9 - The Helen of our wars: cultural politics and Jean Rhys criticism

Summary

So that when we run into a strait of binaries (versuses &/or viruses), we begin to recognise that we in the Caribbean ‘stand’ where we have always ‘stood’ & that Jean Rhys has become the Helen of the wars

(Kamau Brathwaite 1995: 77)

As Terry Eagleton has pointed out (1983), literary criticism is always ideological and shaped by its cultural location. The history of Rhys's literary reputation is a conversation, consciously or unconsciously, on the relation between the Caribbean and Europe (especially England) and also within and between Euro-American, post-colonial, feminist and Caribbean critical positions. Rhys criticism is always informed, implicitly or explicitly, by the cultural location and politics of the critic, even in those cases where political commentary is explicitly avoided or minimised. Predictably, those who have avoided Rhys's racial, cultural or political implications have tended to focus on her eminence as a literary stylist, especially connecting the latter to European modernism. Caribbean models of culture emphasise plurality and complexity: adopting such a stance is very important in reading Rhys.

Three major currents in Rhys criticism emerged within a decade of her death in 1979. Jean D'Costa, in an excellent essay (1986) describes them by means of a telling image of cultural relations as shaped by the transatlantic slave trade: ‘Critics at three corners of the triangular trade lay claim to Jean Rhys’ (1986: 390).