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ABSTRACT
This essay pairs Jean Rhys with George Lamming to offer insight into the trajectory of migration from the Caribbean to England in the twentieth century. I focus on an aspect of their work that has received little scholarly attention: allusions to Richard Hakluyt’s accounts of English exploration and imperial expansion in Jean Rhys’s autobiographical novel, Voyage in the Dark (1934) and George Lamming’s collection of personal essays, The Pleasures of Exile (1960). Through a reading that focuses on Rhys’s and Lamming’s intertextuality with Hakluyt as well as their narrative focus on migration to England, I situate their texts in conversation with historic and modern forms of travel literature. I argue that Rhys and Lamming deploy references to narratives of imperial expansion to (1.) call attention to the historical mobilities upon which their travels from the West Indies to England are predicated; and (2.) reverse the formula of the colonial travel narrative – accounts of travel from the imperial “center” to the colonial “periphery” that frames the latter as exotic spaces to be domesticated – to articulate a modern state of the collapsing, as opposed to expanding, English empire.
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Notes
1 For example, see Caroline Rody, The Daughter’s Return: African-American and Caribbean Women’s Fiction (2001), particularly Chapter 5, “Burning Down the House: Daughterly Revision in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.” Highlighting Rhys’s “revisionary uses of intertextuality,” Rody argues that Rhys merges feminist and postcolonial impulses to reimagine the Caliban figure via Antoinette in her reimagination of Bertha in Brontë’s Jane Eyre, 135, 145. Regarding the role of The Tempest in post- and de-colonial literature and critique, Rob Nixon provides an extensive overview in his article for Critical Inquiry, “Caribbean and African Appropriations of ‘The Tempest’” (1987), citing Lamming as the “first Caribbean writer to champion Caliban,” 566. See also “Exile and Cunning” The Tactical Difficulties of George Lamming” (Contemporary Literature, Winter 2006) in which J. Dillon Brown addresses Lamming’s use of the now “familiar Tempest trope” to argue how he recognizes the roots of his education in British cultural heritage while also resisting the role of “quiet, obedient worshipper” to actively situate himself within twentieth-century metropolitan culture, 689.
2 Sherman, 22.
3 For further information on Hakluyt’s nationalist discourse and imperial motivations, see Nandini Das, “Richard Hakluyt” in The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500–1640 (2013) and Matthew Day, “‘Honour to our Nation’: Nationalism, The Principal Navigations and Travel in the Long Eighteenth Century” in Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe, edited by Daniel Carey and Claire Jowitt (2012).
4 Maclean, “Early Modern Travel Writing (1): Print and Early Modern European Travel Writing,” 67.
5 Paquet, “Foreword,” xviii.
6 Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, 448. For additional autobiographical reflection by Lamming, see “The Sovereignty of Imagination: An Interview with George Lamming” (2002) by David Scott and Clay Risen’s recent obituary for George Lamming in The New York Times (June 17, 2022). Regarding Rhys’s “outsider” status within Parisian literary circles of the 1920s, see Shari Benstock, Woman of the Left Bank (1986). On Rhys’s fraught relationship with her race, see Mary Lou Emery, Jean Rhys at World’s End (1990). As Emery explains, white creoles’ descent from a slave-owning plantocracy contributes to a doubled sense of homelessness: “They may feel close to a black culture that they cannot be part of and that can only resent them, and they may still look to a ‘mother’ country that long ago abandoned them and still considers them inferior,” 13.
7 Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, 35. This comparison also draws on Mary Lou Emery’s analysis of Rhys’s experience of colonial exile and “double marginality” in Jean Rhys at World’s End (1990), Helen Carr’s analysis of Rhys’s claims to West Indian identity in her contribution to the edited collection, West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (2003), and Elaine Savory’s argument for the centrality of the Caribbean in Rhys’s body of work, broadly, and the “confrontational” juxtaposition of England and the Caribbean in Voyage in the Dark in Jean Rhys (2004), specifically, 89. In making this parallel, my aim is not to flatten the differences between Rhys and Lamming, but rather to focus on the ways in which each author showcases “a quintessential aspect of Caribbean experience, the marginality of living in between cultures” as Mary Lou Emery writes, 12, and engages with the idea of England in relation to the reality of living there. To that point, see also Anna Snaith, Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890–1945 (2014), particularly Chapter Five, “Jean Rhys: ‘A Savage from the Cannibal Islands’” in which she stresses that the “unease in which Rhys and her protagonists … experience London’s streets is not just about the discomfort of the single woman, but the single colonial woman, who occupies a doubly transgressive position in the metropole,” 135.
8 Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, 13.
9 See “The first voyage of the right worshipfull and valiant knight sir John Hawkins, sometimes treasurer of her Majesties navie Roial, made to the West Indies 1562” in The Principal Navigations, 7-8.
10 Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, 12.
11 Ibid., 13.
12 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 4, 7.
13 Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, 37.
