced in canonical works: the chorus girl, the mannequin, the demimondaine.” Much has been made of her reading of Zola’s Nana and indeed there are many parallels between the two characters. Anna, like Nana becomes a prostitute and in the first version of Voyage in the Dark Anna like Nana dies very young. There is of course the obvious anagram of her name but, as Elaine Savory highlights, some interesting revisions by Rhys. Whereas Zola, in Nana, creates a character who brings about the downfall of upper class men not through power but “with only the unsophisticated currency of youth and raw female sexuality” Rhys, in Anna, creates a character who is herself destroyed by men.

           “In Rhys’s version the men who use her youth and beauty are for the most part         evidently cowardly or downright disreputable: Anna herself begins as naively trusting,         passes through a stage of self destructive hopelessness and passivity and ends, in Rhys’s         preferred, unpublished version, by dying from a botched abortion.”

If we are to see Walter Jeffries as the original European, existing in a world viewed certainly by himself as principally ordered and reasonable then Rhys is, through this character, highlighting the degenerate aspect of using power to commodify and even destroy, thereby subverting the colonizer’s position in relation to the colonized.

Through the character of Anna, Rhys explores those oppositions of “Self” and “Other”, male and female, black and white. Even though she outwardly resembles the white European, enabling her, unlike Marson, to blend visually within London, her association with the Caribbean sets her apart as between black and white cultures and as an exotic “Other”. This ambiguity of Anna’s position results in “slippage”. Anna and her family would have been regarded in the West Indies as the white colonizers. In England and in her relationship with Jeffries she becomes the colonized “Other”. In being read as the colonized subject Anna is continually having to adapt her world view and sense of identity to the perspective being imposed on her. A good example of this is the chorus girls’s renaming her as the “Hottentot” aligning her more with the black African and demonstrating the homogenizing of the colonized peoples by the colonizers. This is similar to Spivak’s belief that ‘so intimate a thing as personal and human identity might be determined by the politics of imperialism.’ Interestingly, “Hottentot” is the former name for the Nama, a nomadic tribe of Southern Africa. A somewhat apt comparison which reflects Anna’s own nomadic existence as she moves from town to town as a chorus girl and from one bed sit to another. The term “Hottentot” developed into a derogatory term during the Victorian era and became synonymous firstly with wide hipped, big bottomed African women with oversized genitals and then with the sexuality of a prostitute.

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Jeffries is fully aware of the implications of the name “Hottentot”. In response to hearing Anna’s renaming he says, “I hope you call them something worse back.” Elaine Savory makes a strong connection between Anna’s renaming and  her relationship with Jeffries, her eventual seducer.  Whilst “not looking at Anna’s body in an obvious way, eventually the transaction between them is understood fully on his side to be a promise of sexual excitement from a white woman whom he perceives as having an extra thrill presumably from association with racist constructions of black females in his culture.”

Franz Fanon, in his ...

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