Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 8 Number 1, April 2007
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Simpson, Anne B. Territories of the Psyche: The Fiction of Jean Rhys, New York & Houndmills, Palgrave/Macmillan, 2005. 168pp. ISBN 1-4039-6613-3, $56 (hardback).
Reviewed by
National & Kapodistrian University of Athens
Anne B.Simpson's book is a systematic Kleinian reading of Jean Rhys' Voyage in the Dark, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Quartet, Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea. It aims at articulating Rhys' “vision of the psychic terrain” (2) while renewing and attracting critical interest in the work that precedes and determines Wide Sargasso Sea, her widely known and critically acclaimed novel. Aware of Rhys’ own distrust of psychoanalysis, Simpson develops a theoretical approach that binds psychoanalytic theory with literary criticism in order to offer the dense critical perspective from which Rhys' fiction can be engaged and re-examined. More specifically, she focuses on Melanie Klein’s challenge of Freud’s insistence on the male scenario of the Oedipal rivalry between father and son as the fundamentally transformative experience of human development and analyzes Klein’s contribution to the reading of the role of the mother as more than a mere catalyst. For Simpson, Klein's focus on the role of the mother that “demonstrates ways in which the mother-daughter pair characteristically serves as the source of subsequent misjudgments in adult life” (16) is the point that invites a parallel reading of Rhys' fiction that is preoccupied with the figure and role of the mother in the development of the female subject. Following Klein and a number of theorists that have been influenced by her work like Riviere, Winnicott and others, Simpson proposes to critically investigate ideas that have become “staples of Western thought” (17) by putting the female subject under erasure and simultaneously read Rhys’ fiction that focuses on the problematic of the psychic and intellectual development of the female subject. By offering to balance the “interests of literary critics with the claims of psychoanalysis” (20) and introduce the students of literature to a deconstructive reading of the psychoanalytic premises of Freud and Lacan, Simpson promises to cast a new light on Rhys’ work that, with the exception of Wide Sargasso Sea, has been overlooked in the literary circles.
Throughout her second, third and fourth chapters on Rhys’ novels, Simpson solidifies her reading of Melanie Klein's work and deconstructs some of the predominant Freudian and Lacanian premises while offering interesting insights into Rhys’ narrative and complex characters. For instance, her analysis of Voyage in the Dark opens with a reading of Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere’s object-relation theories that are employed to illuminate Anna Morgan’s story, which Rhys writes as an unconventional bildungsroman that narrates the masking rather than the unconcealment of a feminine identity. In her chapter on After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Simpson combines her psychoanalytic approach with a literary reading that examines the modernist considerations of the text to follow the traces that weave together the character of Julia. She shows how Rhys’ character of Julia develops out of a daughter-mother relationship that becomes the focal point of her text and underlines Rhys' resistance to appropriating the “traditionally masculinized renditions of Oedipal conflict” (64), a tenet of modernism that Rhys’ fiction critically undoes by rewriting it. Simpson develops the trope of the “deficient maternal object” (85) in her reading of the character of Marya in Quartet, by closely following Melanie Klein’s Envy and Gratitude, a work that analyzes the mother-daughter relationship from the perspective of deprivation and envy. This analysis gears to a reading of Rhys’ novel as the narrative of its protagonist’s “state of insatiable need as nodal point for the examination of the interconnected and fraught conditions of deprivation, loss, greed, and envy as these relate to infant fantasies and, in particular, feminine experience” (69).
In her chapter on Good Morning, Midnight, Simpson demonstrates how Rhys offers "a feminized rendition of development that both substantiates and qualifies Lacanian theory" (105). Simpson shows how Sasha's dream-like and opaque narrative relies on the techniques of condensation and displacement (88) and thus recollects features of the unconscious represented by the fragmented and surreal structure of the novel, which "relies for its effects on interchanges between the narrator's and the reader's states of unconscious awareness" (89). This "interchange" between narrator and reader necessitates their double positions as analysand and analyst respectively. In order to illustrate the complexity between narrator/analysand and reader/analyst on which Sasha's narrative relies, Simpson follows a reading of Lacan's "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis", which articulates the ontological and political necessity of the communicative act. Rhys' narrative silences and opaqueness reveal the story of Sasha's "soul murder" (91) committed not only by the hidden and lurking figure of Sasha's abusive father who molested and abused her but also by the distant mother with whom Sasha had a complex and conflicted relationship. Simpson demonstrates how Sasha's convoluted narrative is the outcome of her effort to suppress her traumatic experience that involves both her father and mother. Simpson then refers to Freud's "The unconscious" and "The return of the repressed" to define the contours of the young protagonist and her relation to her life but also point out the limitations of these theories that are rooted in male paradigms and are not informed by the role of the mother in the family triangle.
The book's last chapter focuses on Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, which Simpson analyses not as a text that simply rewrites or overwrites Bronte's Jane Eyre but as a narrative that brings to a climax Rhys' preoccupation with the theme of the cultural and ontological displacement that her female characters, often betrayed by their own families and beloved ones, cannot overcome or negotiate. Following a succession of characters from Anna Morgan and Julia Martin to Marya Zelli and Sasha Jensen, Rhys' protagonist and narrator, Antoinette Rochester, is another female subject who is "colonized by the others' desires" (113) as she stands between cultures (British and colonial, Creole and Victorian), mothers (surrogate and biological) and histories (pre and after Emancipation). In this chapter, Simpson analyzes Antoinette's ontological predicament as an estranged woman without a place to belong to in the context of Rhys' narrative obsession with the marginalized other's unresolved predicament, which is her cultural, political, ontological and often linguistic homelessness. For Simpson, this obsession constitutes the core of Rhys' vision and makes her fiction sensitive to "the nuances of psychic processes as people confront the inevitably traumatic circumstances of living" (142).
All in all, in chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 on Rhys' respective novels, Simpson succeeds in articulating Rhys' cartography of the female psyche entrapped in a politically and culturally overwhelming context. At times, however, the reader feels too quickly introduced to psychoanalytic theory only to be even more quickly swept away into the literary analysis that is not always at pace with the foundations of the psychoanalytic theory. This is the case especially in her chapter on Good Morning, Midnight: A story of Soul Murder, in which the references to Lacan and Freud are too swift and weaken Simpson's effort to deconstruct the male paradigms on which they are founded, despite the solid analysis of Rhys' text. However, in the last chapter and the epilogue, Simpson's analysis of Rhys' fiction is at its best moments as it perfectly balances psychoanalysis and literary criticism in order to critically demonstrate and explore Rhys' thematic preoccupations and concerns. Having established her psychoanalytic approach in the previous chapters and uninterrupted by necessary references and theoretical explications, Simpson ends with a vivid and beautiful reading of Rhys' "Fishy Waters", a powerful short story that collects Rhys' narrative and political preoccupations and demonstrates the author's passionate and attentive reading of the unprivileged, victimized and dispossessed constituencies. By bringing critical attention to Rhys' early and unknown work in the light of a methodology that combines psychoanalytic theory with an intense literary analysis, Simpson fulfills her promise to shed light on Rhys' fiction used not only as a site of psychoanalytic applications but as a textual force that can interrogate the established theoretical paradigms and contribute to their unsettlement and deconstruction.