The only protection for a Jean Rhys heroine is clothes. The magical properties of a dress or a pair of silk stockings. If to change one’s room is a sort of optimism, hope is a new dress. Rhys so accurately depicting the material and economic reality of a woman lacking independent means. “You look at your hideous underclothes and you think, ‘All right, I’ll do anything for good clothes. Anything — anything for clothes.’”
In her diaries Virginia Woolf noted that she was also interested in what she called “frock consciousness,” a consciousness that involved not only the jouissance of shopping, but also its dread counterpart, the construction of a fragmented self for the outside gaze. Woolf, regularly profiled by British Vogue, would go dress-shopping with the editor, but often felt panicked and put off by the experience. In Room Woolf calls for the Mary Carmichaels to write their relationship to their own, true world, to “the everchanging and turning world of gloves and shoes.” But she warns too that this literature will also be dismissed, as we see in the treatment of the novels of Jean Rhys and others. Much as in life, so-called masculine experiences in literature are seen as universal, versus feminine experiences, which are often derided as for women only and sub-par (chick lit, chick flicks). “Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important,’ the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial,’” Woolf writes. Of course a lot of commercial fiction geared towards women does trade in easy stereotyping and conspicuous consumption. All the more urgency and necessity for literary explorations of the ambivalent yet authentic experiences of women, to tell the story of themselves as well as Woolf ’s “girl behind the counter,” whether observed or remembered.
The purity of the ideology of the Second Wave, I believe, makes us lie about the dividedness and contradictions of our lives for fear of being seen as bad feminists. It took me years before I could confess my love of make-up or clothes. My fellow bloggers often post images from various couture shows or fashion spreads on their Tumblrs or Facebook pages.
Perhaps feminists’ putdown of girls simply reifies the aversion towards the feminine that is such an integral part of patriarchal society. Does literature written by women need to be feminist, or does it need to be honest, to document the cultural reality? Yes, to critique it but also to explore its nuances, and perhaps even to subvert it. For sometimes we are destroyed by love. Or we don’t want to get old. These thoughts still haunt many of us. The novels of Rhys address the complexities of both our subjectivity and objecthood, our psychic colonialism, in a way that seems still so modern.
The woman in that seminar was correct — Jean Rhys did write out of a diary, but why is this seen as so ridiculous and unliterary? The plain brown songbird of a notebook Rhys called “The Ropemaker Notebook,” she kept while staying at The Ropemaker’s Arms in London while her third husband Max was in prison for something amounting to fraud, both of them old, sick, fragile, desperately poor. In this notebook especially we see Rhys mercilessly explore and critique and construct herself — it is in this notebook that she began to explore the themes of the haunting, perfect, Wide Sargasso Sea, especially that of madness as the loss of self.
One of my favorite Rhys pieces is in this notebook, a memoir fragment called “The Trial of Jean Rhys,” published in her posthumous collection Smile, Please, an interrogating voice which reminds me of Nathalie Sarraute’s memoir Enfances. Rhys would have been used to the language of trials as she was perennially hauled into court at this time for physical altercations with neighbors. But in this piece at least there are no easy enemies, and it reflects what I love most about Rhys, the searing exorcism, the naked honesty, the interrogation of the “difficult” woman. In this piece she examines herself ruthlessly, she is both persecuted and persecutor.
DEFENCE. It is untrue that you are cold and withdrawn? It is not true.
DEFENCE. Did you make great efforts to, shall we say, establish contacts with other people? I mean friendships, love affairs, so on? Yes. Not friendships very much.
Did you succeed?
Sometimes. For a time.
It didn’t last?
No.
Whose fault was that?
Mine I suppose.
You suppose?
Silence.
Better answer.
I am tired. I learnt everything too late. Everything was always one jump ahead of me.
The phrase is not ‘I do not know’ but ‘I have nothing to say.’ The trouble is I have plenty to say. Not only that but I am bound to say it.
Bound?
I must.
Why? Why? Why?
I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it will be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death.
“I will not have earned death.” I love that. To me the life of Rhys reflects the relentless desire to write, even when not publishing, that great chasm of decades between the publication of her modern between-the-war novels and Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966. Even when she is not publishing, the compulsion to write, to uncover. To EXIST. To write, above all to write. To channel her memories and her emotions and to distill and communicate, and yes, transcend her existence. And how integral her notebooks were to her process (of writing, of living, of surviving), even when the notebook form for women writers is so often dismissed.
My apprenticeship as a writer began with an elaborate notebooking system (or rather it was the second stage, the earlier one was being a fucked-up girl writing in my diary). When we returned to Chicago from London I began to start up a journal again, keeping up a fastidious, constant diary in black Moleskines. The notebooks at the beginning were filled mostly with automatic writing and observations, and often with notes on the biographies of the mad wives. I called this project “Scratches,” after Michel Leiris, a personal project to push myself to write my own quotidian, to write these moments that I realized I abruptly surrendered to amnesia. A desire to write what Woolf called the “violent moods of my soul” that she too hoped to capture in her diaries, her life-writing.
I wanted to write down everything that happened to me in the present, in an attempt to understand myself, mirroring the diaries of these modernist women. At the beginning of The Ropemaker Notebook: “This time I must not blot a line. No revision, no second thoughts. Down it shall go. Already I am terrified. I have none of the tools of my trade. No rows of pencils, no pencil sharpener, no drink. The standing jump.” Anaïs Nin whose project was to write the “absolute truth” in her diaries. “Reality deserves to be described in the vilest terms,” she wrote within. Her diary was often self-reflective of the act itself, of the process.
I filled up those first Scratches notebooks so quickly — the memories poured out, as I tried to make sense of myself, meditating on the act of writing, why I was writing, who I was as a writer. They were my first nascent stirrings of a revolution, a revolution from deep inside. With my unruly notebooks I was mimicking and mirroring Jean Rhys when she first began to write, when her first major love affair ended, those exercise notebooks she purchased from the stationary shop. How she stayed up all night pacing the floor remembering everything that happened in her past year, “what he’d said, what I felt,” writing into the night. And Rhys carried these three exercise notebooks around with her for years, in all of her many moves, as I did with those early notebooks, and then how hers formed the basis for Voyage in the Dark, her novel with her youngest heroine.