The mirror image Muda, G.E.
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Muda, G. E. (2011). The mirror image: The representation of social roles for women in novels by Charlotte Brontë, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Jean Rhys. s.n.
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Chapter 6
Life After Leaving Mr Mackenzie
If there is one hypocrisy I loathe more than another, it’s the fiction of the ‘good’ woman and the ‘bad’ one.
Jean Rhys in “Vienne.”1
6.0: INTRODUCTION
The last book under discussion in this study is After Leaving Mr Mackenzie by Jean Rhys (1890-1979).2 Jean Rhys was born in Dominica, the daughter of a doctor of Welsh descent and a Creole mother. She came to England in 1907 and briefly attended the Perse School in Cambridge, and later the Academy of Dramatic Art in London. But after her father died, she discontinued her studies and went to work to support herself. She worked as a chorus girl, and a film extra, and, during the First World War (1914-1918), as a secretary and volunteer cook. In 1919 she left England to marry the first of three husbands, Jean Lenglet, and remained abroad for many years, living mainly in Paris, where she began to write and where much of her early work is set. The short story collection The Left Bank appeared in 1927 with an introduction by Ford Madox Ford. The novel that will be discussed here, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, was published in 1930.
I began this chapter with a quotation from one of Rhys’ short stories. Rhys evidently hated the division of women into stereotypical opposites because she was quite often stigmatized in her own life.
However, it is clear that she found the division useful in the writing of fiction and, in spite of this statement, much of Jean Rhys’ work is organized around those split or mirrored images. Her novel After Leaving Mr Mackenzie is no exception. In this novel,
1 “Vienne” is a short story by Jean Rhys. It was first published in the Transatlantic Review II.2 (December 1924): 639-645.
2 Some authorities give Rhys’ date of birth as 24 August 1894, but Diana Athill mentions in a
‘Foreword’ to Rhys’ posthumous autobiography Smile Please, 24 August 1890. Jean Rhys was born in Roseau, Dominica, in the West Indies. She was named Ella Gwendolin Rees Williams. She changed her name various times, but her novels and short stories were published under the name Jean Rhys.
Jean Rhys (The University of Tulsa)
the sisters Julia Martin and Norah Griffiths are contrasted. Julia is the so-called ‘bad’
woman. She is pretty, she has style, and her marriage has enabled her to leave the drabness of home and move to Paris. Norah has denied herself excitement to stay at home with their ailing mother. Superficially, she is the ‘Angel in the House’ and the ‘good’ woman, but she is unmarried, embittered, and imprisoned in suburban Acton by poverty and the invalid mother.3 The relationship between the two women is not good, and the resentment the two sisters feel is mutual (Athill, 11-12). Norah’s feelings cut deeper, though; she hates, whereas Julia shows only dry-eyed spite.
It is especially in the middle section of the novel that the sisters are mirrored, but the limitation of the various social roles for women is shown throughout the book, and the comparison with Norah is important, because it shows an alternative to Julia’s existence and reveals what might have happened to her, if she had behaved in a more traditional way.
A short summary may clarify the development of the story-line. In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, the central female protagonist is Julia Martin.4 She lives in Paris, and we enter the story on a Tuesday in the spring of 1929 or 1930. Since the previous October, when her
‘lover’ Mr Mackenzie left her, Julia has been living on the weekly three hundred francs which his lawyer, Henri Legros, sends her. Her life is characterized by little freedom, and the social and economic constraint she experiences is becoming worse. The allowance is suddenly stopped with a final payment of fifteen hundred francs. In a fit of rage, Julia seeks out Mr Mackenzie in his local restaurant, slaps him, and flings his money back at him. This incident is witnessed by George Horsfield, and after she leaves the restaurant, he tracks her down and approaches her in a nearby café. They have a drink, go to the cinema, and talk.
When Mr Horsfield realizes that she has no money, he gives her fifteen hundred francs, and he also advises her to return to London. Julia goes there for various reasons; “to see her family (a dying mother, a jealous sister, a selfish uncle), to seek financial help from the wealthy older man who was her first lover (he had promised that they would always be friends), and to continue her affair with Mr Horsfield.”5 The mother is by now an invalid;
and she dies while Julia is in London. After the cremation, Norah and her paternal Uncle Griffiths send Julia away. Julia briefly takes George Horsfield for her lover, but then returns to Paris. In Paris, she sticks to the same routines as before, and the novel ends with her asking Mr Mackenzie to lend her one hundred francs.
Jean Rhys always denied being a feminist, yet her depiction of the available social roles for women, and the unequal and unfair division of power structures leaves no doubt that she was fully aware of the oppressive social structures of patriarchy. In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, we find the bleakest depiction of the contemporary social system. Instead of being mildly ironic about society and the various social roles, as Edith Wharton would have
3 Diana Athill stresses this, calling Norah “the good sister, the one who has stayed at home and sacrificed her youth to caring for their mother.” Jean Rhys: The Early Novels (London: André Deutsch, 1984) 11. Many other critics mention the opposition of the “good sister Norah” and the “bad sister Julia,” as well, though. Lorna Sage refers to it in the “Introduction” to the latest Penguin edition (London: Penguin Classics, 2000) v.
4 The original title of After Leaving Mr Mackenzie does not have a period after Mr ; I have generally followed this form.
5 Arnold E. Davidson mentions this in “The Art and Economics of Destitution in Jean Rhys” Studies in the Novel 16:2 (Summer 1984) 215-227, 216.
been, Jean Rhys can be downright sarcastic about the economic and social dependence of women. Perhaps this is also a sign of the times; After Leaving Mr Mackenzie is the most recent of all of the novels under discussion here, published in 1930.6 By this time, women writers could be more outspoken about the social system; and the plight of the individual, also the female individual, had become an important issue.
What is noteworthy about Rhys’ writing style is that it is less ‘realistic’ than the style of the earlier women writers. Many critics, amongst them Ford Madox Ford, regarded her as a modernist writer, because of the techniques that she uses. In general, modernist literature is characterized by a rejection of nineteenth-century traditions. The conventions of realism are abandoned and many modernist writers considered themselves an avant-garde upsetting bourgeois values. They adopted new forms and styles, ‘played’ with the chronological order and attempted new ways of describing the flow of characters’ thoughts in their
‘stream-of-consciousness’ styles. Many writers introduced new or forbidden subject- matters. Overall, it seemed to be their aim to shock the sensibilities of the conventional reader and to challenge the norms and values of bourgeois culture. This modernist revolt against traditional literary forms and subjects demonstrated itself strongly after the catastrophy of World War I shook people’s faith in the foundations and continuity of Western civilization and culture.7
In her writings, Rhys experiments especially with the structuring of the story, with the juxtaposition of characters and events and with the introduction of risky subject matters. In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, this sometimes leads to an almost grotesque portrayal of the female main characters and the representation of their plight borders on the absurd. Yet, her method to portray women’s struggle with contemporary society is very illuminating, and it is again the mirroring of the main characters that seems to develop into a consciousness- raising technique. To examine further the method used by Jean Rhys to represent what the text suggests as the limited options for women in contemporary society, I will first have a look at the gender and class specific socialization of both Julia and her sister Norah, and then examine their relationship with society.
