LINDA BAMBER
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autobiographical novels. Like her heroines, Rhys couldn't claim
much. That is, she could not make her claims directly; she based
them on her weaknesses and failures rather than on her strengths.
Stella Bowen, Ford's wife at the time of his liaison with Jean Rhys,
tells us that, in life as in her fiction, Rhys self-consciously played the
role of the loser:
Ford's girl was by no means without generous instincts and her
world had its own standards of chic .... Yet here I was cast for
the role of the fortunate wife who held all the cards, and the girl
for that of the poor, brave, and desperate beggar who was
doomed to be let down by the bourgeoisie. I learned what a
powerful weapon lies in weakness and pathos and how strong is
the position of the person who has nothing
to
lose, and I simply
hated my role! I played it, however, until the girl was restored to
health and a job materialized, since we appeared to represent her
last chance of survival.
Bowen's analysis rings true, right down to the constant sense of "last
chance" that Rhys creates in her novels. The final disaster, desertion
or death, is always just around the corner. In
Quartet
Rhys explicitly
claims pathos as her defining mode, commenting on the Ford and
Bowen figures as follows:
Of course, there they were: inscrutable people, invulnerable
people, and she simply hadn't a chance against them, naive
sinner that she was.
The outside world is knowing and invulnerable, the Rhys heroine is
"naive," innocent in spite of her sins, pure because helpless.
Rhys's helplessness is often a kind of "weapon" in her fiction just
as it was in her life. Her silences are not, unfortunately, the true
absences that Alvarez takes them for but a form of pressure for the
reader's sympathy. Rhys's retreats have a double message. We
cannot be such beasts, she seems to say, as to refuse our sympathy to
someone with such poverty of artistic means, someone so helpless to
make her own case. There is a kind of emotional blackmail to Rhys's
technique: she is like a woman who leaves the room in silent agony,
indicating in every line of her body an absolute demand to be
followed.
What is particularly disturbing is that Rhys seems to equate her
femininity with her pathos, the one reinforcing the other. In
Good
Morning Midnight,
for instance, we hear of a "thin, scraggy and
hunted" kitten: "Well, all the male cats in the neighborhood were on
to her like one o'clock. She got a sore on her neck and the sore got
