Preface

Summary

Jean Rhys and her texts have been interpreted by different critics and theorists in strikingly different ways. She and they are in those readings: Caribbean, English, European; feminist and antifeminist; elite, working class, marginal; white and white Creole; outsider and insider; ageless and of her time. But one identity can hold all of these contradictory facets: Rhys is a Caribbean writer. In her very complexity and contradictoriness, in important aspects of her writing style and in her fictional portrayal of race, ethnicity, class, gender and nationality, she is best understood within the richly diverse tradition of Caribbean literature and culture. The scribal aspect of this tradition has largely come into being as part of local and global anti- or post-colonial movements but equally as much as an important component of nation-building. At this time, almost the turn of the century, Caribbean writing reflects both the extensive migration of Caribbean peoples to Europe, America and Canada and also the need to confirm and define nationality and regional identity.

Rhys reflects two major facets of Caribbean culture: a multifaceted cosmopolitanism which searches out complexity and a desire for home and belonging which seeks an uncomplicated self-definition. Like Caribbean culture, her writing is both metropolitan and anti-metropolitan, both colonial and anti-colonial, both racist and anti-racist, both conventional and subversive.