Literary Allusion in the Fiction of Jean Rhys

Abstract

As a white Creole with a family history of slave-owning, Jean Rhys might be seen to sit precariously within the Caribbean literary canon. Kenneth Ramchand¹ and Evelyn O’Callaghan² have argued for her Caribbean identity and she remains a pivotal figure despite a continuing debate. John Hearne speaks of Rhys’s best-known novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), as representing a character ‘abandoned by history’; it would be sad if Jean Rhys too were to be abandoned by history because she is not deemed sufficiently ‘Caribbean’. As Denise deCaires Narain and Evelyn O’Callaghan have said, the

privileging of the black, working-class woman, while being ‘politically correct’ tends to homogenize writing by regional women, encouraging fixed agendas of appropriate subjects and setting limits on just who actually qualifies to be considered ‘Caribbean’.³