14 Ibid., 36.
15 See A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (2004) by Jed Esty. Here, my reading of Lamming’s analysis of the “event” if discovery is aligned with Esty’s argument that Lamming provides a counternarrative to “the historical roles of conqueror and conquered” and instead “seeks to unfold a relational, and at times even recuperative, model of exile,” 205.
16 Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, 36, 37.
17 Kincaid, “On Seeing England for the First Time,” 37.
18 Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, 37.
19 Ibid., 37-38, (italics mine). Regarding my italics, Lamming reiterates this claim again shortly after this description, writing, “The West Indian novel, by which I mean the novel written by the West Indian about the West Indian reality is hardly twenty years old,” 38.
20 Ibid., 38.
21 That Rhys drew heavily on personal experience in her fiction has been well-documented, perhaps most notably by biographer Carole Angier in her short study, Jean Rhys (1985), and her seminal biography, Jean Rhys: Life and Work (1990).
22 See “Colonization in Reverse” (1966) by Louise Bennett, which humorously addresses the colonizer’s ironic fear of being colonized by its subjects. In addition, Jed Esty names the waves of immigration from the colonies to England in the years preceding and following the Second World War “reverse colonization” in A Shrinking Island (2004).
23 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 17.
24 Ibid., 7.
25 Angier Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 3. In Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (2003), Andrew Thacker cites Teresa O’Connor’s reading of the passage I cited above, writing: “The quotation Anna remembers is another such representation of space, a description in a book viewing the island through the colonial gaze, as it is taken from the island’s first conqueror, Christopher Columbus, in his report on Dominica to the King of Spain in 1493,” 211. However, this reading conflates “that book” with the diary kept by Columbus.
26 Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 215–216 (italics mine).
27 Lucas, A Historical Geography of the British Colonies, 163-164.
28 In addition to quoting this conquest-era source, Rhys gives latitude and longitude coordinates that appear to be taken directly from novelist and travel writer Charles Henry Eden’s The West Indies (1880), which details Dominica’s beauty, histories of French and British occupation, and the Carib population.
29 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 164.
30 Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 5.
31 Ibid., 21. Angier identifies Walter Scott, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Emily Brontë as Rhys’s favorite authors in her childhood, 21, and in yet another instance of the blurred boundaries between author and character, Anna recalls “the bookshelf with Walter Scott and a lot of old Longmans’ Magazines” in her father’s library, 70.
32 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 41. In a parenthetical aside, Anna narrates: “(While you are carefully putting on your gloves you begin to perspire and you feel the perspiration trickling down under your arms. The thought of having a wet patch underneath your arms – a disgusting and a disgraceful thing to happen to a lady – makes you very miserable.),” 42.
33 Ibid., 149.
34 Ibid., 147. In England, Anna is treated like an outsider and racially coded as “Other” by those with whom she interacts. Maudie, one of the chorus girls with whom Anna works and briefly lives, offhandedly mentions that Anna “was born in the West Indies or somewhere,” 13. In addition, her stepmother, Hester, casts doubts Anna’s racial purity as she suspects her mother possesses mixed-race heritage—which Anna adamantly denies—and Maudie refers to her as “the Hottentot,” 13.
35 Ibid., 149.
36 In Jean Rhys, Angier describes Rhys’s initial introduction to life in England, writing, “The first, worst disappointment had happened: England had let her down,” 19.
37 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 17.
38 In fact, she can be read as more courageous than her English counterparts who had been daunted by the topography of Dominica; for example, Lucas writes that the Earl of Cumberland, “found the island too woody to muster his men upon it,” 164, n3. Anna, however, ventures into the interior of England upon her arrival to the port city of Southampton after her transatlantic voyage.
39 Holland and Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters, 21, 50. On connections between Rhys and the genre of travel writing, see also Thacker (note 25). He proposes that Rhys offers an “alternate literary geography to that of travel writing in the 1930s,” arguing that her modernist novels, which focus less on specific places and more on the movements of their protagonists, should be read as examples of “anti-travel writing, where the travel is enforced, always between sites and with no return,” 194.
40 Ibid., 198.
41 Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, 22.
42 Throughout the novel, Anna remains caught in a liminal space between her memories of Dominica and expectations of life in the metropole, a space that resembles Rhys’s description of England as “this curious limbo” in her unpublished “Essay on England,” qtd. in Thomas, 91.
43 Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, 212.
44 Ibid., 211.
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Shannon Derby
Shannon Derby’s research focuses on travel writing, colonial and postcolonial studies, and gender. She has published articles on the modernist travel writing of Louis MacNeice in Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association and on Isabella Fane's nineteenth-century travels in India in the collection British Women Travelers (Routledge, 2019). She is currently revising her doctoral dissertation, “Never Wide and Free: Gender, Mobility, and Empire in Narratives of Travel” into a book manuscript. She is an Affiliated Faculty member of the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College where she teaches courses on women writers, postcolonialism, and travel literature.