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PARTISAN REVIEW
makes pathetic forays for a brandy and to which she returns, as like
as not , to be bullied for her failures by the landlady .
Notably absent from Rhys's account of her heroine is any
analysis of her plight in political terms. The Rhys heroine is a
natural victim, not a victim of sexual politics or class oppression. As
an exile of obscure origins she is more or less classless; and although
she certainly feels brutalized by men, she insists that "I'm even more
afraid of women." The problem is extremely general: "People are
such beasts, such mean beasts," says the heroine of
After Leaving Mr.
Mackenzie.
Elsewhere the formula is simply "life is cruel and horrible
to unprotected people." The social analysis of Rhys's work stops with
the assertion that there are outsiders and insiders, and that the one is
entitled to resent the other. But even the resentment is fitful and
limp. The Rhys heroine knows that she is largely responsible for her
own unhappiness. Whenever something good comes her way–
money, a man, the possibility of a good time-she instantly loses it
through laziness, obsessiveness, or a kind of petty anger arising from
her sense that it isn't enough .
Another notable absence in Rhys's work is the sense of place.
We are told that we are in Paris rather than London, or vice versa,
but it seems to make little difference . The outside world has with–
drawn from the Rhys heroine . As long as there is a room, a street, or
a restaurant for her to occupy, she doesn't bother much about the
details. That is, of course, Rhys herself, in sympathy with her
heroine's depression, makes no effort to find correspondences
between the inner and the outer life. Her heroines experience the
thinness of life and Rhys means for her readers to do likewise. Ford
Madox Ford tells in the preface to
The Left Bank
how he tried to get
Rhys to "introduce some sort of topography .. . into her
sketches .... " He goes on to say :
But would she do it? No! With cold deliberation, once her atten–
tion was called to the matter, she eliminated even such two or
three words of descriptive matter as had crept into her work. Her
business was with passion, hardship, emotions .
Rhys does sometimes include material that is interesting for its own
sake: there are descriptions of the life of a Paris manikin, of a
Bloomsbury group's horrible country vacation, of Left Bank parties.
And in the first section of
Wide Sargasso Sea
she quite brilliantly works
up the landscape of Dominica, where all relationships are as
decadent as the lush, rotting vegetation . But the monotony of the
