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ABSTRACT
When Jean Rhys was living in Paris in the years between 1918 and 1921 it is entirely likely that she at least saw the Norwegian writer Cora Sandel in the Dome café or elsewhere around Montparnasse, at Sylvia Beach's book store, or on the streets that form a character in both writers' Paris novels. Sandel, who was ten years older than Rhys, lived in Montparnasse between 1906 and 1921. Within just a few years of one another these two writers published achingly similar portraits of displaced women living in Paris among various cohorts of other foreigners. In gestures that decenter both the European hegemony that Rhys so resented and what Sandel saw as suffocating Nordic provincialism, both writers present a de-nationalized Paris that affords their characters certain radical freedoms while at the same time grinding them down economically and psychologically. This essay examines the precarity of the freedom that Sandel explores in Alberte og friheten (1931) [Alberta and Freedom] and the glimpses of rebellious freedom expressed in Rhys's portrait of precarity, Good Morning, Midnight (1939), as they mutually illuminate one another.
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Notes
1 Alberta frequents an Odeon book shop – presumably Sylvia Beach’s – and one day picks up a book that makes her hand tremble: “Alberta puts the book down and does not pick it up again. Some words in it had hurt her, stinging like salt in a wound. Hard, relentless, true, they hit home with no mercy. A man’s words. Thought by a man, written by a man. They tear and sink into her, stopping her heart for a moment, as with all of life’s shocks” (357). Similarly, Rhys in the Black Exercise Notebook recalls picking up a book on “psychoanalysis” at Beach’s shop in the Odeon and reading that “women of this type will invariably say they were seduced when very young by an elderly man … They will relate a detailed story which in every case is entirely fictitious,” to which Rhys retorts, “No honey I thought, it is not fictitious in every case. By no means anyhow how do you know … Then I put the book down. No dear no, you don’t play fair” (in Thacker 166; Jean Rhys Archive, McFarlin Library Special Collection, University of Tulsa).
2 Sandel’s trilogy was initially published to acclaim by Gyldendal, the premier publishing house in Norway, in 1926 (Alberte og Jakob), 1931 (Alberte og friheten), and 1939 (Alberte Alene). Translated by Elizabeth Rokkan in the early 1960s, the English versions were re-released by the Ohio University Press in 1984 and 2007. New editions of the original Norwegian books have been issued by Gyldendal in 2022.
3 Rhys, 153.
4 Sandel, 248.
5 Rhys, 266.
6 While I am deeply indebted to Elizabeth Rokkan’s 1963 translation of Alberta and Freedom, I also work with the original Norwegian text and have slightly altered her translations in a number of cases. In addition to maintaining Sandel’s present tense, in contrast to Rokkan’s translation into past tense, I have altered some of her word choices. I would also note that there are some untranslatable elements of the original, such as the fact that Swedes speak Swedish, Danes speak Danish, and Norwegians speak Norwegian to one another as is the practice among Scandinavians, but it all comes out as undifferentiated English in translation.
7 Sandel, 346.
8 As Selboe points out, both Rhys and Sandel “came to Paris with no wish for or intention of returning ‘home’—the word home having more negative than positive connotations” (119). Selboe does not specify whether she refers to Dominica or England in the case of Rhys, but to the extent that she came to Paris from England, this is certainly true. (Dominica held a much more powerful and meaningful pull on her.)
9 Moran, “Shame, Subjectivity, and Self-Expression,” 719.
10 Rhys, 10.
11 I emphasize Paris over France in this discussion because a city like Marseille, with its close proximity and ties to French colonies in North Africa, did enact certain obstructions to immigration before the country as a whole did. French law changed following the conclusion of the Algerian war of independence in 1962 which saw the repatriation of a million pieds-noirs, or French citizens who had been living in colonial Algeria, along with large numbers of Algerians.
