The Literary Voyage of Jean Rhys: Characteristics of Modernist Women's Literature and its Revival in Contemporary Novels

Abstract

This project aims to uncover how the modernist female literary imagination persists in contemporary novels today. This will be exemplified through using Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys as a primary reference and comparator text. Using findings drawn from Voyage in the Dark, this project compares Rhys’s novel to contemporary novels Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney and The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride. These similarities come in thematic forms of women’s autonomy, which extend to body and identity. I explain that the structural and thematic elements found in modernist women’s literature reflect the negation of women’s autonomy over their identities and bodies in exchange for societal survival and how those characteristics recur in women’s contemporary novels. Investigations of similar aspects that represent Rhys’s modernist influence include forms of deviances in prose and individualism in characters. I argue that despite the modernist and contemporary period being so far removed from each other, women's novels in British and Irish society reflect the negation of women’s autonomy over their identities and bodies in exchange for societal survival. My argument engages the emerging theory of ‘metamodernism’ and how this analytical frame helps us understand experimentalism in contemporary literature. Specifically, metamodernism refers to how modernism influences the exploration of ambiguity, creative paradox, and disillusionment in contemporary novels. Through this line of influence and critical thought, I thus argue that a female literary perspective persists from the modernist era that exemplifies how patriarchal structures dictate women’s self-identity and reflects on the inescapability of gender-based oppression. This phenomenon is tracked through formal distinctions seen in both the modernist and the contemporary texts I examine. My analysis compares the themes of a woman’s arc of independence and individuality in the 19th century versus the 21st in order to reveal how women grapple with their lack of autonomy in identity and body in literature across these time periods.