“Today I Have Left My Armor at Home” Revisiting Jean Rhys’s Interwar Novels after the Ethical Turn

Abstract

Within the critical interpretation that too often conflates life and fiction, the so-called "Jean Rhys woman" has resisted full assimilation by a feminist literary canon that advocates empowerment and agency. Browsing through Rhys's bibliography, it is interesting to note the considerable number of titles that suggest a commiserating attitude towards both the novelist and her female characters. Rhys's nomads, expatriates and zombielike figures have been analysed from the prism of postcolonial criticism as strongly inspired by the novelist's Caribbean background, their undecidable and precarious nature might be explained as part of what Butler has termed "certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human". Other instances of abject corporealities can be found in Rhys's allusion to mannequins and inanimate bodies that elicited particular fascination in the interwar period, when huge numbers of injured soldiers acquired arms and legs prostheses, thus imposing new ways of thinking the body and its limits.