Jean Rhys’s Tropographies: Unmappable Identity and the Tropical Landscape in Wide Sargasso Seaand Selected Short Fiction
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Jean Rhys’s Tropographies:
Unmappable Identity and the Tropical Landscape in
Wide Sargasso Seaand Selected Short Fiction
Jessica Gildersleeve
Griffith University
Abstract
This essay seeks to trouble the traditional understanding of Jean Rhys’s ‘homelessness’
through a re-examination of the way in which the uncertain identities of her fiction are tied to
their geographical settings. This works towards a reading of Rhys’s narratives as ‘literature of
the tropics,’ describing not only the landscape within which and from which so many of them
operate, but a literature of the unrecognised, the unmapped. In this essay I seek to complicate
traditional readings of Rhys’s work that reassert her liminality and sense of unbelonging to
propose that it is, paradoxically, the affinity ofher work with the unassimilable tropics that
produces this ‘outsider status.’
f the fundamental task of postcolonial criticism is, as Robert J. C. Young puts it, to ‘find a
way to talk about’ the feeling that ‘you [are] not the subject of your own sentence,’ that
you are always already ‘spoken for,’ or ‘the object of speech,’ that ‘you live in a world of
others, a world that exists for others’ (1), then it is inarguable that Jean Rhys’s writing – her
novels, short fiction, and life writing – figures a performance of this sense of being ‘outside,’
perpetually ‘Othered.’ It is not clear how oneshould best describe Rhys: as Dominican,
English, French? Simply, Creole? How simple can that be? Even Rhys herself remained
ambivalent about her racial identity; ‘as far as I know,’ she wrote in a 1959 letter to Francis
Wyndham, ‘I am white – but I have no country really now’ (Wyndham and Melly 172).
Antoinette Cosway, the protagonist of Rhys’s 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, echoes this
sentiment: ‘between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I
belong and why was I ever born atall’ (64). And in the short story ‘I Used to Live Here...
Unmappable Identity and the Tropical Landscape in
Wide Sargasso Seaand Selected Short Fiction
Jessica Gildersleeve
Griffith University
Abstract
This essay seeks to trouble the traditional understanding of Jean Rhys’s ‘homelessness’
through a re-examination of the way in which the uncertain identities of her fiction are tied to
their geographical settings. This works towards a reading of Rhys’s narratives as ‘literature of
the tropics,’ describing not only the landscape within which and from which so many of them
operate, but a literature of the unrecognised, the unmapped. In this essay I seek to complicate
traditional readings of Rhys’s work that reassert her liminality and sense of unbelonging to
propose that it is, paradoxically, the affinity ofher work with the unassimilable tropics that
produces this ‘outsider status.’
f the fundamental task of postcolonial criticism is, as Robert J. C. Young puts it, to ‘find a
way to talk about’ the feeling that ‘you [are] not the subject of your own sentence,’ that
you are always already ‘spoken for,’ or ‘the object of speech,’ that ‘you live in a world of
others, a world that exists for others’ (1), then it is inarguable that Jean Rhys’s writing – her
novels, short fiction, and life writing – figures a performance of this sense of being ‘outside,’
perpetually ‘Othered.’ It is not clear how oneshould best describe Rhys: as Dominican,
English, French? Simply, Creole? How simple can that be? Even Rhys herself remained
ambivalent about her racial identity; ‘as far as I know,’ she wrote in a 1959 letter to Francis
Wyndham, ‘I am white – but I have no country really now’ (Wyndham and Melly 172).
Antoinette Cosway, the protagonist of Rhys’s 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, echoes this
sentiment: ‘between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I
belong and why was I ever born atall’ (64). And in the short story ‘I Used to Live Here...