Locating Race in Jean Rhys’s Non-Caribbean Fiction: Notes on Method in Whiteness Studies

Abstract:This essay argues that Jean Rhys’s After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie and Good Morning, Midnight reveal how mundane, noninstitutionalized forms of gendered classism against poor white women constitute an indispensable part of imperialist white supremacy. Closer scrutiny of white supremacy’s indirect, inconspicuous manifestations is increasingly crucial as politically-correct, neoliberal multiculturalism suffuses our contemporary moment. This essay’s reading of Rhys poses two interventions in the field of critical whiteness studies: 1) greater attention to how white people manifest their racial identities through interactions that do not directly involve people of color and 2) heightened consideration of white supremacy’s unspectacular, noninstitutional forms. The essay makes these interventions, on the one hand, through reading Mackenzie and Midnight through the lens of scholarship in colonial discourse studies about the relationship between “Englishness” and bourgeois class standing and, on the other hand, through a reading of Rhys’s tone and style, specifically her use of sardonic humor and the second-person voice.