6.1: THE REPRODUCTION OF POWER SYSTEMS
Like The Awakening, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie does not mention education in relation to the female protagonists. Yet, like Edna Pontellier, Julia Martin is in the middle of a learning process and, in that sense, the novel can be called a ‘Bildungsroman.’ With regard to the division of power structures and the expected social roles of both genders the novel implies that Julia comes to fully understand the oppressive social system. She also realizes that she cannot really change it, though.
In spite of the fact that After Leaving Mr Mackenzie is the most recent novel of my four case studies, and contemporary society was beginning to change, it is only in relation to
6 Elgin W. Mellown, “Character and Themes in the Novels of Jean Rhys,” Contemporary Literature 13. 4 (Autumn, 1972): 474.
7 See: Richard Lehan, Literary Modernism and Beyond: The Extended Vision and the Realms of the Text (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009) 16-17, 41-42, 57.
some of the male characters that education is mentioned. Mr Horsfield, for example, had a good education, and both Mr Mackenzie and Mr James had a traditional upbringing. This one-sidedness is surprising, because the period between World War I and World War II altered the shape of life in various contexts for women in Europe. Women were gaining more and more rights and opportunities. Soon after the end of World War I, these included for some the right to own property, the right to vote, and the chance of a higher education.
During World War I, women from the middle classes went to work in place of men away at war, and many refused to give up their new-found financial independence after the war.8 In Great Britain the Representation of the People Acts of 1918 and 1920 granted suffrage to women over thirty and to women over twenty-one, respectively. New technologies in the home added to the sense of freedom. Electric irons, pyrex glass which enabled food to be cooked and served in one dish, mass-produced clothing, and vacuum cleaners were among the many conveniences which by 1930 helped to free at least middle class women from full-time housework.9 In addition, new fashions cut down the time spent on personal appearance; short hair and clothes without the corsets or petticoats of the Victorian and Edwardian periods gave women a previously unheard-of degree of freedom in movement.
One of the most important factors in this social revolution was the opening up of higher education to women, a development that began in the late nineteenth century. Fighting the perception that education would render women ‘unfit’ for their traditional roles as wives, housewives, and mothers, pioneers of women’s education set up colleges where women and girls could learn in a structured environment and study what their brothers had been studying for centuries. Many women prepared there for careers, often in teaching. Although many others found their time at college to be a brief but welcome break before marriage, the social conditions for women seemed definitely changed. And by the 1930s, the traditional, unequal marriage where the woman was delegated to the private sphere and the man to the public no longer seemed the only option available for women.10
One would expect writing from this period, at least that by women for women, to reflect some of these social and cultural changes. Yet, with regard to Jean Rhys’ work quite the opposite is true. In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, the quest for knowledge or self- understanding is portrayed as a search for a partner, and is similar to the more traditional romance plot. Julia Martin still longs for the ideal of a man in whose arms she can sacrifice her independence for the sake of love. However, she does a bad job of choosing her men,
8 See also Chapters 2.4 and 2.5 of this dissertation for a detailed overview of these changes.
9 Elizabeth McMurray points out that the “new woman” absolutely freed from domestic work by appliances was in some sense a myth, though: “The time spent on domestic chores did not decrease, it was rather that standards of cleanliness were raised” (At Home in the Thirties, 1). She adds that “it was predominantly the middle classes who purchased these new ‘labour-saving’ appliances in a period of transition away from the employment of live-in domestic help. [The trade catalogues]
describing these products reflect the changing role of the housewife and elevate housework to a profession” (1-2). McMurray provides some noteworthy statistics on ownership: the high prices of washing machines meant that by 1938 only 3% of the households possessed one, while most continued to use a copper and portable wringer (9); by 1939 nine million households owned a radio (in Britain), but radios were very expensive, costing on average twice the weekly wage and many bought on hire purchase (10); Pyrex heat-resistant glassware was developed in 1915 by Corning Glassworks in America, and it was first produced in Britain in the 1920s (14).
10 Gage Blair, “Chapter 13: Great Britain,” International Handbook of Women’s Education, 285-323.
and very often she does not seem free to choose at all, but is content merely to be chosen.
Her search for love, communication, and respect does not result in a happily-ever-after marriage, but merely leads to alienation and depression. The overall impression given by After Leaving Mr Mackenzie is that, in spite of all of the contemporary developments in the 1930s, the underlying power-structures have not changed at all.
The first thing Julia Martin discovers during the learning process she undergoes is that patriarchy is still quite an oppressive social system for women. Julia mentions the oppressive social system, already, in relation to her youth. In a chapter entitled
“Childhood,” she states:
When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul.11
As an adult, Julia longs to get in touch with her ‘real self’ again. What she wants to learn is
“the truth about myself and about the world and about everything that one puzzles and pains about all the time” (ALMM, 41). What she finds out is already depicted in the childhood story about butterflies:
You were catching butterflies. You caught them by waiting until they settled, and then creeping up silently on tiptoe and squatting near them.
Then, when they closed their wings … you grabbed them quickly … When you had caught the butterfly you put it away in an empty tobacco tin, which you had ready.
… Of course, what always happened was that it broke its wings; or else it would fray them so badly that by the time you had got it home and opened the box and hauled it out as carefully as you could it was so battered that you lost all interest in it.
… what you had hoped had been to keep the butterfly in a comfortable cardboard-box and to give it the things it liked to eat. And if the idiot broke its own wings, that wasn’t your fault, and the only thing to do was to chuck it away and try again. (ALMM, 115-116)
The butterfly story represents what will happen to Julia later in life. She, too, is really only allowed to live in a box, or straitjacket of social roles. The social role that she is finally pushed into is the role of mistress, kept in a cheap hotel room, when she is still young and attractive, but chucked away when she is no longer wanted. Julia is never associated with the more acceptable social roles for women, such as wife, housewife, and mother. Rhys shows little joy for women in their rebellion against these roles. Julia always remains on the fringes of acceptable society, and so basically does her mirror image, her sister Norah. Both Julia and Norah belong to the lower middle classes, unlike the female protagonists discussed earlier; and their overall situation is less comfortable because of that.
