Between Illusion and Reality, ‘Who's to Know’: Threshold Spaces in the Interwar Novels of Jean Rhys

Abstract

This article considers the concept of the threshold in the interwar novels of Jean Rhys and demonstrates how the attempts by Rhys's female characters to transform themselves both internally and externally are complicated by the threshold spaces in which they operate. Rhys's novels draw attention to the social and economic situation for women living alone in European cities and moving between the liminal spaces of cafés and hotel rooms. In addition to these physical thresholds, the threshold also becomes a precarious psychological space for Rhys's characters, where the boundaries between truth and illusion, reality and fantasy merge freely and identity is always provisional. By drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and theories of the threshold as a site for transition and transformation, this article argues that Rhys's characters’ attempts to create a stable identity can be read as an attempt to survive in the threshold space between the traditional public and private identities available for women in the interwar period.

Keywords:

• Jean Rhys
• threshold space
• interwar Europe
• female identity
• women writers

Notes

¹The introduction of passports after the Great War became a way of policing the movement of the populace by nationality. In Politics of Modernism (2007), Raymond Williams discusses the cross-border mobility of writers and artists, the ‘restlessly mobile émigré or exile’ (Williams 2007: 34), at a time when the shifting borders of interwar Europe were becoming ever more regulated. Indeed, Benjamin committed suicide in the threshold space between European borders in September 1940 after having been refused an exit visa to Spain.