Analysis Of Mary Lou Emery's Modernist Crosscurrents

In Mary Lou Emery’s Modernist Crosscurrents, Emery criticizes the outsider status of Jean Rhys. An outsider as female in a male-dominant literary world, as a West Indian writer, and as a European modernist. In demonstrating the intersecting importance of cultural history and literary history, Emery takes two approaches. In her first approach, she considers the European approach of the “self’ and the “masquerade or character” In her second approach, Emery considers the uncertainty of cultural identity and the conflicting role it plays in the historical and social force of a West Indian writer. Emery explains how Rhys became marginalized and was never fully accepted in the male-dominated West Indies, never accepted within the feminist community, …show more content…
By virtue of her colonial background, Emery categorizes Rhys as an outsider. Emery points out the conflicting truth of Rhys’s writing prior to 1927. Rhys is said to have “hated [England’s] climate and values”, but returned to England anyway. Emery says “to readers of her fiction-as-her-life, such contrariness, along with passivity, masochism, victimage--drifting aimlessly, feeling fated to suffer helplessly--characterize Rhys and her protagonists as if they mirrored one another clearly” Emery brings into question the theme of masquerade, she argues the line between the actual and the created is so blurred that it is difficult to distinguish the mask from the masquerade. Essentially, the masquerade is influenced by Rhys’s life whilst the mask is representative of the characters. Emery also distinguishes the play between aspects of the authentic self discovery and disguise that shapes the narrative. Emery argues her writing is therefore not accepted by the European modernist writing community because she was also treated as the “other”; this idea of colonial difference is prevalent in her early …show more content…
Both are discussed side-by-side as they cannot be discussed without the other. Emery points out Wide Sargasso Sea’s ability to provide a context missing in her previous novels. Emery says Rhys finally accounts for “female vulnerability of the protagonist and her specifically feminine defense of beauty…” also arguing that “she seems all the more passive and victimized, but clearly driven out to drive this quintessential feminity” Although Emery accounts for this feminine empowerment in Wide Sargasso Sea, her previous claims highlight Rhys’s inability to be accepted by the feminist writing community. Therefore, she is unable to effectively support this claim as she only discusses this change for one