11 Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie 1930 (London: Penguin Classics, 2000): 115. Further citations from this novel will be indicated with ALMM, followed by the page number(s) of this edition.
Norah Griffiths represents the woman who sticks to the expected social roles, who accepts her lower-middle-class life in all its drabness. She is among life’s defeated women.
Throughout the story, she represents the ‘Angel in the House,’ but her depiction of this stereotype is quite different from the impression made by the ‘angels’ in the previous novels. It is mostly her correct behavior that can be considered ‘angelic.’ It is not her looks or her temperament; in fact, beneath her grim stoicism lurks an embittered, self-pitying woman. And the narrator’s opening description depicts her as follows:
Her head and arms drooped as she sat. She was pale, her colourless lips pressed tightly together into an expression of endurance. She seemed tired.
Her eyes were like Julia’s, long and soft. Fine wrinkles were already forming in the corners. She wore a pale green dress with a red flower fixed in the lapel of the collar. But the dress had lost its freshness, so that the flower looked pathetic. (ALMM, 51)
We learn from her “cold” face that “warmth and tenderness were dead in her” (ALMM, 51). Norah has been beaten down in a way different from Julia, but the same social and economic forces have worked upon her. Norah is a woman with middle-class tastes “left without the money to gratify them … yet holding desperately to both her tastes and opinions” (ALMM, 53). These opinions lead her to criticize Julia for her shiftlessness, her conduct with men, and her failure to care for their dying mother.
Norah is introduced as the incarnation of a woman who behaves in the proper way according to the prevailing social norms. She is socialized into the stereotyped role- expectations. There are some flaws in her character, but especially in the caring context, and in her role as daughter she behaves quite correctly. However, she does not really succeed in correcting Julia’s conduct, or in convincing the reader that the role of ‘angel’ is the preferable one. On the contrary, and Julia recognizes Norah’s defeat in Norah’s coldness and self-righteous moral superiority. Overall, the mirroring of the female protagonists in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie raises the socially acceptable and unacceptable behavioral patterns for women to a more conscious level of understanding, but the motif mostly helps the reader to gain a critical view of the contemporary social context.
Yet, the reader is not the only one to learn something about the social system. Julia already discovered the oppressive tendencies of patriarchy and both Julia and Norah also learn two important other points in their confrontation with contemporary society. The influence of the social context is especially noticeable through the similarities between both sisters.12 Norah, for example, is always “tired.” She thinks of herself as “a slave,” and as “buried alive”; she also “cries for her dying youth and beauty,” and even her “voice” is like Julia’s,
they did not help. They just stood round watching her youth die, and her soft heart grow hard and bitter. They just sat there and said: ‘You’re wonderful, Norah.’ Beasts … devils … For a long time, she had just lain on her bed, thinking: ‘Beasts and devils…’ (ALMM, 75-76)
12 Carol Angier points out these similarities in her biographical study Jean Rhys: Life and Work (London: André Deutsch, 1990) 264-265.
Norah comforts herself with thoughts about money and the inheritance, which is not like Julia; but soon she sounds like Julia again:
And then she had felt very cold, and had pulled the bed-clothes over her.
And then she had felt so tired that after all nothing mattered except sleep. And then she must have slept. (ALMM, 76)
Norah is also like Julia in another way: she is “divided” (Angier, 264) She experiences a growing division between “warm and cold,” “soft and hard.” Once she was soft, she thinks, but now she is becoming increasingly hard and insensitive. After she and Julia have a row, she succeeds in forgetting Julia fairly quickly.
Norah lay back, with her eyes shut. She thought: ‘My God, how hard I’ve got!’ Her lips trembled: ‘What’s happened to me?’ For a moment she was afraid of herself. (ALMM, 101)
Yet, this is Julia’s story, too. Her last remaining pride is her empathy and her tender heart;
but at the end of the story, she thinks,
And it was funny to end like that – where most sensible people start, indifferent and without any pity at all. Just saying: ‘It’s nothing to do with me. I’ve got my own troubles. It’s nothing to do with me.’ (ALMM, 136)
And so Julia gradually acquires the habit of not caring, too.
The second thing Julia and Norah learn in their confrontation with society is that they should not care about other people and society too much, if they want to survive as an individual (Mellown, 466). As a reader this development makes you begin to wonder about the norm and value system presented in the novel, especially because the male characters have this attitude from the beginning. Right at the start of his relationship with Julia, Horsfield already thinks, “Once you started letting the instinct of pity degenerate from the general to the particular, life became completely impossible” (ALMM, 34). Overall, George Horsfield is depicted as the kind and understanding male character, but this sentence reveals how much he has been conditioned by the apparently harsh social context of the 1930s. At the same time, the narrator ridicules this type of thinking with such a comment, exactly because one cannot care about the general, if one does not take heed of the particular. The male character Mr Mackenzie gets involved with other people in only a very limited, usually businesslike way. Women he mostly sees as objects, and in relation to Julia he thinks: “Never again – never, never again – will I get mixed up with this sort of woman”
(25). Mr James is depicted as only having been interested in sex with Julia: “I didn’t know anything about him, really. You see, he never used to talk to me much. I was for sleeping with – not for talking to” (125). And even her uncle, Uncle Griffiths, thinks, “Why should I have to bother about this woman?” (59). The men in patriarchy apparently find this a normal way of dealing with other people. Both female protagonists gradually acquire this type of behavior, but neither is really happy with it.
At the beginning of her novel, Rhys separated the ‘soft’ from the ‘hard’ person, and put them into two different female characters. Yet, the more we progress into the story, the more similar especially the plight of both women becomes. Overall, the female main characters are in a way closer to each other, than the female protagonists of the other
novels, because they are introduced as sisters. With this representation technique Rhys can show that there is a connection between them, even when there is not such a strong emotional bond between the two women. The likeness between them seems to be the family-background; but, for the rest, they are depicted as complete opposites. The shared family background between the two sisters also allows Rhys to express truths about the one through the other. At an important point in their learning process, there is even an actual confusion between them, so that for a moment the reader does not know which sister is referred to (Angier, 266). This happens when one of the main questions of the novel is asked.
It occurs in Chapter 9, in Part 2. The family is traveling to Mrs Griffiths’s cremation. The third section ends: “Norah was silent, looking down at her hands clasped together in her lap.” Then the fourth section begins
The car stopped. Everybody walked in a short procession up to the chapel of the Crematorium, where a clergyman with very bright blue eyes was waiting. That was a dream, too, but a painful dream, because she was obsessed with the feeling that she was so close to seeing the thing that was behind all this talking and posturing …
In another minute she would know. And then a dam inside her head burst, and she leant her head on her arms and sobbed. (ALMM, 94)
“She” must be Julia, not Norah because Julia is the one who cries, with her arms pressed over her eyes, while Norah watches the coffin “with eyes wide open” (ALMM, 94). But when “she” is first mentioned, the reader cannot be sure. The experience and the question seem like Julia, but “logically it should be Norah, the last one to be named” (Angier, 266).
