The Poetics of Labor in Jean Rhys's Caribbean Modernism

Abstract

If Jean Rhys's fiction is read in the context of the Americas and the plantation system, a global vision of modernity emerges, spanning the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. More specifically, this vision appears through colonialist stereotypes of idle and lazy West Indians displayed in dynamic interaction with scenes of actual toil and servitude that appear everywhere in Rhys's fiction. Her distinctly Caribbean modernist style links the labor politics of Dominica, where Rhys grew up, with the subjectivities of working women across centuries and extending from the Caribbean to England, Europe and the southern United States. This essay focuses on Voyage in the Dark (1934), the short story ‘Temps Perdi’ and Rhys's last novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), discovering a poetics of labor created from the apparent indolence of the Caribbean.

Keywords:

• Rhys
• plantation
• modernism
• labor
• modernity
• Caribbean

Acknowledgments

The author and editors would like to acknowledge the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA, for permission to reproduce the following illustrations from the Lilly Library Collections: Francis Wheatley, ‘Strawberrys, Scarlet Strawberrys’; Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Milk’; and William Marshall Craig, ‘Russell Square. Rhubarb!’ We thank Krista A. Thompson for permission to reproduce ‘On the Way to Market’, a postcard from her personal collection. We also acknowledge BFI Stills and Screenonline for the image of Ivy Martinek as Three-Fingered Kate. Another version of this essay has appeared in a 2011 special issue of Philological Quarterly on ‘The New Southern Studies and the New Modern Studies’, edited by Harilaos Stecopoulos.

Notes

¹I am indebted to Amy Clukey for the term ‘plantation modernism’ (Clukey 2009).

²For example, in her recent biography of Rhys, Lillian Pizzichini writes of Dominica: ‘It is easy to be indolent there, something Jean learned early on, and something she shared with her father. It was that very indolence that drove her mother mad’ (Pizzichini 2009: 13).

³John Matthews developed this concept, adapted from Slavoj Žižek's work on ideology, in a paper presented at the 2009 Modernist Studies Association Conference (Matthews 2009).

⁴Scholars of the Caribbean such as Édouard Glissant, and also C.L.R. James, Sidney Mintz, Philip Curtin and David Scott, have all written about the plantation system as a foundational matrix of modernity (see Curtin 1990; Glissant 1997; James 1963; Mintz 1985; Scott 2004).

⁵I am adapting Glissant's notion of ‘transversality’ based on the losses of the middle passage which, recognized, begin to surface in ways that disrupt linear notions of history (Glissant 1989: 66–7).

⁶Peter Hulme and Sue Thomas have each analysed another of Rhys's novels, Wide Sargasso Sea, in light of the position, influence and activities of Rhys's mother's family, the Lockharts (Hulme 1993; Thomas 1999). I am drawing on their research in this section.

⁷During the period of apprenticeship, a number of legislative acts were passed in Dominica that, as Michel-Rolphe Trouillot stresses, indicated a ‘totalitarian climate’ (Trouillot 1988: 105–6). Boland summarizes this period in the anglophone Caribbean as one in which everything was designed to socialize the former slaves into subordinant estate laborers who could be punished for vagrancy, insubordination and ‘neglecting work’ (Boland 2009: 118).

⁸O. Nigel Boland has argued that though the former slaves valued personal liberty, they sought a fuller freedom in the re-establishment of kinship and community ties on land that could be considered family land (Boland 2009).

⁹Boland writes of planters throughout the British Caribbean owning large amounts of uncultivated land—land owned ‘not to use it but to prevent its use by others’ (Boland 2009: 123).

¹⁰Peter Hulme, Sue Thomas and Elaine Savory read it as autobiographical in various ways, with Hulme and Thomas focusing mainly on the representations of Caribs (Hulme 2000: 214–23; Thomas 1999). Savory recognizes the story's powerful form and style (Savory 2009: 103–4) and, in her earlier book on Rhys, stresses the emphasis on creolization in the story (Savory 1998: 173).

¹¹This song also appears in Wide Sargasso Sea (see Rhys 1999: 54, 90).

¹²Peter Hulme has cited Wide Sargasso Sea, ‘Temps Perdi’ and another story titled ‘The Imperial Road’ as three fictional versions of this trip, and has brilliantly analysed the political background involving Rhys's family in Dominica as shaping these fictions (Hulme 2001).

¹³Indeed, at the end of 1936, a minimum wage was set in St Lucia, indicating that labor issues continued to be negotiated, and, in 1937, strikes erupted on two of the largest plantations in St Lucia (Boland 2001: 249).

¹⁴Another version of ‘St. Lucia’ appears as part of Rhys's unfinished autobiography, Smile Please (Rhys 1979: 54–7). The passage quoted appears in both versions.

¹⁵Elizabeth Carolyn Miller has described this series, focusing especially on the only surviving film, Kate Purloins the Wedding Present (Miller 2008).

¹⁶See Françoise Meltzer for analysis of ekphrastic portraits and Mary Lou Emery for analysis of ekphrasis in Caribbean literature (Emery 2007; Meltzer 1987).

¹⁷Natasha Korda has written about the social contexts for the portrayal of female street hawkers in late sixteenth-century London, making the important point that what counts as legitimate ‘work’ in any society or historical period is constructed through socio-economic relations and regulations, often in contrast to perceptions of ‘play’ (Korda 2008).

¹⁸I am grateful to Leah Rosenberg for reminding me of this connection with images of Caribbean market women.

¹⁹See Wallis Tinnie for an expanded analysis of the implications of these songs (Tinnie 1997). In his book on Stephen Foster, Ken Emerson suggests that the name ‘Camptown’ was ‘a generic term for a temporary settlement, an African-American community, or both’. He also stresses the illegal nature of the horse racing and the possibility that ‘“doo-dah!” may well have been a hooker's come-on’ (Emerson 1997: 160).

²⁰I should stress that this is a rhetorical effect and a matter of context. As a number of critics have pointed out, whatever alliances Antoinette may claim or desire with the Afro-Caribbean people and their culture, she remains divided from them (see, for example, Handley 2000: 151).

²¹A number of critics have written about Rhys's representation of obeah in Wide Sargasso Sea, including Carine Mardorossian (2005), Judith Raiskin (1996) and Kathleen Renk (1999). On obeah in Rhys's fiction, see Savory (1996). In this article, I am not attempting to tie Christophine to any historical or anthropological accounting of obeah. Rather, my concern is with the sense of such Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices as ‘work’.

²²Joseph M. Murphy employs this term in describing various spiritual traditions of the African diaspora. Drawing on the sense of ‘liturgy’ as ‘work’ and ‘service’, he explains that: ‘the spirit is “worked” in the service to empower the community and praise the spirit’ (Murphy 1994: 6–7). Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert describe ‘the use of Obeah charms to do a person good’ as called ‘work for me’, and mention that in Guyana, whether man or woman, the obeah practitioner is called the ‘work-man’ (Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert 2003: 139, 134).