The drunken poetics of Jean Rhys: intoxication, femininity and agency in Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight

Abstract

The inter-war novels of British-Caribbean author, Jean Rhys, focus on the precarious and subversive lives of her protagonists who have come to be collectively termed as ‘the Rhys Woman’. These protagonists portray an intoxicated and disenfranchised experience of colonial, patriarchal and capitalist Britain and Europe in the 1910s and 1930s. Contemporary analyses of Rhys’ inter-war oeuvre typically centre on topics of post-colonialism, alcoholism, trauma and shame. While these topics are highly valuable to Rhys scholarship, the Rhys Woman is often pathologized by critics and maligned for her passivity. Despite the predominance of alcohol use in Rhys’ inter-war novels and the persistent question of her protagonist’s lack of agency, research into the complex relationship between these themes has been far from exhaustive. While the Rhys Woman’s sense of agency can be read as tenuous and sometimes ambivalent, her marginalised position is key to understanding how her autonomy and self-definition is conveyed through expressions of the unconscious via intoxication in the novels. This thesis will explore the themes of femininity, agency and intoxication in Rhys’ inter-war novels, Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight, to establish that intoxication facilitates the Rhys Woman’s expressions of marginalised female agency. By investigating a brief history of altered states of consciousness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this thesis will contextualise the outsider experience of the drunken Rhys Woman and identify how the surrealist approach to intoxication can be seen in her struggle for psychic and experiential freedom. I argue that the Rhys Woman’s resistance to the oppressive ideologies that constrain her, is a surrealist act of agency as liberation through struggle. The Rhys Woman’s resistance to the reality of racism, classism, sexism and colonialism can be read in Rhys’ stylistic approach to narrativising the unconscious through intoxication, internal dialogue, stream of consciousness, fever and dreams. By incorporating these themes and experiences into the text, Rhys manipulates the pacing, temporality, spatiality and perspective of the narrative to give expression to an intoxicated narrative of the unconscious. I contend that Rhys’ narrative style and form give rise to an innovative suite of literary devices that I describe as her ‘drunken poetics’.

Date of Thesis submission	2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Western Sydney University
Supervisor	Lorraine Sim (Supervisor)