It is noteworthy that when Rhys leads the novel to the point of asking one of the heroine’s most important questions (“what is behind the nothingness that her life has reached?”) there should be this mix-up: “is it Norah or Julia who is asking? is it Norah or Julia whose life is nothing?” There is an instant when according to strict grammatical analysis Norah seems to ask what is really Julia’s question.13
There is not a straightforward answer to the question, “What is behind all this nothingness?” It seems to lead to other questions, such as: What is the nothingness? Is the nothingness being nothing, or having nothing? Julia already gave part of the answer to this question herself in the chapter called “Childhood.” It is also indicated later on when she is trying to get in touch with her ‘real self’ again. The novel suggests that what prevents her from getting in touch with her ‘real self,’ is an oppressive social system which forces her to accept a certain pattern of behavior. In her rebellion to this she has chosen, or been chosen, for a social role in the fringes. Her sister Norah has acted a little ‘wiser,’ but, in the context represented in the story, she is still in the margin, too.
13 Angier believes that this confusion was an unconscious “slip” of the pen by Rhys; but I am not so sure of that, as Rhys was very much concerned with and conscious of structure and experimenting with form, 266.
It is too limited to say that it is only Julia “herself” who is behind the nothingness.14 And this is true for Norah, too. The contemporary social system does not really co-operate, either. This is perhaps the most striking resemblance between Julia and Norah, in spite of the different lives they lead. Within the bourgeois power structures sketched in the novel, the men have all the money, and thus the power, and the women have nothing. The idea that the main means for survival, money, belongs to men is apparent throughout the story, and it is the third thing Julia and Norah learn. With the money, the men also have the power in contemporary society, and perhaps the main similarity between Julia and Norah is their powerlessness and their poverty. Women seem to be able to get money only through men, if they are beautiful, or, more rarely, if they have something else that men want, as Uncle Griffiths’s wife has docility and companionableness. If they are plain and without any other marketable quality, they can get no power at all, only bare survival.
In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, the idea that men can be poor or powerless is absent. There are the “unknowns,” and the poor thin skeleton at the end, drooping in a doorway; but they are hardly presented as real people, and in any case they are outnumbered by similar, ghostlike, unnamed women. All the main male characters have money. Mr James has been very rich ever since Julia has known him; Mr Mackenzie is “comfortably off,” and even Mr Horsfield owns a business, though it is “small and decaying” (ALMM, 18, 31, 42). Mr James’ riches sound inherited (that beautiful house, that gentlemen’s club); and Mackenzie and Horsfield too have done without working hard, and do not work at all while Julia knows them (48, 79-80). Mackenzie was helped by his father, and by a “certain good luck which had always attended him”; Horsfield also inherited his business from his father, and during the six months that Julia has been alone in her hotel he has been spending a “legacy”
on a holiday (18, 27-28). Uncle Griffiths, finally, has only irrational fears of poverty, and has been “the large and powerful male” of the family since Julia’s childhood (57). In this novel, men and money seem to belong together. The money is handed down from father to son, so that without any of them making any visible effort generations of men form a smooth wall of money, with no chink to let a woman in, thus perfectly reproducing the existing power structures.
The women, accordingly, are all poor. Life says to them all the time what London says to Julia: “Get money, get money, get money, or be forever damned” (ALMM, 65). The whole novel is full of anxious, detailed, female calculations about money, most of all Julia’s (56).
She gets three hundred francs a week from Mr Mackenzie (10). Her hotel costs sixteen francs a night, which means a third gone (7). The rest must pay for cafés, meals, and her bottle every night. Mr Horsfield gives her fifteen hundred francs; she spends most of it on clothes, and has the equivalent of thirty shillings left for London (36, 44). Her Bloomsbury hotel costs eight shillings and six pence a night. She pays for a night, plus a shilling for the meter and a shilling to the boy (47-48). The next day she has lunch at Lyons’ and goes to a film, after which she has only a little over one pound left (49-50). A boarding house (bed and board for a week) will cost two pounds; she gets one pound from Uncle Griffiths and another pound from Mr Horsfield, and moves (61, 68). Then she buys her mother a bunch of roses for six shillings and has only ten shillings left (91). This detailed account of her
14 Some critics state this in otherwise excellent studies of Rhys’ work. Angier points this out in Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 266. In her comment Angier focuses on the individual, but the text of the novel seems to stress the intertwining of the condition of the individual with the social context.
financial situation goes on until after her return to Paris and the novel ends with her
“borrowing” one hundred francs from Mr Mackenzie.15
Norah is almost as poor. The first thing Mr Horsfield imagines about her is “No money. No bloody money,” and he is right: “Norah … was labelled for all to see. She was labelled
“Middle class. No money” (ALMM, 42, 53). She has eight pounds to last a month: “count up for yourself” (53). When her mother dies she cannot afford a choir at her funeral.
Norah’s being so poor must mean that Uncle Griffiths does not help her; and indeed we are told in the story that he does not. “[T]he truth is,” he says, “that I haven’t got any money”
(though “if he had he would not give it to Julia, certainly not, but to her sister Norah, … because she was a fine girl and she deserved it”) (60). Within the text, that turns out to be not the truth, at all; but the result is that even the ‘good’ sister gets no money from the safe rich male of the family. The only money she will get will be female money, her mother’s and her Aunt Sophie’s (76). This is the usual female money, enough for the organist, but not for the choir. It will be enough for Norah “to do what she likes” or at least to go away, once they are dead; but it is not enough to pay for any help now, and free her from years of slavery.
This third aspect both Julia and Norah come to realize in relation to society: that men have the money and the power, is repeated so often by the narrator, that its depiction becomes almost absurd. This is, of course, exactly what it is and the reader notices this, too. In the story, the men do not deliberately oppress and crush the women with the money issue, but they do not share their money either. They give women just enough to keep them alive, never enough to buy pleasure or freedom. In this way, the family “back their approval” of Norah, “but not in any spectacular fashion”; and so Mr Mackenzie gives Julia not the lump sum she asks for, but only the carefully judged allowance, “receipt of which” she must every week “acknowledge and oblige” (ALMM, 14, 16, 21). Men make the decisions, which women can only accept. Julia’s and Norah’s father similarly took their mother from her South American home to cold grey England, then promptly died and left her to his unhelpful brother. And, thus Julia herself is “let down” by all her lovers from the age of nineteen, “five or six times over” (79).
