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ABSTRACT
Reading Jean Rhys’s “The Imperial Road” (2001) in the context of Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Journey” (1934) and Fanny Kemble’s Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation (1863) enables us to see how all three were attempting to write against White racism in different eras whilst still themselves not free of its cultural indoctrination. Kemble has to be understood in the context of British and American battles for Abolition, a cause in which white women could engage if they chose, giving them a role evidently on the side of justice but also distant from the discomfort of witnessing the plantation. Porter and Rhys are complicated because their work and their lives reveal both rejection of racism and racist cultural prejudices. They are also different, Rhys chronologically further away from ancestral connection to the plantation than Porter and Caribbean rather than American born and raised. Reading these three writers together provokes important questions about how and why white women write race in different historical and cultural spaces.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Rhys, Letters, 202.
2 Robertson, “Accessing Blood-Knowledge,” 247.
3 The British banned the slave trade in 1807; the U.S. followed in 1808. But illicit trading of course followed. Emancipation came in 1833 for British colonies, though the “apprenticeship period” (five years until 1838) was an egregious sop to planters’ reluctance to part with “property” for which they were handsomely compensated through a 20 million pound bond taken out in 1835, not paid off until 2015 and equivalent to 40% of Treasury. Former slaves got nothing. The U.S. was in the midst of their devastating Civil War over the South’s commitment to slavery when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
4 “Blood kin” is an ominous term now since it is important to the White supremacist thinking of Scots-Irish groups in the South today, such as the secessionist League of the South, led by Michael Hill. The 2018 film Who Put the Klan in the Ku Klux Klan traces this legacy.
5 Adam Hochschild describes an example of Abolitionist organization amongst white women as follows: Elizabeth Heyrick published a pamphlet “Immediate Not Gradual Abolition” (1824), attacking those who wanted to edge along to end slavery. She wrote that a woman “is especially qualif(ied) … to plead for the oppressed,” 325.
6 David Blight writes that when Douglass reported on a visit he made to Stowe, he spoke of Uncle Tom’s Cabin reaching “the universal soul of humanity” and of Stowe herself as having “splendid genius,” “keen and quiet wit,” an “exalted sense of justice,” 247–8. Douglass was deeply impressed, clearly, with her intelligence and quality of thought.
7 For example, Meg Smaker’s film, first titled Jihad Rehab, was first lauded and then dropped as Graeme Wood explains in his article “Cowardice at Sundance.” At root is the issue of her being a white woman (suspected of being White?).
8 Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation (London: Robert & Green, 1863; New York: Henry Holt, 1963) is included in edited form in Fanny Kemble’s Journals, edited by Catherine Clinton. Kemble published plays, poems, stories, literary criticism and many memoirs. For a framing of her work from an African-American perspective, see the 2021 film produced by Ujima Genealogy of Coastal Georgia, From Enslavement to Freedom: The Saga of Butler Island Plantation.
9 Pierce Butler’s grandfather proposed the Fugitive Slave Act. The family’s ancestry was in Irish aristocracy and they displayed absolute indifference to those who labored in brutal conditions to enable their life-style, over generations.
10 David, Fanny Kemble, 140.
11 Ibid., 137.
12 Ibid., 120, 137. Channing was a major Abolitionist thinker and writer (1780–1842). He was friendly with the Sedgwicks, Fanny Kemble’s friends. Catharine Sedgwick, a novelist and abolitionist, was important in Kemble’s life (they met in 1833). Her sister-in-law was the Elizabeth to whom Kemble’s letters about her time in Georgia were addressed (which formed Kemble’s Journal of a Residence attacking plantation slavery).
13 Kemble, Fanny Kemble’s Journals, 128.
14 Clinton, Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars, 119.
15 Kemble, Fanny Kemble’s Journals, 128.
16 Ibid., 129.
17 Ibid., 135.
18 Ibid., 150.
19 David, Fanny Kemble, 140.
20 “Fanny Kemble,” Encyclopedia Britannica.
21 Ibid.
22 Als, “Enameled Lady.”
23 Ibid.
24 Porter, 163.
25 Unrue, Katherine Anne Porter, xxi.
26 For example, Thomas Staley, who published the first monograph on Rhys.
27 Depending on intonation Caribbean white can imply a slight racial mixture, usually denied, whereas white Caribbean does not (most full-on racist Whites left after majority rule was established, though obviously there are lingering effects from the plantation for everyone). It should be remembered that white people who choose to be involved in their Caribbean societies in positive ways, happy to be minority in a Black society, find appreciation. Examples are Phyllis Shand Allfrey and Lennox Honychurch in Rhys’s Dominica, both outstanding contributors to their nation.
28 For me, the name Miranda recalls Shakespeare’s confused daughter in The Tempest – which has been recreated many times in the Caribbean as a text about race and colonialism. But I have found no evidence this was Porter’s reference.
