'Money, for the night is coming': Jean Rhys and Gendered Economies ...

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`Money, for the night is coming’: Jean Rhys and Gendered Economies of Ageing

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he published collection of Jean Rhys’s correspondence opens with two undated photographs of Rhys on facing pages. The author’s pose is nearly identical in the two images: her head rests on her hands and her large, dark eyes, rimmed with black liner, look directly out at the viewer. In both pictures, Rhys’s hairstyle is exactly the sameÐthough the colour and texture have changedÐand the vivid pattern on her clothing is also similar. Both are portraits of a strikingly beautiful woman, and together they suggest a narrative embodying several concerns central to Rhys’s early fiction: the exhibition of feminine beauty, the passing of time, and the social, biological and economic consequences of ageing for women. The strong continuities between the two photos, along with their striking differences, serve as a visual representation of the need for women to appear unchanging, to weave a narrative or create an image of the self that keeps the past and present contemporaneous in order to maintain value in the sexual marketplace. The inter-relations of gender, value, age and expenditure suggested by the two photographs are articulated in Jean Rhys’s early novels, which depict the economy of investment and loss that women face as they age. In Rhys’s textsÐand particularly in her two first-person narrativesÐthere is an attempt .............................................................................................................................................................................

Women: a cultural review Vol. 12. No. 2. ISSN 0957-4042 print/ISSN 1470-1367 online # 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/095740400110060247

JEAN RHYS AND GENDERED ECONOMIES OF AGEING . 205

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to recreate in prose the simultaneous experience of past and present, not simply as an example of modernist experimentation with narrative continuity, but also as a specifically gendered response to the economic and social consequences of ageing for women.

Ìncapable of Exchange’: Freud’s Model of Femininity At the conclusion of his essay entitled `Femininity’ (1933), Freud makes a startling assertion: I cannot help mentioning an impression that we are constantly receiving during analytic practice. A man of about thirty strikes us as a youthful, somewhat unformed individual, whom we expect to make powerful use of the possibilities for development opened up to him by analysis. A woman of the same age, however, often frightens us by her psychical rigidity and unchangeability. Her libido has taken up final positions and seems incapable of exchanging them for others. There are no paths open to further development; it is as though the whole process had already run its course and remains thenceforward insusceptible to influenceÐas though, indeed, the difficult development to femininity had exhausted the possibilities of the person concerned (Freud 1965:135). Freud’s claim that women over thirty are `rigid’, ùnchanging’ and ìncapable of exchange’ is particularly intriguing when read against Rhys’s early novels.

206 . WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW

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These texts demonstrate that women’s energy after the age of thirty is often invested in strenuous efforts to achieve precisely the effects of ùnchangeability’ in order to keep themselves from being considered obsolete waste products. In economic terms, advancing age can be figured as an accumulation (of years, memories and experience) or, more frequently, as a loss (of youth, vitality or beauty). It is often marked, howeverÐespecially for womenÐby the culturally imposed difficulty and even danger of social, financial and (as Freud suggests) psychological exchange. Jean Rhys’s novels reframe what Freud calls the `rigidity and unchangeability’ of women over thirty by exposing the frenzied energies their central characters devote to the purposeful effort to appear static and unchanging. These works demonstrate that it isn’t the `difficult development to femininity’ that Freud cites that exhausts the women he discusses, but rather the difficult attempt to retain 1 the marks of socially endorsed, youthful femininity.

`Keeping Up Appearances’ in the Novels of Jean Rhys

1 In a recent essay in this journal, Rachel Bowlby cites the above passage from Freud and contrasts it with the contemporary ideal of fluid identity promised by twentyfirst-century consumer culture (Bowlby 2000: 113±14). Noting that she has interpreted the passage in different ways over the course of her life, Bowlby offers evidence of her own development and ability to change over time.

