‘Always half-and-half’: ‘Voyage in’ as halfness in Jean Rhys’s short fiction

Abstract

From the initial years when criticism on the writer Jean Rhys largely circled around Wide Sargasso Sea to an interest in her other novels growing since then, Rhys’s short stories have evoked comparatively scant critical interest. Yet the thematic concerns in her short stories contribute as vitally to the writer’s continuing close scrutiny of coloniality as her novels do. In this article, it is the criss-cross traffic of imperialist voyages that is looked at through Rhys’s short stories. The thematics of contamination, bastardization and halfness that these stories probe complicate more utopian theorizations of cosmopolitanization. The voyage into the imperial capital is inseparable from the experience of creolized, stigmatized, ‘halfness’ in Rhys’s corpus and that makes for a contestatory understanding of the polyphony often ascribed to these increasingly porous cityscapes. This article looks at two stories from the writer, ‘Overture and Beginners Please’ and ‘On Not Shooting Sitting Birds’, both foregrounding the ex-centric position of the women protagonists who are specifically tied to a Caribbean background, to suggest how Rhys’s work haunts that writing of the trope of voyaging whereby the brutal abrasions of colonial history are retrospectively subsumed into the more pluralistic folds of hybridity. In these stories, the journey into the imperial metropolis sets up a probe into the limits and blindspots of cosmopolitan Europe in the early to mid-twentieth century. Rhys’s short fiction spectrally interrupts the modernist narrative of aesthetic border-crossings to tell another, more experiential, one, where boundary crossing is a haunted experience from the point of view of those voyaging in.