A comparison between Jean Rhys and Una Marson Essay

Voyage into the MetropolisExile in the Works of blue jean Rhys and Una Marson.In Jonathan Millers 1970 production of Shakespe atomic number 18s The Tempest the character of Caliban was cast as d givehearted, therefore reigniting the link between the Prospero/Caliban range as the coloniser/colonized. It was non a new-fashi cardinald idea, indeed Shakespeare himself envisaged the play set on an island in the Antilles and the play would begin had great appeal at the time when new territories were cosmos disc all overed, conquered, plundered and providing seemingly inexhaustible r pointue for the colonisers. What is secernateicularly interesting, however, is how powerful the play later becomes for discourse on compoundism. This trope of Caliban is used by George Lamming in The Pleasures of Exile where he worryns Prospero in his affinityship with Caliban, to the jump slave-traders who used physical force and then their culture to subjugate the African and the Carib, overcomin g any rebellion with a self righteous determinism. In The Pleasures of Exile Lamming sees Caliban asMan and other than man. Caliban is his convert, colonized by language, and excluded by language. It is precisely this gift of language, this render at faulting which has brought ab aside(a) the pleasure and the paradox of Calibans expatriation. Exiled from his gods, exiled from his nature, exiled from his own name Yet Prospero is afraid of Caliban. He is afraid because he knows that his encounter with Caliban is, largely, his encounter with himself. 1The Prospero/Caliban paradigm is a very relevant symbol for the colonizer/colonized situation of the westmost Indies that it nevertheless remains a paternal position. Where does that leave women of the Caribbean? It could be argued that the Caribbean woman has been even further borderlineized. That in making Caliban the model of the Caribbean man it is therefore providing him with a voice.Yet nowhere in the Tempest is there a egg- producing(prenominal) counterpart, rendering the Caribbean woman invisible as well as silent and ignoring an essential part of their historical culture. Another issue raised(a) here, is that Caribbean literary productions has for legion(predicate) years been male masterd. Just as the colonizer sought to ignore and marginalize their savage other so the Caribbean male has ignored their female counterpart. Opal Palmer Adisa, in exploring this issue, believes that it is out of this patriarchal structure, designed to make her an object, part of the landscape to be used and discarded as seen pass by the colonizer, that the Caribbean woman has emerged.2It was out of such a patriarchal structure that dungaree Rhys and Una Marson emerged. The writing of both(prenominal) women revise and expand theme and personae, subverting a colonial and patriarchal culture. ii women may exist in different ethnological and ontological realms exactly they both exist in realisms which have, at on e(a) time or another, attempt to censure, silence or ignore the ideals and interests of women3 Like many of their male Caribbean counterparts to succeed them, their writing was greatly influenced by voyaging into the colonial capital and living in exile. In this essay I will discuss the importance of that journey in seeking to find a voice, an identity, and even a language to dispute established tactual sensations of egotism, sexual practice and race indoors the colonial structure. But essential to their experience is their struggle. Naipaul recognised, in Rhys, the themes of isolation, an absence of society or community, the wizard of things falling apart, dependence, leaving.4 This could also be said of Marson.Jean Rhys was born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams on 24th August 1890, in Roseau, Dominica to a Creole acquire of Scottish descent and a Welsh father who was a doctor. Rhys left Dominica in 1907, aged sixteen and continued her education in a Cambridge female childs school and then at the honorary society of Dramatic Art which she left after cardinal terms. Rhys experienced olfactionings of alienation and isolation at both these institutions and these feelings were to stay with her for much of her life. Upon pursuing a public life as a chorus girl under a variety of names Rhys embarked on an affair with a man twenty years erstwhile(a) than herself and which lasted two years. It is broadly accepted that this early period of her capital of the United Kingdom life formed the structure for Voyage In The Dark, and comparable all of Rhyss novels, explores homelessness, dislocation, the marginal and the migrant. The character of Anna, equal most of her female protagonists exists in the demimonde of city life, living on the wrong side of respectability. What Rhys does effectively in this novel is to centralize the marginalized, those payoffs who give out nowhere, between cultures, between histories.5Una Marson was born in rural Jamaica in 1905 . Her father was a well respected Baptist minister and as a leave behind of his standing at bottom the community Marson had the opportunity to be meliorate on a scholarship at Hampton High School, a boarding school for mainly fresh, center of attention