Jean Rhys published four novels between 1928 and 1939: Postures (1928, published the following year as Quartet in the United States), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). Each centres on a woman whoÐalienated from her family, without a husband and financially desperateÐtrades on her body, and must maintain her beauty in order to remain in sexual circulation and sustain herself financially. The necessary efforts to project beauty and desirability in an oppressive economy of visual display and exhibition are threatened not only by the women’s poverty (on the contrary, their poverty and shabbiness mark them as vulnerable and sexually available), but also by the exhaustion and depletion of their bodies over time and through the effects of experience. All four have worked in jobs that involved the exhibition of their bodies in a way that would become harder to sustain as they age: two worked as chorus girls and the other two served as artists’ models and dress store mannequins. In the `present’ time of each novel, however, the characters have either lost their jobs or lost the energy to pursue them, and therefore market their bodies more directly with increasing anxiety. Even Rhys’s youngest characters fret anxiously about their looks and recognize the inexorable social and physical effects of age. Anna Morgan, the central character of Voyage in the Dark, had only just begun to menstruate when she first begins to fear àll the things you getÐold and sad and everything’ (1982:72). In Quartet we are told that àt twenty-four . . . [Marya] imagined with dread that she was growing old’ (1971:72), and Julia Martin, in After Mr Mackenzie, is in her mid-thirties when she is described by her lover as à clockwork toy that has nearly run down’ (1972:148). Both internalized by her central characters and expressed by those


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2 I do not mean to suggest that ageing is the only source of oppression in Rhys’s novels; as Helen Carr argues, for Rhys, `the power structures of organized society depend on a complex interaction of economic, class, racial, national and gender privilege’ (1996:55). This study argues, however, that age constitutes another divisive marker, and that the negative social and economic implications of ageing for women are internalized by and have consequences for women of all ages.

around them, the dread of female ageing is marked throughout Rhys’s fiction as not simply an economy of loss, but one that requires ongoing investment in a speculation that will inevitably lose value over time. While the highest value tends to be reserved for women who don’t circulate, that is, for young virgins and (perhaps less so) for married women, part of the problem Rhys’s heroines face is that because of their poverty they must circulate, and like coins or stamps that enter circulation, their value depreciates accordingly. Yet they continue to invest in their clothes and appearance in order to sustain their status as increasingly devalued commodities. Rhys’s fourth novel, Good Morning, Midnight, features the oldest of the four heroines. A women in her forties with a small but stable source of income, Sasha Jensen has been lent money by a female friend to `transform herself’ in Paris. She dyes her hair and purchases clothes, determined to avoid `looking old’ (1986:11). In the years before the novel opens and after the departure of her husband, Sasha lived as precariously as the other heroines, relying on the commodification of her body when she was desperate for a meal. In the present time of the novel, however, she is not financially desperate, and Sasha’s position on the market is therefore somewhat different from those of the other women. Whereas the other characters are objects of desire, subject to sexual exploitation in exchange for cash or clothes, Sasha is marked by her age and her fur coat as one who desires, and the men who approach her on the street offer to sell her things, not to buy from her. Although the coat is a gift from long ago and the money Sasha spends in Paris is borrowed, she has the opportunity to occupy a different socioeconomic role. When a gigolo first approaches her, Sasha thinks: `this is where I might be able to get some of my own back . . . to hurt him a little in return for all the many times I’ve been hurt’ (72±3). While her position as consumer rather than commodity seems potentially empowering, Sasha finds the social consequences of her age frightening and confusing. She hearsÐor imagines she hearsÐother people rudely mocking her: `Qu’est-ce qu’elle fout ici, la vieille? What the devil (translating it politely) is she doing here, that old woman? What is she doing here, the stranger, the alien, the old one?’ (54). Sasha undertakes the `transformation act’ meant to stave off the appearance of age and to allow her to circulate as both respectable and desirable; by the end of the novel she seems to have resumed the role of passive object of another’s desire, offering her naked body to her neighbour in the hotel, a man she finds repulsive. Like the other novels, then, Good Morning, Midnight poignantly explores the relation between women’s age and the economic market, and demonstrates that, even with some economic security, the effects of age require ever-greater investments of finances and energy mobilized in an attempt to appear static 2 and unchanging. Sasha articulates both her growing anxiety and her increasing need for