29 Unrue, Katherine Anne Porter, 451.
30 Ibid.
31 Graham, “Katherine Anne Porter's Journey,” 141.
32 Porter, “The Journey,” 333.
33 Ibid., 334.
34 Ibid.
35 Porter’s essay is remarkably bland and avoids all mention of race: in 1941, Jim Crow and lynchings were a part of the normalized terror campaign of Southern White supremacists, despite the eyes of the world being on America as the battle against fascism in Europe intensified. She says, on the subject of poverty, “we are arriving at an increasing standard of good living for greater and great numbers of people,” 194. On the subject of alienable rights, “the house was built with great labor and it is made with human hands; human hands can tear it down again, and will, if it is not well loved and defended,” 195. This is true, as we see in our present moment, as democracy needs to be defended against those who would see it be replaced by authoritarian rule: but Porter is writing in an America which was not protecting the rights of all Americans, two decades before Civil Rights.
36 Blair, “South by Southwest,” 500.
37 Bibler, Cotton's Queer Relations, 150–1.
38 Ibid., 151.
39 Ibid.
40 Phyllis Shand Allfrey was also criticized for the fictional representation in her novel The Orchid House (1953) of her beloved childhood nurse as Lally (whom she made narrator of the story). Some readers thought this was appropriation by giving the story to Lally: the white author controlling her voice, but it could also be read as history needing to be written by those who have been subordinated by White supremacy. Writers, after all, should not be confined to their own voices: literature is both about the familiar and the unfamiliar, about reflecting experience and imagining what is outside of it. See Paravisini-Gebert, Phyllis Shand Allfrey 83, on this criticism of Allfrey.
41 See Kamau Brathwaite’s reading in Contradictory Omens (1974). He said that white creoles have forfeited their place in the spiritual life of the Caribbean, provoking much discussion. The time and the context of the time are relevant (this was a moment for decolonial thinking and analysis), but, as if clear from his other writing, Brathwaite never rejected Rhys, only sought to make us think about the likely element of fantasy in the closeness of Tia and Antoinette. To be fair, Rhys has Tia throw a stone at Antoinette at the time of the riot, but it is the ending which sustains that fantasy, as if Antoinette can go home to Tia in death, as if Tia is as patient as Nannie in Porter’s story.
42 Gregg, Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination, 41.
43 Mardorossian, “Shutting Up the Subaltern,” 1071.
44 Gilchrist, “Women, Slavery, and the Problem of Freedom,” 462.
45 Rhys, Smile Please, 24.
46 Ibid., 38, 39.
47 Ibid., 40,41.
48 Diana Athill’s memoir of her affair with Hakim Jamal is appallingly confident in her power to take charge of racial space. On the very first page of the memoir, she attempts to play with race: “I sat down near him-though I could have chosen a chair further away- and within two minutes he had put his hand on my shoulder and was watching to see if I would flinch at being touched by this impertinent n … ,” 1. Athill’s text has the n word in full on the first page: inflicting this so confidently on her reader is a shocking demonstration of the class and race status (and impermeability) of Athill – the thought containing the word is represented as Jamal’s. Are the challenges to Rhys over Tia and Christophine and Allfrey over Lally made because they are white Caribbean women writers?
49 Plante, Difficult Women, 17.
50 Ibid.
51 Angier, Life and Work, 355.
52 Ibid., 356.
53 Ibid., 357.
54 Pizzichini, The Blue Hour, 30.
55 Ibid., 31.
56 Ibid., 291.
57 Seymour, like other Rhys biographers, can tend to erase the fascinating ambiguities in her life and work. For example, she reads the endings of Quartet and Voyage in the Dark as deaths, based on Rhys’s choice for Voyage until her publisher talked her out of it. Rhys was always learning as a writer and ultimately ambiguity, where possible, serves her better than closure. Of course the ending of Wide Sargasso Sea is determined by Jane Eyre’s conclusion.
58 Both the estate (Francis Wyndham) and the home of Rhys papers (University of Tulsa) gave permission for the story to be published in The Jean Rhys Review (2001). Previously it existed in multiple typescripts in the University of Tulsa Rhys Collection. As editor, I compared the drafts to determine which was the most finished, from my knowledge of Rhys’s writing process, but reminded the reader that the story is “unfinished,” in the sense of not being published with Rhys’ sign-off.
59 Savory, “The Text and the World,” 15.
60 Rhys, “The Imperial Road,” 17.
61 Ibid., 18.
62 Ibid., 19.
63 Ibid., 20.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid., 21.
66 Ibid., 20.
67 Kemble, 132.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Elaine Savory
Elaine Savory has published widely on Caribbean and African literatures and most recently in the new field of Postcolonial Environmental Humanities, in which her current work is mainly on the Caribbean. As well as many articles on Rhys, she has written two books, Jean Rhys (2004) and The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys (2009), co-edited Wide Sargasso Sea at Fifty (2020) with Erica Johnson and edited The Jean Rhys Review. She is Emeritus Professor in Literary Studies and Environmental Studies, New School University.