12 Selboe, “Modern Metropolis,” 120.
13 Briens, “Le discours de Paris,” 71.
14 Sandel, 246.
15 The comprehensive geographical overlap is one reason that I focus on Good Morning, Midnight, out of all of Rhys’s Paris novels. In After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Julia’s scenes with Mr. Mackenzie take place in Montparnasse but her hotel and most of her walking and shopping are located in distant neighborhoods along various quais of the Seine. Marya in Quartet also spends time in Montparnasse but the first time she settles in Paris it is far across town in Montmartre, and when she moves in with the Heidlers she joins them in their house in the Latin Quarter.
16 Sandel, 331.
17 Savory, “The White Creole,” 16.
18 Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism, 18.
19 Ibid., 100.
20 Rhys, 163, 164.
21 Delia Konzett’s concept of “ethnic modernisms,” a category in which she includes Rhys, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anzia Yezierska, offers another useful lens for understanding how very different writes might co-create a similarly dislocated modernist aesthetic. Although Konzett’s focus is on writers from the Americas, her concept of ethnicity as an experience born of dislocation within a larger hegemonic culture would apply as well to Sandel’s experience of Paris.
22 This was the case in spite of the fact that both Denmark and Sweden held colonies in the Caribbean and Denmark’s colonial reach into the nineteenth century included as well footholds in West Africa and along the Indian and Cantonese coasts. However, these colonial relations for the most part ended before the turn of the century, and Denmark—which maintained colonies in Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands—had exited all of its non-European colonies by 1917.
23 Thacker, “Of Bliss and Blushing.”
24 Sandel, 255.
25 Rhys, 157.
26 Sandel, 428-429.
27 Gunn, “Other Mothers,” 353.
28 Ibid., 340.
29 Rich writes at some length about Sandel’s conflicted portrayal of motherhood in the Alberta trilogy in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (Norton, 1976). Rich focuses on not only how Alberta feels the tension between self-preservation and maternal feeling as a “primal agony” (161), but she also brings in the important point that Alberta’s experience of her own bruising mother colors her ambivalence about becoming one herself.
30 Kusch, “Disorienting Modernism” (41).
31 Sandel, 292.
32 Ibid., 286.
33 Ibid., 266.
34 Ibid.
35 Rhys, 14.
36 Ibid., 190.
37 Ibid., 32.
38 Ibid., 34.
39 Sandel, 256 (italics mine).
40 Froshaug, 45.
41 Harris, 19.
42 Sandel, 244.
43 Ibid., 392.
44 Ibid., 417.
45 Harris, 20.
46 Savory, The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys; Moran, “Shame, Subjectivity, and Self-Expression.”
47 Moran, 205.
48 Rhys, 29.
49 Ibid., 29.
50 Ibid., 106.
51 Ibid., 28.
52 Ibid., 167.
53 Boire and Sententia, “On Cognitive Liberty.”
54 Lauren Elkin provides perhaps the most sustained reading of Sasha’s “paranoia” in “Getting the Story Across: Jean Rhys’s Paranoid Narrative” (Journal of Narrative Theory. Vol. 41, no. 1 [2016], pp. 70-96).
55 Rhys, 161.
56 Butler, 66.
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Notes on contributors
Erica L. Johnson
Erica L. Johnson’s work focuses on Caribbean literature, cultural memory studies, and modernism through various overlapping approaches. She is the author of Cultural Memory, Memorials, and Reparative Writing (2018), Caribbean Ghostwriting (2009) and Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of Location in Works by Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell’Oro (2003). She has co-edited a number of volumes including Wide Sargasso Sea at 50 (2020) with Elaine Savory, Memory as Colonial Capital (2017) with Éloïse Brezault, and Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches (2015) and The Female Face of Shame (2013) with Patricia Moran. Her many journal articles have explored the writing of Patrick Chamoiseau, Michelle Cliff, Maryse Condé, Dionne Brand, and others. Her recent projects have largely addressed counter-archival and counter-canonical Caribbean literature and art, an ongoing focus of her work dating back to Caribbean Ghostwriting. She is Professor of English at Pace University in New York.