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money as she approaches the `midnight’ of middle age: `Now, money, for the night is coming’, she says to herself. Money for my hair, money for my teeth, money for the shoes that won’t deform my feet (it’s not so easy now to walk around in cheap shoes with very high heels), money for good clothes, money, money. The night is coming (144). This passage suggests that the title of the novel, which is borrowed from an Emily Dickinson poem, alludes (at least in part) to the `midnight’ of ageÐof which Sasha seems to stand on the thresholdÐand points to the heroine’s troubled relationship to the passing of time. At the same time that she requires money to restore or cover up the parts of her body that are changing, however, Sasha also exemplifies the ways in which spending on fashion items eases her anxieties about the linear progression of time: Tomorrow I’ll go to the Galeries Lafayette, choose a dress, go along to the Printemps, buy gloves, buy scent, buy lipstick, buy thing costing fcs. 6.25 and fcs. 19.50, buy anything cheap. Just the sensation of spending, that’s the point. I’ll look at bracelets studded with artificial jewels, red, green and blue, necklaces of imitation pearls, cigarette cases, jeweled tortoises . . . And when I have had a couple of drinks I shan’t know whether it’s yesterday, today or tomorrow (145). Sasha begins the passage with a temporally situated plan for `tomorrow’ (i.e. `Tomorrow I’ll go to the Galeries Lafayette’), but it becomes clear that her goalÐthrough the purchase of ornaments and accessories and with the help of a `couple of drinks’Ðis precisely to lose track of the passage of time and to mask the onset of age. The definition of the word ìnvestment’ is given in the Oxford English Dictionary as `the act of putting clothes or vestments on; . . . An outer covering of any kind; an envelope; a coating’. Rhys’s novels reveal that, as women age, they are required to invest more and more in a covering or envelope for their bodies. Thus women’s dual roles as consumers of goods, on the one hand, and as objects of consumption, on the other, become increasingly interdependent in the attempt to attract the sexualÐand financialÐinterest necessary for survival. The investment in self-construction has a three-fold significance in Rhys’s work. Through her purchases, Sasha `makes up’ her face and body, conforming cosmetically with expectations about commodified femininity. By doing so, she attempts to `make up’ in the sense of compensating for the passing of time and the loss of youth. In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, the narrator says of Julia Martin: `To stop making up would have been a confession of age and weariness. It would have meant that Mr Mackenzie had finished her’ (1972:14). Rhys’s early novels are haunted by older women with `half-dyed hair’ and unkempt nails who are `finished’, who


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no longer have the will or resources to make up for the passing of time by making up their bodies. On the other hand, Rhys also depicts ageing women whose determination to invest in ornaments and self-display seems absurd and grotesque. In Good Morning, Midnight, Sasha remembers an old, bald woman who tried to purchase a pretty ornament for her hair (1986:22). Later, Sasha watches another women shop for a hat: Her hair, half-dyed, half-grey, is very disheveled. As I watch she puts on a hat, makes a face at herself in the glass, and takes it off very quickly. She tries anotherÐthen another. Her expression is terribleÐhungry, despairing, hopeful, quite crazy. At any moment you expect her to start laughing the laugh of the mad. I stand outside watching. I can’t move. Hat after hat she puts on, makes that face at herself in the glass and throws it off again. Watching her, am I watching myself as I shall become? In five years’ time, in six years’ time, shall I be like that? (68). Sasha fears that it is only a matter of a few years before her attempt to invest in her appearance will be as ludicrousÐand as hopelessÐas that of the `hag’ in the store (68). In 1953, when she was in her sixties, Rhys wrote the following in a letter to Morchard Bishop: Don’t you think that age is often forced on people? The overwhelming opinion is that everyone (especially women) must first be elderly (when they’ve lived so long) then old, then very oldÐthen, God help them. Anyone who resists is ridiculous, then tragic, finally bumped offÐor as good as (if one can imagine anyone resisting fiercely enough to need that drastic treatment). Well I am sure this is all wrong (Rhys 1984:102). To `resist’ through `making up’ is to risk being ridiculous, but the alternative, Rhys’s fiction makes clear, is to accept diminishing financial and social value. The way to negotiate the impasse between ridiculous resistance and passive obsolescence, Rhys’s novels suggest, is through a third kind of `making up’: that is, by the construction of a persona that holds various temporalities together, as Rhys’s characters attempt to do and as Jean Rhys does herself through the inventive strategies with which she structures her narratives. Especially in her first-person novels (Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight), Rhys constructs a polyphony of narrative voices that blend perceptions of past, present and anxieties about the future in what has often been described as a `stream of consciousness’. In these novels, however, the narrative is arguably less a stream flowing in one direction than an attempt to hold in contemporaneous stasis the various stages of time, in order to resist the loss of value socially dictated for women as they age. In `Sex and Credit: Consumer Capitalism in Ulysses’, Michael Tratner argues:


.................................................................................................................................................. The central trait of the modernist novelÐstream of consciousnessÐmay . . . be part of a transformation of the nature of property. As objects turn into ìncome-streams,’ so selves turn into streams of constantly changing mental states. Advertising relies on this new vision of the self: By providing constantly changing mini-fantasies for people to occupy, advertising keeps changing people’s desires, minute by minute . . . not only does one keep wanting different things, one keeps becoming different people, so even the same things may inspire new desires in the changed persona one has become (1993:708).

Tratner’s depiction of an economy built on constant change and flux suggests that early twentieth-century economic developments both mirror and enable a liberation from fixed `mental states’. Citing Molly Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses as an advocate for the free circulation of desire, Tratner suggests that the proliferation of advertising creates a multitude of shifting desires and protean personalities. However, as both Thomas Richards and Garry Leonard point out, advertising also established or contributed to a fixed standard by which femininity was measuredÐin particular, a standard of youthful beauty. Àt one and the same time,’ Richards writes, the image of the `seaside girl’ that became popular in advertising during the late nineteenth century `marked off the adolescent female body as an object of commodity culture and changed the shape of women’s anatomy by making that body normative and compulsory’ (Richards 1990:241). By the 1920s, as Richards demonstrates, `the ideal type of womanhood has become prolonged girlhood’ (244). In a sense, then, advertising at the turn of the century contributed to the fear of physical and social change and the loss of value to which women were subjected as they aged. Rather than encouraging `constantly changing mental states’, advertising can have the contrary effect of stifling desires and stunting development, encouraging women to imagine the inexperienced, adolescent female body as the ideal of femininity. Of course, Molly Bloom’s desires are impressively wide-ranging, and she is significantly more at ease in the role of desiring subject than, say, Sasha Jensen or Anna Morgan. She also has more ample resources: she works as a singer, is married and receives gifts from her lover. In The Economy of Ulysses, Mark Osteen argues that Molly actively positions herself to participate in several different economies (public and private, male and female, barter and gift) thus generating àn infinite economy that turns her corporeal assets into self-renewing currency’ (1995:424±5). Molly is highly aware, however, that her `corporeal assets’ themselves are not infinite, but rather temporally bound. Thus, at the same time that Molly’s rhetoric is marked by multiplicity and change, it is also, like that of Rhys’s women, constrained by the injunction not to change: that is, by the need to stay young, or at least to appear young; to invest in her body in order to maintain


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sexual interest and continuing financial security. Indeed, as Tratner himself points out, Molly adopts the language of advertising when she sees the satisfaction of sexual desire as a way to `make her look young’, but the importance of looking young is, paradoxically, in order to remain an object of sexual interest and avoid obsolescence (Tratner 1993:706; Joyce 1986:18/ 1408). While the goal and frequently the effect of advertising are to create new desires, the range of acceptable fantasies and personae is arguably limited, and the goal for women might be to arrest change rather than to promote it. As a participant in the culture of exhibition and consumption, Molly knows that the stakes of temporal and physical change are very high for women: Ìts all very fine for them but as for being a woman as soon as you’re old they might as well throw you out in the bottom of the ash pit’ (Joyce 1986:18/746±7). Molly asserts that she is `young still’ (as corroborated, perhaps, by the proof of fertility that punctuates her monologue), but she fears and tries to prepare against being put `back on the shelf’ (18/1399). Molly employs several strategies in response to her anxieties about the `shelf’ or àsh pit’: one is to gather up a store of commodities (clothing, underwear, a gold bracelet) and a breadth of experiences against the threat of future obsolescence. Her expenditure of sexual energy can be seen not necessarily, as Tratner suggests, as borrowing on credit against the expectation of future growth and success, but rather (like Sasha) as a means of compensating for a socially perceived loss and of shoring up her resources against a culturally imposed expiration date. Molly buys into assumptions about women’s loss of value with age, and tries to make the most of her 3 `4 years of life up to 35’ (18/475). Through her discursive strategies, Molly both calls attention to and resists the effects of ageing. She repeatedly compares herself to the fifteen-year-old Milly (Ì was just like that’), establishing a cross-generational continuity that is emphasized by the echoing similarity of their names. Molly bears witness both to her own past youth and to Milly’s inevitable ageing, as when she remarks that it’s a pity that Milly’s pretty features `wont stay that way’ (18/1066). At the same time, however, Joyce marks the inadequacy of social notions of chronological age even as he depicts Molly’s anxious concerns about approaching sexual obsolescence. In a form that stands in contrast to the other chapters of Ulysses, Joyce crafts an unpunctuated rhetorical style of simultaneity that allows Molly to build a unified narrative out of her life, keeping all the different temporal aspects of it in play. 3 Indeed, the Ìthaca’ episode reveals that Molly understates her age; she will in fact be thirty-four in September.

