ABSTRACT
Jean Rhys published four novels across the 1920s and 1930s, all of which have a central protagonist who is female, usually existing as a kept woman or prostitute who is also frequently described as drinking alcohol. Rhys’s pre-war writing is usually classed as modernist, and like most modernist novels it is interested in the self, consciousness and interiority, and the way that the world is experienced by the self through consciousness. Modernist novelists very often execute the novel through the restricted consciousness of a narrator or characters, and their work is often characterised by variant forms of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Where the scientific view runs into difficulties is precisely the way in which Rhys chooses to depict consciousness and drunken consciousness in particular. The chapter examines more closely what is meant by the term 'an altered state of consciousness'.
