Farewell, Socialist Gwen: Poverty and the Politics of Injury in Jean Rhys’s Interwar Fiction

Abstract

This essay studies how Jean Rhys’s interwar fiction represents the poverty of its protagonists as penury (‘no money’) and a physically degrading fall into ‘ugliness’ and uncleanliness, rendering an embodied experience of precarity at the nexus of social identity and psychological injury. The autobiographical ‘Essay on England,’ in which Rhys names an adolescent persona, Socialist Gwen, illustrates how the fall into poverty entailed a heightened attachment to bourgeois standards of white femininity, standards that are loudly protested by various protagonists in the interwar fiction, and that additionally naturalize black poverty in the Caribbean and ‘ugliness’ in French working-class women, marked for their social particularity. It is an admixture of critique and untoward complaint that characterizes Jean Rhys’s literary imagination, one shaped by a sense that socio-economic precarity hurts white, middle-class women more than it does others.

Keywords:

• Jean Rhys
• poverty
• politics
• femininity
• whiteness
• class
• emigration
• ‘Essay on England’

Notes

1 The undated typescript is held by the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, and collected in the interwar personal papers.

2 ‘Essay on England,’ 4. I paraphrase rather than quote phrases and sentences directly because of copyright restrictions. Poor and ugly, as well as black, white, and bourgeois, are Rhys’s words in the ‘Essay on England'. I use quotation marks for the word ugly throughout the essay to underscore the constructedness of these standards of attractiveness.

3 Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams was Rhys's birth name.

4 Major works on representations of ‘the poor’ relevant to this essay are Martin Daunton (2007), Catherine Hall (1992), Seth Koven (2004), Ellen Ross (1993), Gareth Stedman Jones (1971).

5 Though always filtered through cynicism, Rhys’s representation of poverty participates in a long literary tradition of working at ‘sympathy’ for outcast members of society; see especially Betensky (2010) and Greaney (2008).

6 I share interests with trauma studies reading of Rhys (see especially Maren Linett 2005, Patricia Moran 2007) and dependency-oriented reading (Jamison 2018), though my emphasis is on the socio-economic imagination that is entailed in representing the self, in line with Lauren Berlant’s The Female Complaint (2008).