Ornithology and Ontology: The Existential Birdcall in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Anna Kavan's Who Are You?

Abstract

This essay explores textual parallels between Anna Kavan's novel Who Are You? (1963) and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Paying close attention to the interrogative birdcall that haunts both texts, it examines how (post-)colonial situations and the experiences of namelessness and marital sexual violence lead Rhys's and Kavan's protagonists to doubts about their identity and existence. Through reference to Kavan's treatment by Swiss existential psychologist Ludwig Binswanger in the 1940s, the essay foregrounds these novels’ concerns with existentialist concepts of identity, free will and angst, but also considers the way that the fictional portraits of women's lived reality in both Wide Sargasso Sea and Who Are You? pose an implicit feminist challenge to existentialism's insistence on free will. Rhys's and Kavan's complex rendering of female characters, who appear both subject to and, at times, complicit with the determining social forces of gender and history (a pervasive feature of their oeuvres), brings their dialogue with existential ideas closer to the more historically and politically grounded existentialism of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949). This comparative study follows recent Rhys scholarship in regarding her as a profoundly intertextual writer, influenced by and engaging with literary and intellectual movements of her time.

Keywords:

• Jean Rhys
• Anna Kavan
• Ludwig Binswanger
• Daseinsanalyse
• literature and existentialism
• angst
• identity

Notes

¹Carole Angier's biography of Rhys reports that Coco's cry has its origins in the call of her grandmother's parrot (Angier 1990: 16).

²Kavan's experiences at Mill Hill are evidenced in letters to her lover, the New Zealand writer Ian Hamilton, held in the Walter Ian Hamilton Archive at the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Wellington. She discusses her treatment at the Bellevue in letters to George Bullock held in the Anna Kavan Papers at the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, USA.

³Unpublished opening page in the Scorpion Press Archive, Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas, Austin, Folder 1.6. ‘Correspondence between John Rolph and Kavan in which he proposes, and she agrees to’, the exclusion of this introduction appears in The Scorpion Press Archive, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, Box 5/Anna Kavan.