class girls. After finding employment as a stenographer, Marson went on to edit the Jamaican Critic, an established literary publication, and from 1928-1921, her own magazine The Cosmopolitan. Having established herself as a poet, playwright and womens activist Marson made the decision to travel to Britain.Her achievements in capital of the United Kingdom were impressive a social activist within the League of Coloured Peoples which led to her taking a post as secretary to the deposed Emperor Haile Selassie and later she was appointed as a BBC commentator. In reality, however, Marson, like Rhys found the voyage into the Metropolis very difficult. Facing blatant racial discrimination like so many due west Indian women migrants of the 1950s, Una found herself blocked at every turn. She complained and cried she felt lonely and humiliated,. 6 In spite of many literary and social connections she remained an isolated and marginal figure. Her metrical composition displays the uncertainty of heathen belonging where her language ties her to colonialism yet also provides her with a powerful withall with which to challenge it.In placing Rhys alongside Marson as pioneering female writers, it is outstanding to explore the notion of nationality, of be Caribbean and to question the grounds upon which such ideas are constructed. Both women were writing at the same time, having been born and educated in the British colonies. Both these writers, whose lives span the twentieth century, are situated at the crossroads of the colonial and post-colonial, the modern and post modern, where the threat of fascism and war result in anti colonial struggles and eventual decolonisation across the world. Their voyages from the col onies into the metropolitan focalise generate similar experiences.What is clear with both is that by journeying into the urban center, as women, they occupy a double marginal position within an already marginalized community. Their journey can be seen as an exploration of displacement where, agree to Edward W. Said, the intellectual exile exists in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the aged(prenominal), beset with half involvements and half attachments, nostalgic and sentimental at one level, an adept mimic or a secret outcast on the other.7 Rhys and Marson, having left the Caribbean are asking us to consider what it way of life to write from the margins. Within their figure out, both women challenge notions of womens place within society and womens place as a colonized subject in the metropolitan centre.The protagonist, Anna Morgan, in Voyage in the Dark, reflects Rhyss own multi indeterminate, multi conflicted identity. Anna, like Rhys is a face cloth descendent of British colonists and slave traders who occupy a unsound position of being inbetween. Hated by the disconsolates for their part in oppressing the slaves and continuing to cling on to that superior social position, they are also regarded by the mother sphere as the last vestiges of a degenerate part of their own history best forgotten. Moreover, 1930s England, still under the shadow of Victorian moralistic dicta, continued to judge harshly a juvenile woman without wealth, family, social position and with an odd accent.Throughout the novel Anna is identified with characters who are usually objectified and still in canonical arrive ats the chorus girl, the mannequin, the demimondaine.8 Much has been made of her reading of Zolas Nana and indeed there are many parallels between the two characters. Anna, like Nana becomes a prostitute and in the introductory version of Voyage in the Dark Anna like Nana dies very young. in that loca tion is of course the obvious anagrammatise of her name but, as Elaine Savory highlights, some interesting revisions by Rhys. Whereas Zola, in Nana, creates a character who brings about the downfall of upper class men not by dint of power but with only the unsophisticated currency of youth and raw female sexual activity9 Rhys, in Anna, creates a character who is herself undone by men.In Rhyss version the men who use her youth and apricot are for the most part evidently cowardly or absolute disreputable Anna herself begins as naively trusting, passes with a stage of self destructive trustlessness and passivity and ends, in Rhyss preferred, unpublished version, by dying from a botched abortion.10If we are to see Walter Jeffries as the original European, existing in a world viewed surely by himself as principally reproducible and reasonable then Rhys is, through this character, highlighting the degenerate aspect of utilize power to commodify and even destroy, thereby subvert ing the colonizers position in relation to the colonized.Through the character of Anna, Rhys explores those oppositions of Self and Other, male and female, pitch- opprobrious and uninfected. Even though she outwardly resembles the white European, enabling her, unlike Marson, to blend visually within capital of the United Kingdom, her standoff with the Caribbean sets her apart as between black and white cultures and as an exotic Other. This ambiguity of Annas position results in slippage. Anna and her family would have been regarded in the westmost Indies as the white colonizers. In England and in her relationship