`Quite Like Old Times’: Temporal Economies of the Masquerade Like Molly’s monologue, Rhys’s early novels reflect the anxieties and dangers associated with the passing of time not only in their thematic content but


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4 A letter Rhys wrote to Selma Vaz Dias corroborates the connection between time and music in Rhys’s work: the original title for Voyage in the Dark, she writes, was `Two Tunes. That’s what I meant. Past and present . . .’ (1984:149). 5 See, e.g., Kern 1983.

also through their structure. In 1934 Rhys wrote to her friend Evelyn Scott about her progress on the novel Voyage in the Dark: `The big ideaÐwell I’m blowed if I can be sure what it is. Something to do with time being an illusion I think. I mean that the past existsÐside by side with the present, not behind it; that what wasÐis’ (1984:24). Similarly, of Sasha Jensen in Good Morning, Midnight, Rhys writes: Ì wanted her to enter the ``no time’’ region there’ (1984:138). For Sasha, every step in the present of the novel is accompanied by memories of the past. While at some moments she tries to resist what she calls her `film mind’ and repress the memories, at other times she welcomes the òrdered, undulating procession [that moves] past [her] eyes’ and through her narrative (1986:109). While in Paris, Sasha buys a painting of an old Jew that appeals to her because it evokes what she calls a `no time’ orÐperhaps, more accuratelyÐan àll time’ region, in which past, present and future are held together in play: `He is singing `Ìt has been,’’ singing `Ìt will be,’’ ’ Sasha says of the figure in the painting, calling to mind the way her narrative shifts unsteadily among the different phases of her chronological trajectory (53). While a painting usually offers a static image, here Rhys couples the visual medium with an aural one, calling attention to the way music must be 4 performed and heard over time. The painting, like Rhys’s narrative itself, covers over and compensates for losses by interweaving and holding together different registers of time. Of course, interest in the perception and representation of time and temporality has long been understood as a central concern of the modernist aesthetic. From the influence of Bergsonian notions of the `duration’ of subjective states on writers like Virginia Woolf to the Futurist movement’s fascination with speed and simultaneity, experiments with new ways of understanding and narrating time are widespread among the broad range of 5 movements and authors associated with modernism. Rhys’s novels, however, pointedly convey the interrelated narration of memory and `the present moment’ as a gendered strategy with which to deflect or resist the social consequences of age. At the same time that it illustrates the experience of various moments in time as overlapping and concurrent, where past, present and future are equally alive to the subject, Rhys’s writing (like the clock in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and the progress of the sun in The Waves) also calls attention to the irrevocable social as well as biological wasting brought on by chronological time. Indeed, Rhys’s novels highlight the contrast between the subjective feeling that `the past exists side by side with the present’ and the perception of the individual by others, to whom memories and experiences are registered only as marks and wrinkles on face and body. Since those marks are thought to diminish the value of those who must circulate on the market of male desire, the ageing woman can be seen as having to participate in what might be called a double-masquerade; she must mask herself in the appearance of youthful femininity, which, according to


