A “Mania for Classification”: Jean Rhys’s Interwar Fiction

Abstract

McKay’s entanglement with authorities over his nebulous nationality stemmed largely from the ways in which his race and political affiliations exacerbated his already suspicious colonial identity. His work insists that the traveling black colonial subject moves without a bureaucratically acceptable identity as a condition of his race and origin. Likewise, Jean Rhys, a white colonial from the island of Dominica, repeatedly described herself and was described by others as “lacking” a nationality. While her first marriage to a criminal Dutchman destabilized her official identity and exposed her to the interwar French legal apparatus, Rhys’s disenfranchisement extended to her status throughout much of her early adulthood as a single, poor colonial woman, without legitimizing male affiliations or economic power. Her fiction suggests that the greatest threat to a marginalized woman like herself and many of her characters emanated not directly from legal channels, but from the classifying eye of the social world, an insidious extension of state power. Characterized by the logic of the passport, Rhys’s work demonstrates that definitions of national identity and general habits of classification mediate both interpersonal interactions and self-understanding. In a mode that resembles Stein’s depiction of Paris and McKay’s of Marseille, Rhys constructs urban worlds as endless series of border stops, nominally cosmopolitan spaces that insist on national identification and coherent self-explication.