Kunapipi XXVI:1

SUE THOMAS
Jean Rhys’s Cardboard Doll’s Houses

In Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) one of Jean Rhys’s mordant figures for Rochester’s need to assimilate white Creole Antoinette Cosway Mason Rochester into a gendered middle-class Englishness is the ‘marionette’ (90, 92) or ‘doll’ (90, 93, 102, 103), the inert object of his desire and hatred. The others are the ‘grey wrapper’ rather than the red dress in which she is clothed at Thornfield Hall, and zombification (Rhys’s West Indian interpretation of what Rochester sees as a doll-like condition). In Rhys’s published and unpublished fiction of the 1930s — Voyage in the Dark (1934), and the typescript ‘The Cardboard Dolls’ House’ (1938 or 1939) — dolls of several kinds feature in narratives about assimilation, xenophobia and the racialisation of colonial difference. A later untitled extant version of ‘The Cardboard Dolls’ House’, beginning ‘MY GREAT-AUNT JEANNETTE LIVED IN her room’ was apparently projected at one time as part of Wide Sargasso Sea. Material from these typescripts informs Rhys’s representation of Aunt Cora and Antoinette’s relationship with her in Wide Sargasso Sea. The image of the doll’s house is brilliantly distilled in the final section of the novel. For Antoinette, Thornfield Hall is a ‘cardboard house’, a ‘cardboard world where everything is coloured brown or dark red or yellow that has no light in it’ (107). Tracing the genealogy of these figures in Rhys’s earlier fiction reveals layers of Rhys’s thinking about the place of women, a precise sense of historical context, and her considerations of artistry.

‘I wrote this book before!’ Rhys declared to Francis Wyndham in 1962, referring to the novel which would become Wide Sargasso Sea. She continues:

Different setting — same idea. (It was called ‘Le revenant’ then). The MSS was lost when I was moving from somewhere to somewhere else and I wonder whether I haven’t been trying to get back to what I did.… I tried to rewrite ‘Le Revenant’ but could not — another title would have been found — however I discovered two chapters (in another suitcase) and have used them in this book. You will see perhaps. (Letters 213)

These two chapters might well be the stories ‘The Birthday’1 and ‘The Cardboard Dolls’ House’. In 1938 Rhys remembered an experience of sexual trauma from her childhood, which began with an uninvited fondling of a breast by an English family friend Mr Howard. The autobiographical account, which is in her Black Exercise Book, contextualises the memory of trauma in a range of memories of growing up in Dominica. Rhys soon began to work on the possibility of using some of the memories as the basis for new stories. Incomplete fragments include ‘Mr Howard’s House. CREOLE’ (dated 4 December 1938) and ‘Fears’ (dated 6 December 1938). ‘The Birthday’ is Rhys’s first attempt to develop a story about sexual assault. Her published story about sexual assault is ‘Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose’ (1976).