With such a social structure, it is no wonder that both Julia and Norah experience a
‘nothingness,’ or that Julia finds it difficult to get in touch with her ‘real self’ again. In the bourgeois social system represented in the novel, genuine feelings are discouraged and sensitivity is resented; and, in spite of its supposed to be around 1929, most women still do not have access to money, freedom, or some kind of individuality. Rhys was unashamedly straightforward in her bleak depiction of the negative aspects of contemporary society. She
15 The examples in the rest of the story are as follows: Her mother dies and Norah gives Julia a ring worth one pound. Norah is always willing to give her a pound for it, if she needs money; this to prevent Julia from pawning it. The precise value of the ring is not indicated (96-97); the next example is that she gets through the following two days, because Mr Horsfield buys her suppers. Then Mr James sends her twenty pounds; she pays her bill and goes back to Paris (125); Mr Horsfield sends her ten pounds there, which once again she spends on clothes (130-131); at the end, she is completely broke again, and “borrows” one hundred francs from Mr Mackenzie (138).
was also early in her emphasis on the importance of money. The feminist movements did not make this an issue in society in general until the 1960s.16
6.2: MAKE-UP AND CLOTHES Make-up
The question that is thus raised by the novel is: ‘how can women brace themselves against such a society?’ In Rhys’ novel, the main character Julia is portrayed as using certain role- attributes to ward off unpleasantness. As with the other novels, it is especially these attributes that characterize the social roles of the female protagonists in relation to the class specific context. Clothes remain the main attribute referring to the social roles and the class divisions connected with them, but there is also another attribute that deserves mentioning within this context, namely make-up. That make-up has not been referred to before has historical reasons. Maggie Angelogou indicates that the cosmetic revolution only started around 1910, with the arrival of the Russian ballet in Paris. This ballet inspired audiences with its dancers’ made up faces. And in 1915 Marcus Levy invented the metal container for lipstick. The cosmetics industry began to flourish in the 1920s and onward, and then became one of the main growth industries in Western economies.17
The wide availability of cosmetics in the twentieth century also introduces a change in thought about the nature and stability of identity, especially female identity. The most optimistic interpretation saw make-up as a sign of liberation. Kathy Peiss, for example, points out that “[s]ocial identities that had once been fundamental to woman’s consciousness, fixed in parentage, class position, conventions of respectability, and sexual codes, were now released from small swiveling cylinders.”18 Overall, Peiss opposes a too limited feminist view which mainly stresses the fashion industry’s possible oppression of women. Instead, Peiss links the use of cosmetics with a positive development, namely the idea that identity may result from an individual style and become a matter of performance.
New discourses of metamorphosis and self-realization emerged, as well.19 Within this context, cosmetics was regarded as a feature of women’s liberation, part of an enlightened and rationalized narrative of social progress.
There were also studies of cosmetic femininity that saw make-up as a mask. These interpreters of cosmetics did not embrace the cosmetic surface as a new and subversive site of female agency, but instead reflected on its ambivalence as a symbol of women’s modernity. The mask, namely, defines femininity as appearance, and as such it associates femininity with the rise of an alienated individualism, a modern fall away from an earlier,
16 Virginia Woolf was another female author of the time who stressed this. Some of her works in which this issue occurs are the essay collections Women & Writing (1925) and The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, and her two books of feminist polemic A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938).
17 Maggie Angelogou, A History of Make-up (New York: Macmillan, 1970) 115-125.
18 Kathy Peiss, “Introduction,” Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (New York:
Henry Holt, 1998) 3-4.
19 Rishona Zimring, “The Make-up of Jean Rhys’s Fiction,” Novel (Spring 2000): 220.
wholeness of experience.20 The female mask represents both a more flexible female identity and the woman’s alienation in a market economy that thrives on women’s commodification and consumption.
In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, the cosmetic mask is used by characters to display, question, and protect the construction of female identity. The story makes visible the confrontation of existential and practical conditions concerning women’s modern urban existence, calling into question the make-up of women, but also considering the possible ambiguity one might create with an interplay of natural or made-up faces. The choice between the alternation of and the interaction between the various ‘faces’ a character may show allows a more flexible personality. Such an approach can protect and expose the individual, be deceptive or real, and may create a less fixed character than before. It can allow a more agile personality, who may adapt better to the more complex circumstances of society in the 1930s.21
In the novel, it is the female protagonist Julia Martin who most often uses make-up. Julia herself is quite aware of the possible functions make-up may have. Early in the story, the narrator relates:
She made herself up elaborately and carefully; yet it was clear that what she was doing had long ceased to be a labour of love and had become partly a mechanical process, partly a substitute for the mask she would have liked to wear. (ALMM, 11)
The make-up items Julia most frequently uses are: rouge, powder, and make-up for the eyes.22 There is not a day that she goes without make-up, though she sometimes forgets to take it off at night, with the result of looking awful in the morning. Yet, such a depiction of Julia might also say something about Julia’s personality. The contrast between the mask and Julia’s self seems to disappear. Very often, rather than have her moods decide how she feels, her feelings seem to depend on her looks. If Julia believes that she looks ugly, she immediately powders her nose, in order to look, and thus feel, better. Julia only feels confident, when the image is immaculate.
It is noteworthy that in trying to find out “the truth about [herself] and about the world and about everything that one puzzles and pains about all the time,” Julia seems to resort to a mask (ALMM, 41). She thus seems to disconnect herself from her real self. Julia’s tendency to dissociate herself whenever she is humiliated or hurt seems to develop into a consciously used technique to protect her core being. Rishona Zimring believes that Rhys develops this strategy to,
use the cosmetic mask in order to fashion a literary voice of sardonic distance and wry critique and constructs a female subject who can step
20 Terry Castle “Introduction” Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth- Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1986).
21 The theme of the mask was also present in eighteenth century literature and in prose from the nineteenth century. I have already referred to Terry Castle’s study which examines literature from the eighteenth century. An interesting study that compares the Victorian blush with its modern opposite rouge is Mary Ann O’Farrell’s Telling Complexions (Durham: Duke UP, 1997).
22 Examples can be found on the following pages in ALMM: 8, 11 (kohl).
outside and observe the economic system in which beauty plays a part.
(Zimring, 217)
The introduction of make-up gives Julia the possibility to develop a more distanced, critical, and independent personality. Instead of just symbolizing a certain social role, the role attribute seems to gather another layer of meaning when it is consciously used, not only by the narrator, but also by the protagonist.
