"New words, new everything": fragmentation and trauma in Jean Rhys

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2005 by Maren Linett

Jean Rhys's novels present an intriguing case study for thinking about the status and meaning of fragmented text. With their polyvocal, nonlinear narration, often presented through interior monologues, novels such as Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight exemplify modernist fragmentation while intimating a deeper sense of pain and loss than most accounts of such fragmentation acknowledge. In spite of the strong undertone of psychological damage it conveys, the fragmentary nature of Rhys's writing is sometimes celebrated by critics as evidence of a subversive stance, either in Rhys or in her characters. Such a response is not peculiar to Rhys studies, of course, but part of a broader trend in feminist criticism. Molly Hite provides a succinct summary of this trend, describing it as a "strain of feminist criticism" that "has demonstrated that the decentering and destabilizing tendencies of recent experimental writing have a great deal in common with the feminist project of overturning culturally constructed oppositions" (16). While this trend is generally beneficial, when it is applied to Rhys's novels it often leads to overly optimistic accounts of her characters as actively resisting such "culturally constructed oppositions." In turning our traditional expectation of agency on its head, these accounts value Rhys's incisive wit and social criticism, but they also underrate the characters' unsavory but fundamental helplessness. (1)

An alternative critical response to Rhys's characters' powerlessness has been to acknowledge but contextualize it, viewing it as a result of their thoroughgoing social oppression. (2) The protagonists are, after all, poor, badly educated, female, and often colonial subjects exiled to the metropolis. Their positions on the extreme edge of multiple axes of exclusion certainly render them powerless in real-world situations. But when we look only to social factors to explain their helplessness, we miss symptoms of what we would now call posttraumatic stress disorder. While social oppression certainly operates, it does not account for the depth with which expectations of and collusion in repeated psychological injury are etched into their minds.

So, without wishing to deny the force of their social marginalization, I focus here on Rhys's characters' powerlessness as a function of trauma; (3) and without wishing to dissent from the proposition that fragmented text can perform meaningful linguistic subversion, I focus on Rhys's fragments not in their abstract relation to cultural dichotomies but in terms of the psychic fragmentation they represent. Although critics such as Elaine Savory, Coral Ann Howells, Teresa O'Connor, and Sue Thomas have insightfully discussed Rhys's personal history of sexual trauma, Rhys criticism lacks an account of how trauma informs her textual strategies. Perspectives provided by the burgeoning field of trauma studies allow us to see in Rhys's fragmented narratives negotiations with what Judith Herman calls trauma's "central dialectic" (1): a knowledge so partial that it borders on denial, a revelation so incomplete that it obscures.

This approach may be said to risk moving Rhys criticism backward toward what Mary Jacobus has identified as

    an unstated complicity with the autobiographical "phallacy,"
    whereby male critics hold that women's writing is somehow closer to
    [women's] experience than men's, that the female text is the author,
    or at any rate a dramatic extension of her unconsciousness.
    (520; Hite 14)

This is a valid warning against reading innovative narrative as though it somehow emerged, unbidden and unmediated, from a brain that could not attain coherence. However, it elides the difference between refusing a writer artistic agency and seeing her narrative as formally innovative because its author was seeking a literary means by which to represent particular mental processes. My reading emphasizes the highly crafted, purposeful, modernist project of Rhys's narratives, which had to "[break] the sequence" in order to portray her protagonists' fragmented minds (Woolf 85). Like Ulysses' portrait of the thought processes of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, Rhys's novels lay bare in brilliantly sketched (and much revised) detail their characters' mental lives.

By linking Rhys's narrative style to trauma, I hope to complement, not reject, other accounts of modernist form. Rhys was certainly influenced by Joyce and other experimental novelists; she participated in the general dismayed reaction to linear narrative that Woolf articulates in her essays. She also joined other modernist writers in endeavoring to represent the chaos of life in modern urban spaces. Her characters manifest the difficulties of the modern city, the intense "nervous stimulation," as Georg Simmel puts it, "which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli" (410). As a colonial writer working in European capitals, Rhys worked to undermine dominant discourses with her disjointed narratives. In addition, she was responding to fascism, which threatened violently to make wholes out of disparate elements. (4) Rhys's modernist form is overdetermined by these and other influences. My aim here is to augment our understanding of that form by analyzing the ways in which the fragments of Rhys's texts convey the traumatized psyches of her characters. Rhys herself was traumatized, but that biographical fact led neither simply nor directly to her representations of traumatized characters; and it did not magically provide her with the literary strategies necessary to represent them. Rather, Rhys worked with fragmented text in part because she desired to make trauma legible in the precarious, partial ways that can be done. Her fragmentary style is, in my view, strategic and mimetic rather than symptomatic.