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6 `Womanliness . . . could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it . . .’ (Riviere 1986:38). 7 Mary Lou Emery considers Rhys’s interest in masks and masquerade in the context of the West Indian carnival and Bakhtinian notions of the carnivalesque (Emery 1990) 8 Woodward discusses the masquerade of youth in relation to Freud, Proust and Gustav Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. 9 Thomas Staley and Arnold Davidson, for example, both read the ending of Good Morning, Midnight as an affirmative echo of Molly Bloom’s last words, while Coral Ann Howells and Carole Angier interpret it as a hopeless surrender to silence, madness or oblivion. As I suggest in the brief discussion of Good Morning, Midnight above, my understanding of the final passages is closer to the latter reading.

psychoanalysts like Joan Riviere, is itself a masquerade. Riviere published her famous essay, `Womanliness as a Masquerade’, in 1929, just as Rhys was beginning to publish her novels, and `Masquerade’ was for some time the 7 working title of Rhys’s first novel. Indeed, in trying to make her mind `vacant’ (Rhys 1986:19) and in her determination to kill off her `sale cerveau’ after confessing herself a `cerebrale’ (161), Sasha Jensen embodies the intellectual woman who masquerades in passive femininity, as in Riviere’s case study. However, if women in general are defined as marking and masking what they lack with the fetishizing process of the masquerade, then ageing women might be understood as performing a double-masquerade in trying to recreate the youthful feminine appearance that is itself a cover-up for what women lack. In the essay `Youthfulness as a Masquerade: Denial, Resistance, and Desire’, Kathleen Woodward suggests that youthfulness can itself be seen as another version of Riviere’s `masquerade’, another attempt to cover or compensate for that which is missing. Ìn a culture which so devalues age’, she writes, `masquerade with respect to the ageing body is first and foremost a denial of age, an effort to erase or efface age and to put on youth’ 8 (1991:148). Woodward’s essay deals with the male masquerade of youth, but, in the stories Rhys tells, she demonstrates the dual masquerade of femininity and youth her characters must perform in order to maintain value in the sexual marketplace. If, as Luce Irigaray suggests, the masquerade of femininity consists of `what women do in order to recuperate some element of desire . . . to submit to the dominant economy of desire in an attempt to remain `òn the market’’ in spite of everything’ (Irigaray 1985:133), then we must consider the position of the older woman within the `dominant economy of desire’ and what the stakes and the options might be for her to remain` `òn the market’’ in spite of everything’. Reading Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight alongside Joyce’s Ulysses can be useful in several ways. Both narratives are structured around the absence of a son who died in infancy, and several critics have read the closing words of Good Morning, Midnight (`YesÐyesÐyes’, 190) as either an affirmative echo or 9 a nightmare revision of Molly Bloom’s final words. In addition, though, understanding the centrality of ageing in the narratives of both Molly and Sasha allows us to reconsider these authors’ formal experimentation with the simultaneous experience of time as yet another element of the feminine masquerade. Through the prism of the double-masquerade, we can recognize the significance of the various registers of `keeping up appearances’ in Rhys’s novels as well as in Molly’s monologue. However, like `making up’, the masquerade arguably works on a narrative level as well: by narrating in a present-tense voice that shifts between Sasha Jensen’s earlier life in Paris with her husband and her later visit alone, for example, Rhys creates a narrative chronological doubling that enables the older woman to cloak herself in