Throughout the story, Julia struggles with the opposition between her public, role-bound, made-up self, and her private, or ‘real’ self. This real self is not explicitly mentioned or described, but is referred to through a range of metaphors (childhood, nature, animality, flame).23 All of these metaphors seem to refer to the core being of Julia, a part where she is (or was) still innocent, pure and undamaged by society. Julia is extremely sensitive concerning her ‘real self.’ To stress Julia’s vulnerability in this context the narrator frequently exaggerates the importance of make-up, until it becomes slightly absurd. Whilst talking to Mr Horsfield, her future lover, Julia powders her face, seeming to him as completely in control, even “furtive and calculating” (ALMM, 31). When they drive to his hotel in a taxi, she powders again, “carefully” (35). Worried and trying to get his attention, she makes “her inevitable, absent-minded gesture of powdering her face” (65). Concerned that Horsfield might think that she is ugly, she takes out “her little powder box, open[s] it and look[s] at herself in the mirror” (66). Horsfield even refers to make-up in the note he writes for Julia as he leaves her room after they made love: “I kiss your lovely hands and your lovely dark eyelids (what is the stuff you put on them?)” (112). Even now Julia cannot have a natural face.
Julia’s habits are already suggested in the novel’s first scene. This scene opens with an panoptic impression of her room, showing the reader the mirror with its “toilet things – an untidy assortment of boxes of rouge, powder, and make-up for the eyes” (ALMM, 8). We witness Julia putting on make up quite regularly and the dramatic question that is gradually developed in the text is: will Julia become a mask or will the use of make-up set her free. In general, this question is especially relevant in Julia’s connection with the men in the story.
As make-up can be used to make a woman more attractive to a man, Julia’s identification with the mask might mean her surrender to the role of kept woman. A more conscious and more subtle use of make-up might indicate her awareness of the available options make-up offers. Make-up might also give her a means to play with her personality, to consciously create various shapes with different functions. Such functions might range from display to protection. In any case, there will be a selection from the available options in which the desired, rejected, or created images may interact. This interaction may create a less straightforward, but also a more volatile or nimble personality that can adapt better to the complex circumstances Julia is confronted with.
The irony in relation to the portrayed use of make-up is that the narrator sometimes seems to overrule Julia’s attempts to save herself by exaggerating Julia’s use of make-up. Rather than make her look more beautiful, and employ make-up to create an image of wholeness, symmetry, and idealized beauty, the narrator exaggerates Julia’s make up (lips too red, powder used too often); or by portraying her as making herself up badly. Instead of being a
23 Examples of these metaphors in ALMM can be found on the following pages: 52, 57, 77, 101, 112, 115, 121 (childhood), 97 (animality), 94 (flame).
liberating force, the attribute then begins to limit Julia and causes her to be criticized. With all the make-up, and the irregular clothes, Julia is linked by most other characters to the social role of “mistress,” and even referred to as a “tart” (ALMM, 85).
It is true that Julia has had an irregular career. After her arrival in London, Norah’s first comment on seeing Julia is, “She doesn’t even look like a lady now. What can she have been doing with herself?” (ALMM, 53). When she visits Uncle Griffiths, he can infer from the page-boy’s reaction that Julia’s appearance is quite the opposite of a lady (56-57). And at the end of the story, Mr Mackenzie notices how women can lose their looks quite suddenly:
She looked untidy. There were black specks in the corners of her eyes.
Women go phut quite suddenly, he thought. A feeling of melancholy crept over him. (ALMM, 137)
These judgments would hurt such a sensitive character as Julia. The social role of mistress, namely, is completely unacceptable for bourgeois society, and people around her do not hesitate to show their disapproval. There is no longer the pretense of her surroundings or her family to accept or tolerate Julia; a tendency that we still saw in Edith Wharton’s novel, The Age of Innocence. Julia’s situation, of course, is quite different and she is also from another social stratum. She belongs to the lower middle classes. It is not stated what type of education she has had, but it is clear that she is not a member of a powerful family. On the contrary, Julia is hated by her family, ignored by her former lovers, and left without any social or economic protection.
What is particularly striking about the description of the use of make-up in the development of social criticism is the way it reflects a conflict between the public and the private self.
On the one hand, we see Julia powdering herself mechanically; but on the other hand, she is quite self-conscious about the use of make-up as a ‘mask,’ and thus as a metaphor for the public self, behind which stands the private. She reminisces about a Modigliani painting in the studio of a woman artist,
A sort of proud body, like an utterly lovely proud animal. And a face like a mask, a long, dark face, and very big eyes. The eyes were blank, like a mask, but when you had looked at it a bit it was as if you were looking at a real woman, a live woman” (ALMM, 40)
Julia even identifies with the painting, when she states:
I felt as if the woman in the picture were laughing at me and saying: “I am more real than you. But at the same time I am you. I’m all that matters of you.” (ALMM, 41)
It is true that in the role of mistress the mask and the lovely body are all that would matter of Julia, but Julia does not really want that. She is pushed into that role again and again, because she has no money. Yet, her real self seems to be protesting constantly against this stereotyping. It is too limited to state that the role-attribute make-up fully characterizes Julia and solely links her with a certain social role; Julia herself also consciously uses make-up in an attempt to rebel. Throughout the story there seems to be a discrepancy between Julia’s own attempt to save herself, and the narrator’s more objective interpretation of her position. Julia’s absorbed manner of applying make-up seems to be ‘overruled’ as a
strategy to protect herself by the narrator’s interpretation of the effects of these efforts. The narrator stresses the frequency of the use of make-up, the wrong application or the exaggeration and the distorted image that results from that. Julia’s looks become more and more grotesque. Yet, this image finally evolves into a steady voice of irony and sarcasm which is mainly applied to criticize patriarchy.
An explanation concerning the origin of this technique is given by Cynthia Davis. Davis studies the Caribbean influences on the work of Jean Rhys.24 Amongst those influences are techniques such as parody, satire, and masquerade. She examines the history of these techniques and concerning masquerade she points out that within the Caribbean local women had only a few options to ventilate their anger against the colonizers. One of them was the carnival performances. Such performances were not simply entertainment, but were
“modes of resistance to an unjust and exploitative system” (Davis, 5). As a child, Rhys would watch these carnival parades from the window, and she recalls that:
In the afternoon, from four to six, the singing, dancing mobs thronged the streets. I used to hang out of an upstairs window and watch … Dancing, swaying people, dressed in every colour of the rainbow … the women- masks were powdered and scented. You could see the powder like bloom on the dark skin of their necks and arms … (the dancers) passed under the window, singing, headed by three musicians … I used to think, “Imagine being able to do that – to dance along the street in the sun … dressed in red or yellow, to concertina music; and to sing and shout your defiance.25
One of the few options the poor black population had to express its anger was in this context. With white powdered faces and carefully chosen clothes the local women could express their frustration. In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Rhys uses the trope of masking for a similar purpose. The character Julia shows her defiance with a thick layer of make-up, and she also shouts her defiance, as we shall see later on (in section 6.3). What is noteworthy in the application of the technique is that Rhys also introduces a narrator who has a different point of view concerning the effects of Julia’s attempts at rebellion. As readers, we alternately zoom in to Julia’s desperate attempts to save herself or to the more general depiction of her plight by the narrator. We witness Julia’s plunging against her fate.
