ABSTRACT
Like Mary Lou Emery’s, my project on Rhys negotiates the ‘tension between the two spaces or contexts of Rhys’s writing-the West Indian colonial context and the modernist European-as it is inscribed in terms of sex/gender relations in her novels’ (Emery 1990: xii). The translation of Rhys’s fiction into an exclusively modernist European cultural and literary context-a characteristic move in Rhys cr iticism-exhibits the ‘logic of translation-asviolation’ discussed by Gayatr i Chakravorty Spivak (1986) in ‘Imperialism and sexual difference’: such translations are inadequately informed by a sense of the ‘subject-constitution of the social and gendered agents in question’ (1986:235), the author or her protagonists. The translation of Rhys’s fiction into a West Indian or post-colonial context is an effort to read it ‘other-wise’, a term Molly Hite uses in her acute analysis of the refusal of ‘the prevailing constructions of gender and genre’ (1989:6) by women writers. This effort is occasionally effected, as Emery suggests combined ‘feminist and Third World’ readings of Rhys are, by ‘a structural analogy between colonial hierarchies and sexual oppression that still positions the protagonist as a victim who lacks agency and offers little or no resistance’ (Emery 1990: xii). These strategies of translation, I have argued elsewhere, often insufficiently question the terms and ethics of exchange of gendered knowledges of women and colonialism (S.Thomas 1990b). My project historicizes Rhys’s fiction in the gaps, contradictions, and hybridized improvizations of her West Indian colonial and modernist European cultural and literary contexts. Feminist ahistorical, indeed anti-historicizing, approaches to Rhys render ‘ungrammatical’1 her negotiation of first-wave British feminist
discourse and European modernism; and effects which operate as implicit critique or ironizing commentary on modern European feminist tradition or European modernism have gone largely unnoticed in her fiction.