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memoriesÐalbeit often painful onesÐof her youth. Similarly, through Molly Bloom’s temporally unstable and memory-filled monologue, Joyce illustrates a woman’s need to cling to traces of her youth and resist change. Reading the formal level of the masquerade helps highlight the ways Rhys and Joyce both draw on a technique of narrative simultaneity in order to call attention to the social and financial consequences of ageing in a historical moment when youth begins to be promoted as the normative state. We can see the formal aesthetic both authors employ as a technique that, while depicting women engaging in the double-masquerade, also highlights, criticizes and recasts the (perceived) need for women to try to hold youth and age in a kind of balance. Through their fiction, both Rhys and Joyce engage in another kind of `make up’ as they make up fictions that call on readers to reconsider their assumptions about gender and age. Good Morning, Midnight opens with these words: ` ``Quite like old times’’, the room says. ``Yes, No?’’ ’ (1986:9). The suspension of both yes and no, past and present, forecasts the balance of voices and perspectives that masquerade through Sasha Jensen’s multivalent, present-tense narration. The opening of the novel is set at `what they call an impasse’; the literal meaning is the culde-sac on which Sasha’s third-rate hotel is located, but at the same time, Rhys seems to refer to the sense of paralysis and stagnation, to the impossibility of engaging in social and libidinal exchange, and to the need to hold past and present together to project the appearance of stasis. In The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), John Maynard Keynes writes that `the importance of money essentially flows from its being a link between the present and the future’ (293). Although this offers a valuable description of the ways in which money can (and sometimes must) be used to prepare for or stave off the physical effects of ageing (as in Jean Rhys’s novels), it is notable that, in writing about notions of value, the economist omits any consideration of the relation between money and the past. Of course, erasing the past is an inevitable feature of the fetishization of a commodity, which rests on masking or obscuring origins and history. Such erasure has serious implications, however, for a culture in which women circulate as commodities. Thus, while the passage from Freud cited at the beginning of this essay sees women as stuck in or trapped by the past, with `no paths open to further development’ (1965:135), the condition of women as commodities and their need to raise sexual interest necessitate an erasure of their past. According to these models, as they age, women risk being alienated from either the value located in their own histories or from the potential for change and growth in the future. In Rhys’s novels, however, the past itselfÐthat is, youthÐis the valuable commodity that is continually being fetishized, marketed and consumed. The three levels of `making up’ and masquerade seem to both mark and mask the increasing absence of socially and economically valued youth.


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Rhys and the Age of Modernism Rhys’s early novels and Joyce’s Ulysses were all written between the two world wars, at a time when, on the one hand, women were advancing in legal, professional and economic positions and, on the other, the expanding consumer culture positioned them not only as consumers but also increasingly as products of consumer culture. It is significant, then, that gender and ageing both take on pointed connotations in the ideological and aesthetic rhetoric of this period. It was in 1919 that Ezra Pound lamented in `Hugh Selwyn Mauberly’ the young men of the First World War who gave their lives for àn old bitch gone in the teeth’. Similarly, in the `Futurist Manifesto’, Marinetti writes not only of the centrality of masculinity in the new movement, but also of the importance of youth: `The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscriptsÐwe want it to happen!’ (Kolocotroni et al. 1998:252). By establishing an opposition between the decrepit, feminized values of the Victorian era and a new youthful, virile, creative, modern moment, Pound and Marinetti helped set the terms for what would 10 later become a critical debate about `the gender of modernism’. A range of critics have participated in the debate on the feminist or misogynist aspects of modernist rhetoric and experimentation, but it seems imperative to remember in addition that some practitioners of modernism characterized the movement as not only representative of the `values’ of one gender, but also (as implied by its name) embodying the spirit of youth. To the recent recuperations of overlooked or marginalized modernist women can be added a re-evaluation of the place of ageing in our understanding of `the modern’. It is important to enquire how writers perceived and responded not only to the gendered dimensions of various modernist approaches, but also to the frequent elision between Pound’s exhortation to `make it new’ and the tacit imperative to `keep it young’. When she was in her seventies, Rhys wrote the following in a letter to her daughter: 10 See, e.g., the anthology of that name edited by Bonnie Kime Scott. Other participants in this debate include Andreas Huyssen, Rita Felski, Shari Benstock, Lisa Rado and Vicki Mahaffey, among many others.

My dream is to finish my book, get a face lift and a bright red wig. Also a lovely fur coat. Underneath I will wear a purple dress and ropes of pearls, or what do you say to rags? Then, in all my glory, I will come and see you . . . Rhys 1984, 198 (28 Dec 1960) Rhys’s dream of a face lift and a red wig can be seen as evidence of her own desire to `resist’ the social consequences of ageing by participating in the double-masquerade of youthful femininity. This is not to suggest, however, that Rhys herself can be reduced to another version of the heroines she


