LINDA BAMBER
95
heroine's feelings is more likely than not to fill the whole frame, fore–
ground and background.
Ford's description of Rhys's "business" is worth pausing over.
According to Ford, and to many of Rhys's contemporary readers,
the point of Rhys's work is the intensity of the heroine's inner life .
From time to time Rhys will indeed claim a kind of energy for her
heroine; in
Quartet,
for example, the "longing for joy" is said to be a
"mad thing in her heart ... like some splendid caged animal roused
and fighting to get out." But the characteristic gesture in Rhys's
novels is actually the
withdrawal
of emotional presence in times of
crisis, not the enactment of fierce emotional needs. The following
exchange between heroine and her lover is typical:
"I want to help you; I want you to get on. You want to get on ,
don't you?"
"I don't know," I said .
"But my dear, how do you mean you don't know? .. What
would you really like to do?"
I said , "I want to be with you. That's all I want."
"Oh, you'll soon get sick of me." He smiled, a bit as if he were
sneering at me.
I didn't answer .
"Don't be like that," he said. "Don't be like a stone that I try to roll
uphill and that always rolls down again."
"Like a stone ," he said . It's funny how you think, "It won't hurt
until I move ." So you sit perfectly still . Even your face goes stiff.
The withdrawal here is twofold. The heroine, Anna, withdraws
from the lover, her face stiff with pain; and Rhys withdraws from the
reader into ellipsis and Hemingway-style understatement. Neither
gesture seems compatible with mad, splendid longings for joy. Both
the author and the heroine characteristically avert their eyes from
precisely the "passion, hardship [and] emotion" that Ford thought
central to Rhys's project.
A more recent admirer of Jean Rhys, A. Alvarez, explains the
novelist's technique as follows:
She is . .. far too pure an artist to allow herself the luxury of self-
pity ... . The moments of drama and confrontation - when the
