Inaudible Voices in Sleep It Off Lady

Abstract

The article deals with crises of transmission in some of Jean Rhys's stories included in Sleep It Off Lady (1976), more specifically ‘Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers’, ‘Fishy Waters’, ‘Good-bye Marcus, Good-bye Rose’ and ‘Sleep It Off Lady’. Their voiceless characters are discussed through the lens of precariousness, the argument relying on Guillaume Le Blanc's and Judith Butler's essays on precarious lives (Guillaume Le Blanc, Vies ordinaires, vies précaires, 2007; Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, 2004). I shed light on the correlations between social precariousness, invisibility and linguistic vulnerability which make the transmission of the experience of dispossession precarious itself. The stories stage ghostly, invisible characters who cannot give an account of themselves but who, on the other hand, are held accountable by society. This oppressive type of accountability based on punishment or revenge contributes something to the crisis of transmission to which Jean Rhys's fiction obsessively returns. Caught within this coercive system of accountability, the precarious self remains untransmissible, while the stories bear witness to the processes which obstruct voice, and tell tales of precariousness.

Keywords:

• accountability
• invisibility
• precariousness
• Rhys
• voicelessness
• vulnerability

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Jean Rhys, Sleep It Off Lady [1976], Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. All subsequent page numbers refer to this edition.

2 ‘The precarious, the unemployed, the supernumerary, the useless thus form a ghost army that modern nations try to hide through the use of different myths and of a whole range of bewildering measures’ (Guillaume Le Blanc, Vies ordinaires, vies précaires, Paris: Seuil, 2007, p. 16; my translation).

3 ‘Ultimately, precarization jeopardizes the narrative shell of the self. The latter is embedded in a series of linguistic skills that disintegrate proportionally to the degree of precarization to which it is subjected. What is undermined by the more extreme forms of precarization is not only the possibility of addressing someone, but also the wish to gather one's life into a life story that is indispensable to the arts of doing’ (Le Blanc, Vies ordinaires, vies précaires, pp. 107–8; my translation).

4 If precariousness and vulnerability are interchangeable words in Judith Butler's Precarious Life, Le Blanc distinguishes between ontological vulnerability and social precariousness on the grounds that the latter, and the political outrage from which it proceeds, should not be naturalized: ‘[w]hen one regards social precariousness as a special case of ontological precariousness, the political outrage of precariousness disappears for it is immediately returned to a natural dimension that is particularly disarming’ (Le Blanc, Vies ordinaires, vies précaires, p. 67; my translation).

5 On the history of the Imperial Road and the imperial policy of the late nineteenth century in Dominica, see Peter Hulme, ‘Islands and Roads: Hesketh Bell, Jean Rhys, and Dominica's Imperial Road’, The Jean Rhys Review 11:2, 2000, pp. 23–51.

6 ‘To lead a precarious life is not so much to live on the margins as to be forced into a marginal existence that causes existence to lose its social visibility and, consequently, its internal form' (Le Blanc, Vies ordinaires, vies précaires, p. 173; my translation).

7 ‘The fleetingness of our place in discourse reflects the fleetingness of our place in social life. This is why speaking is never a mere linguistic inscription of the self, but always a social inscription of the self, the corollary of which implies the capacity to be heard by others and thus to be recognized' (Le Blanc, Vies ordinaires, vies précaires, p. 138; my translation).

8 ‘[T]he precarious man is first of all one who is separated from those who are recognized as men, and thus perceives himself as a barely viable subject, a human on the brink of inhumanity’ (Le Blanc, Vies ordinaires, vies précaires, p. 219; my translation).

9 ‘“Good morning,” Rosalie said, but Mrs Menzies did not answer. She rode past, clip-clop, clip-clop, in her thick, dark riding habit brought from England ten years before’ (Rhys, Sleep It Off Lady, p. 11).

10 Here one cannot help thinking of how dominant frames of recognition freeze Antoinette/Bertha into the identity of the mad woman in Wide Sargasso Sea.

11 The face understood as the expression of the infinite alterity of the Other, an infinity that cannot be captured or totalized, over which I can have no power. The face is also the expression of the exposure and vulnerability of the Other which address me and call me to responsibility. Levinas defines the ethical relation as an immediate face-to-face encounter, without the intervention of any image or representation (Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority [1969], trans. from the French by Alphonso Lingis, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. See more specifically ‘2. Ethics and the Face’, pp. 197–201).

12 The riot was probably part of the counter-plantation rebellions in Dominica in the late nineteenth century (1844, 1853, 1893, and 1898): ‘[t]his counter-plantation tendency took three prominent forms: outright rebellion, migration to preferred non-plantation regional locations, and the rejection of wage labor locally, either by total withdrawal from the estate sector or by forcing the planter class to accept sharecropping arrangements on the spatial and juridical domain of the plantation’ (Cecilia Green, ‘A Recalcitrant Plantation Colony: Dominica, 1880–1946’, New West Indian Guide 73:3/4, 1999, p. 46).

13 Most of the information is released through indirect means in this story, mostly composed of embedded texts, public and private correspondence, and the long report of the trial in the local paper.