Humor and parody are aspects of the masquerade technique that are used to underline the apparent hopelessness of Julia’s struggle. Though the representation of the use of make-up sometimes seems to lean towards a means to show sarcasm and aggression, the overall depiction of Julia’s situation remains quite desolate.
The other female protagonist’s struggle with society is represented in a similarly bleak way, and Norah, Julia’s mirror image, does not even use a role-attribute to protect herself. Norah does not use any make-up, “She was pale, her colourless lips pressed tightly together into an expression of endurance. She seemed tired” (ALMM, 51, 75). Throughout the story she presents only one image, that of the hard-working and suffering daughter; a “slave” she calls herself (75-76). It is not that Norah is not aware of her own appearance:
24 Cynthia Davis, “Jamette Carnival and Afro-Caribbean Influences on the Work of Jean Rhys,”
Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 3.2 (Fall 2005): 1-22.
25 Jean Rhys, Lost Island; cited in Davis, 10.
Then she had got up and looked at herself in the glass. She had let her nightgown slip down off her shoulders, and had a look at herself. She was tall and straight and slim and young – well, fairly young. She had taken up a strand of her hair and put her face against it and thought how she liked the smell and the feel of it. She had laughed at herself in the glass and her teeth were white and sound and even. Yes, she had laughed at herself in the glass. Like an idiot.Then in the midst of her laughter she had noticed how pale her lips were; and she had thought: ‘My life’s like death. It’s like being buried alive. It isn’t fair, it isn’t fair. (ALMM, 75)
In a scene similar to Julia’s watching of the painting, Norah judges herself in the mirror. In assessing her own mirror image, Norah notices the youth and the strength of it, but she also immediately recognizes the hopeless situation she is in. Her body, her person is used in a different way than Julia’s is. She is not an object of physical attraction to men, but her body is made subservient nonetheless. She slaves to take care of their ailing mother and gives up her freedom, youth, and happiness. Norah does not consciously use a role-attribute to protect herself. Role-attributes do not interest her; but she does use a technique to prevent herself from being injured. She protects herself and her status by doing the right thing.
Everybody always said to her: ‘You’re wonderful, Norah, you’re wonderful. I don’t know how you do it.’ It was a sort of drug, that universal, that unvarying admiration – the feeling that one was doing what one ought to do, the approval of God and man. It made you feel protected and safe (ALMM, 75)
Norah is aware that people assume that she should be doing this anyway; and, in practice, nobody really helps. Yet, throughout the story Norah fulfils the social role of caring daughter to perfection. The absence of make-up and the bleak and aging image underline the social role of caretaker. Yet, the narrator again seems to have a different interpretation of a character’s situation. Norah perfectly sticks to the accepted social roles; but instead of being grateful, the society depicted in the novel does not even react. It mostly ignores women like Norah and Norah herself is unhappy and frustrated and very conscious of the fact that she has not been able to develop her own individuality. The only real consolation she has is Aunt Sophie and her mother’s money:
And then she had begun to think – in a dull, sore sort of manner – about Aunt Sophie’s will, and the will her mother had made. And that at long last she would have some money of her own and be able to do what she liked. (ALMM, 76)
Norah is thirty-one and, so far, all her life has been spent in serving others. The lack of rouge and powder reflects her complete surrender to the caretaker role. Julia, at least, is depicted as having had a “shot at the life I wanted,” she has “had good times – lots of good times,” and when she was married, her husband “gave [her] lovely things – but really lovely things” (ALMM, 60, 82). This is what Norah envies her for, but she would never adopt such a life style herself. She does not like make-up, she refers to Julia’s “hateful, blackened eyelids.” She herself shows the world a “huge stupid face,” and she is treated without much respect, accordingly (98). Without any ironic distance, she is quite vulnerable and basically destined to be coaxed by others indefinitely.
Clothes
Throughout the story, the impression made by the role attribute of make-up is supported by the use of clothes. The female protagonist Julia is very interested in clothes, but she does not have that much money, and when she buys clothes, she goes to second hand stores or to department stores like Galeries Lafayette (ALMM, 44, 131). The result of this is that her clothes are either old-fashioned, or too shabby (32, 44).
Julia realizes this, and she is again very sensitive to people’s disapproval of her. When she visits Uncle Griffiths, she thinks:
‘Of all the idiotic things I ever did, the most idiotic was selling my fur coat.’
She began bitterly to remember the coat she had once possessed. The sort that lasts for ever, astrakhan, with a huge skunk collar. She had sold it at the time of her duel with Maître Legros.
She told herself that if only she had had the sense to keep a few things, this return need not have been quite so ignominious, quite so desolate. People thought twice before they were rude to anybody wearing a good fur coat; it was protective colouring, as it were.
(ALMM, 57)
Again, the character Julia herself is very much aware of what, in this case, the function of clothes may be; but she also simply likes clothes:
She thought of new clothes with passion, with voluptuousness. She imagined the feeling of a new dress on her body and the scent of it, and her hands emerging from long black sleeves. (ALMM, 15)
Gabrielle Chanel Dress c. 1927
Collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute Inv. AC 76 05 92-26-1
She is familiar with the current fashion and realizes that a dress she has just bought is “too short for the prevailing fashion.”26 Yet, she only has minimal resources and she still uses clothes in a better and more conscious way than Norah does. During their first meeting, Norah states:
And who’s better dressed – you or I?’ said Norah. A fierce expression came into her eyes. Julia said, bursting into a loud laugh: ‘Yes, d’you know why that is? Just before I came over here I spent six hundred francs on clothes, because I thought that if I was too shabby you’d all be ashamed of me and would give me the cold shoulder. Of course, I didn’t want to risk that happening, did I?’ (ALMM, 54)
In spite of her poor background, Julia has developed a better sense of taste, and a more conscious use of certain mannerisms than her sister. She wears silk dresses, she is very conscious about the correct wear of accessories such as expensive shoes, and matching gloves; and she almost always wears a hat, when she goes out.27 Julia thinks about the use of clothing more than the other characters do; doubtless because of the unusual or special way in which it affects her in her dealings with the other characters. Julia is more of an outsider. At the same time, more than with the use of make-up, clothes make her happy:
Anything might happen. Happiness. …
In her mind she was repeating over and over again, like a charm: ‘I’ll have a black dress and hat and very dark grey stockings.’