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creates; significantly, this dream of masquerade follows the fulfilment of the other element of Rhys’s making-up, which is the writing of her book. Ironically, it was only as an old woman that Rhys finally gained critical attention and a degree of economic reward. Her early novels received some notice but were quickly forgotten; she published Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 after nearly twenty-five years of literary silence and extreme financial 11 hardship. The novel Rhys published late in lifeÐand the one that has been most widely successfulÐis the only one that does not address anxieties about the economy of ageing. She is far better known as the writer of that `postcolonial’ text than as a novelist who wrote during the heyday of modernism. Rhys’s poignant biography suggests that ageing is a topic that was excluded from modernism’s definition of itself. It also offers, however, a suggestive counter-narrative to the story of social and financial decline featured in Rhys’s novels. The two photographs of Rhys with which I began mark the differences incurred by age, at the same time as they balance each other. They are both simultaneously in play, mimicking the contemporaneous experience of past and present that women are called on to embody and that Rhys’s narratives depict. Like the image of the old Jew in the painting Sasha buys, Rhys’s photographs together create an image that is `double-headed, double-faced . . . and with four arms’, and that both marks and resists the implications of time, `singing `Ìt has been,’’ singing `Ìt will be’’ ’ (1986:109). The photographs enable us not only to reconsider Rhys’s insistent thematic attention to the gendered economics of ageing, but also to interpret her formal aesthetic. They let us see Rhys’s style not simply as an instance of modernist experimentation with the perception of time, but as a strategy specifically rooted in gendered anxieties about ageing and the need for women to hold youth and age in a precarious contemporaneous balance. Together, the two photos remind us that the youth-centred culture that emerged alongside modernism looks at only half of the picture, and sings only half of the old Jew’s song.

Bibliography

11 See Carole Angier’s biography (1990) for an analysis of what she calls the `lost years’ and Rhys’s reemergence.

Angier, Carole (1990), Jean Rhys: Life and Work: London: Andre Deutsch. Bowlby, Rachel (2000), `The Ultimate Shopper’, Women: a cultural review 11/1±2 (spring). Carr, Helen (1996), Jean Rhys, Plymouth: Northcote House. Davidson, Arnold (1985), Jean Rhys, New York: Frederick Ungar. Emery, Mary Lou (1990), Jean Rhys at `World’s End’, Austin: University of Texas Press.


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Freud, Sigmund (1965), `Femininity’ [1933], in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed. James Strachey, New York: Norton. Howells, Coral Anne (1991), Jean Rhys, New York: St Martin’s Press. Irigaray, Luce (1985), This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Joyce, James (1986), Ulysses: The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior, New York: Random House. Kern, Stephen (1983), The Culture of Time and Space 1880±1918, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Keynes, John Maynard (1936), The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, New York: Macmillan. Kolocotroni, Vassiliki et al., eds (1998) Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Leonard, Garry (1991), `Women on the Market: Commodity Culture, ``Femininity,’’ and ``Those Lovely Seaside Girls’’ in Joyce’s Ulysses’, Joyce Studies Annual 2 (summer): 27±68. Osteen, Mark (1995), The Economy of Ulysses: Making Both Ends Meet, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Rhys, Jean (1971), Quartet [1929], New York: Harper Row. ÐÐ (1972), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie [1930], New York: Harper and Row. ÐÐ (1982), Voyage in the Dark [1934], New York: Norton. ÐÐ (1986), Good Morning, Midnight [1939], New York: Norton. ÐÐ (1984), Jean Rhys Letters, 1931±1966, ed. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly, London: Andre Deutsch. Richard, Thomas (1990), The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851±1914, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Riviere, Joan (1986), `Womanliness as a Masquerade’ [1929[, in Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (eds), Formations of Fantasy, London: Methuen, pp. 35± 44. Schleifer, Ronald (2000), Modernism and Time: The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture, 1880±1930, New York: Cambridge University Press. Scott, Bonnie Kime (1990), The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, Bloominton: Indiana University Press. Staley, Thomas F. (1979), Jean Rhys: A Critical Study, Austin: University of Texas Press. Tratner, Michael (1993), `Sex and Credit: Consumer Capitalism in Ulysses’, James Joyce Quarterly 30/4±31/1 (summer±autumn): 695±716. Woodward, Kathleen (1991), `Youthfulness as a Masquerade: Denial, Resistance, and Desire’, in Aging and Its Discontents, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 147±66.