Communal Pleasure in Jean Rhys’s Fiction

Laura Frost’s The problem with pleasure: Modernism and its discontents has blazed a new trail and annexed the concept of pleasure to the notion of modernism in her reading of Jean Rhys’s fiction. For all her meticulously traced genealogy of pleasure, however, communal pleasure is conspicuously absent. This paper argues against a simplistic generalization of Rhys’s treatment of various kinds of pleasure. It is true that Rhys’s female protagonists all make choices that steer them away from pleasure and happiness, but a close-up look at the socio-historical contexts of their life shows that they are often forced to make such choices rather than doing so of their own accord. It is also true that they deserve sympathy, but this sympathy is not earned through their refusal to take part in collective pleasure, as Frost has claimed, but by their sufferings caused by mercenary men who take advantage of their poverty and dislocations, which reflect or refract such socio-historical factors as intense industrialization and globalized colonization. Each of Rhys’s novels contains some moments, however brief, that throw insight into her female protagonist’s genuine love for the pleasure afforded either in nature or in art whose appreciation cannot be achieved unless through taste. And they are capable of sharing such pleasure with people around, and even with strangers, which implies a sense of communal well-being and a yearning for communal feelings. Indeed, part of Rhys’s contribution to modernism is her redefinition of pleasure, but an integral part of that reconceptualization is her reshaping of communal pleasure.