Then she thought: ‘I’ll get a pair of new shoes from that place in the Avenue de l’Opera. The last ones I got there brought me luck.
A ring with a green stone for the forefinger of her right hand. (ALMM, 131)
Julia tries to use fashion to make her look like a lady. At the same time, clothes seem to offer her a form of consolation; and just as the use of make-up seems to acquire more functions in the course of the novel, we can see this tendency with clothes.
The character Norah is not interested in clothes and the narrator stresses this fact by mainly depicting her in one dress, a “pale-green dress with a red flower fixed in the lapel of the collar. But the dress had lost its freshness, so that the flower looked pathetic” (ALMM, 51, 87). This phrase is repeated several times throughout the novel, and it emphasizes Norah’s shortcomings with the use of clothes. Norah does not have a sense of style, and she does not have that much money either. Most of the money that she has is used for the medical bills and the money that is left provides hardly enough to keep her in clean linen. She is
“scrupulously, fiercely clean, but with all the daintiness and the prettiness perforce cut out”
(53). Norah does not make a conscious effort to look and dress any better than she does. All of her energy is spent on caring for her mother. The only accessory that is mentioned in relation to her is a hat (70). But wearing the hat with her coat when she goes out is more a habit and an attempt to keep warm, than an effort to play with clothes, or to create a certain image.
26 ALMM, 44; Julia experiences something similar concerning a coat, 12.
27 Examples of this can be found in ALMM on: 29, 50, 86, 118, 131.
The only jewelry that is described in connection with Norah is a ring. Norah gives this ring to Julia, after their mother’s cremation; it is “a thin gold ring with a red stone in it” (ALMM, 96). This seemingly kind gesture is followed by the hateful remark that Julia must never pawn the ring, and that, if she does, Norah will always give her a pound for it. The image that Norah presents is hardly that of an angel and it is as cold, bare, and frigid as her behavior. With such a depiction of Norah’s plight, the narrator seems to want to stress the uneventfulness of Norah’s existence. The monotony of her daily routines becomes apparent and her frustration is shown, for example, in her behavior towards Julia. Yet, this overall depiction of the situation of both women raises the representation of the contemporary social context to a different level of understanding for the reader. The thematization of the contemporary norm and value system makes its limitations for women very obvious to the reader.
6.3: ANGRY YOUNG WOMEN
Julia and Norah present different types of behavior in contexts that are strictly coded.
Neither woman presents the ideal picture of feminine behavior, but Norah’s behavior is presented as less socially criticized than Julia’s. Both women live on the fringes of bourgeois society. With regard to the space allotted to her, Julia always tries to transcend and stretch the limits of it as much as possible. Julia, for example, likes men and she likes sex.
Between the 1860s and World War I, Britain passed a number of laws linked to the Contagious Diseases and Defence of the Realm Acts. Such legislation intended to control prostitution and venereal disease; but in reality discouraged the presence of single women in public. Because of such sexualized stigmatization, ‘respectable’ women married and accepted confinement in the home. According to William Harris, Assistant Commissioner of Police in late-nineteenth century London, “any woman who goes to places of public resort, and is known to go with different men, although not a common streetwalker, should be considered a prostitute.”28 Such branding was used freely, because female promiscuity was supposed to be inherent. A London policeman in 1882, for example, argued that “in every large town without exception, where a woman has a chance of this course and runs no danger of serious loss or inconvenience … she will embrace it” (Emery, 96-97).
As Rhys had learned from her own work experience, these laws disregarded the fact that women barely earned subsistence wages in legitimate jobs. In 1911, women made up less than 28% of the labor force, and of that, 66% worked in manufacturing or personal service
28 Mary Lou Emery, Jean Rhys at ‘World’s End’; Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile (Austin:
University of Texas, 1990) 96.
André Perugia Pumps 1920-30s Collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute Inv. AC 8948 93-33 AB
(Emery, 92). During World War I, when clerical jobs became available, Rhys was one of the women who earned one-third the salary paid to men in the same jobs (Emery, 92). Her earlier jobs, as a chorus girl and artist’s model, were not only poorly paid, but were considered forms of prostitution.
When Julia in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie rejects the traditional social roles for women, but insists on the right to be out of doors in cafés, streets, taxis, and restaurants, she threatens social stability and inspires disdain in her family, former lovers, landladies, and strangers. She still goes her own way; and, even though she does not find a man who will faithfully continue to fulfil her needs, a true love affair still seems to be one of her main goals. Julia’s need in this context is both psychological and physical. Rhys was one of the first women writers to express an unabashed, direct acceptance of woman’s desire for sexual love.29 Julia is not very lucky in her choice of men, and there are too many social barriers to grant her happiness, even in Paris. Like Edna Pontellier in The Awakening, she finds out that it is just ‘not done’ for a woman to pick and choose a partner freely, or to enjoy sex.
When she openly admits to Uncle Griffiths that she left her husband, he is astounded.
“Nonsense,” he says; and later on: “Why didn’t you make him settle something on you?”
(ALMM, 59). It is the practical side of marriage that is stressed, and within that context the social and economic aspects seem most important. If relationships are formed because of love, or worse, lust, such behavior is considered ‘deviant’ and severely judged.
However, Rhys’ representation stresses that the male is criticized no less in such situations.
When Mr Horsfield leaves Julia’s boarding house at five o’clock in the morning after they have made love, he is spotted by a policeman.
When he lifted his head he saw a policeman, who was standing on the pavement a few paces away, staring disapprovingly at him. The policeman stood with his legs very wide apart and his mouth pursed, looking extremely suspicious. (ALMM, 113)
The next night something similar happens when both Julia and Mr Horsfield are discovered on the staircase. Now it is the landlady who criticizes both of them.
Norah’s behavior in relation to men is quite different. She does not have a sexual interest in men, and the only men she meets in the course of the story are Uncle Griffiths and a clergyman. Norah does like the company of women, though; and living in the flat in Acton with her is a Miss Wyatt. She is described as follows:
The door on the second floor was opened by a middle-aged woman. Her brown hair was cut very short, drawn away from a high, narrow forehead, and brushed to lie close to her very small skull. Her nose was thin and arched. She had small, pale-brown eyes and a determined expression. She wore a coat and skirt of grey flannel, a shirt blouse, and a tie. …
29 Mellown (1972) 464. A similar openness about sexuality has in this dissertation already been noticed in relation to Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening, Chapter 4.
