10 - ‘Upholstered Ghosts’: Jean Rhys's Posthuman Imaginary

Summary

Jean Rhys evinces a scepticism about human beings throughout her work in the sense that her protagonists regard others – and Europeans in particular – as lacking compassion at best and as predatory at worst. Each of her novels written during the modernist period presents a world in which her female protagonists are besieged by poverty, exile, loneliness, and abasement at the hands of men and women who consistently treat them with contempt. She describes human beings as spiteful, cold, and at one point as ‘upholstered ghosts’; her take on the human condition is that it is a brutal one that her protagonists do well to survive (when they do); as Sasha says in Good Morning, Midnight, ‘“I think most human beings have cruel eyes.” That rosy, wooden, innocent cruelty’ (404). In the face of such antipathy, Rhys's heroines demonstrate a pronounced identification with non- human agencies such as ghosts, animals, and objects, as though to escape or at least extend their subjectivities beyond the limits of their own imperilled bodies, and to enter into an affective state that Rhys repeatedly refers to as ‘indifference’. This outsourcing of identity to machines, mirrors, mannequins, dolls, kittens, horses, zombies, and so forth, may be in part a defence mechanism against the oppressive conditions under which they live, but one effect of Rhys's portraiture is that she pushes the boundaries of the body and of the subject in directions only recently explored by theories of the posthuman condition and affect.

Beginning with Deleuze and Guattari's theorisation of embodied existence as ‘deterritorialized flows of desire’ and as a ‘desiring machine that escapes [Oedipal] codes as lines of escape leading elsewhere’, the notion of the posthuman reconfigures subjectivity as a rhizomatic interaction between desires, affects, and their objects– which in this scenario then cease to be objects and become coextensive with the desiring machine. Building on more recent theories of the posthuman, this chapter examines the enmeshment of Rhys's protagonists with material and spectral elements in order to understand her distinct representation of the affective flows of modern subjectivity. As Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston point out in Posthuman Bodies, ‘the posthuman marks a solidarity between disenchanted liberal subjects and those who were always-already disenchanted’;…