with Jeffries she becomes the colonized Other. In being read as the colonized subject Anna is continually having to adapt her world view and sense of identity to the perspective being imposed on her. A good example of this is the chorus girlss renaming her as the Hottentot aligning her more with the black African and demonstrating the homogenizing of the colonized stac ks by the colonizers.This is similar to Spivaks belief that so intimate a thing as private and human identity might be determined by the politics of imperialism.11 Interestingly, Hottentot is the former name for the Nama, a nomadic tribe of Southern Africa. A somewhat apt comparison which reflects Annas own nomadic existence as she moves from town to town as a chorus girl and from one bed sit to another. The term Hottentot developed into a uncomplimentary term during the Victorian era and became synonymous prototypically with wide hipped, big bottomed African women with oversized genitals and then with the sexuality of a prostitute.Jeffries is fully aware of the implications of the name Hottentot. In response to hearing Annas renaming he says, I hope you call them something worse back.12 Elaine Savory makes a strong connection between Annas renaming and her relationship with Jeffries, her eventual seducer. Whilst not looking at Annas body in an obvious way, eventually the transac tion between them is understood fully on his side to be a promise of sexual frenzy from a white woman whom he perceives as having an extra thrill presumably from companionship with racist constructions of black females in his culture.13Franz Fanon, in his bulk Black Skin, blank Masks perceives these complex colonial relations as being in a state of flux rather than fixed or static. In his introduction to Fanons text, Homi Bhabha highlights this point, stating that the familiar alignment of colonial subjectsBlack/ uncontaminating, Self/Otheris disturbedand the traditional grounds of racial identity are dispersed.14 So it is in the relationship between Jeffries and Anna. In transposing the colonizers stereotypical images of a black woman onto Anna he is disrupting and dispersing those traditional grounds of racial identity.Moreover, Anna is subconsciously enacting a mediated performance, aware of her impact upon him and the implications of her actions, in an attempt to adhere to h is prec erstptions of her. The relationship cannot be sustained on these fundamentally rocky preconceptions. Anna, both as a female and racial Other is penetrated by Jeffries and with the exchange of money is commodified. Without independent means Anna becomes that purchasable girl who is at the pity of and eventually becomes dependent upon the upper middle class Jeffries. The relationship between these two characters reflects Rhyss own location in the world where the watt Indies was at the time still a commodity of the British imperium.In another analysis of the colonial stereotype, Homi Bhabha challenges the limiting and traditional confidence of the stereotype as offering, at any one time, a secure point of identification on the part of the individual,15 in this case Jeffries and Hester. Bhabha does not argue that the colonizers stereotyping of the colonized Other is as a result of his security in his own identity or conception of himself but more to do with the colonizers o wn identity and authority which is in fact destabilized by contradictory responses to the Other. In order to maintain a powerful position it is important, according to Bhabha, for the colonizer to identify the colonized with the image he has already fixed in his mind. This image can be ambiguous as the colonized subject can be simultaneously familiar under the penetrable gaze of the all seeing, all powerful colonial gaze and be incomprehensible like the inscrutable Oriental. The colonized can beboth savageand yet the most obedient and dignified of servants he is the embodiment of rampant sexuality and yet innocent as a child he is mystical, primitive, simpleminded and yet the most worldly and accomplished liar , and the manipulator of social forces.16In short, for Bhabha, the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized is riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies which, when imposed upon the colonized Other, cause a crisis of identity. So it is with Anna. Jeffries upo n first meeting with the very young Anna can see that she is as innocent as a child and is most obedient sexually, but by her association with the Caribbean and the Hottentot as I have previously explored, she is subsequently attributed with being the embodiment of rampant sexuality resulting in his taking of her virginity, abandoning her to prostitution but also leading to as Veronica clegg observes a loss of temporal referents17Annas stepmother, Hester, also attempts to impose an identity upon Anna which not only conflicts with Annas own sense of identity but is also based around stereotypical perceptions. . Hester, whose voice represents a repressive English colonial law18 believes that Annas fathers troubles resulted from his having disconnected touch with everybody in England19 and that these severing of ties with the Imperial motherland is a signal to her that he was failing,20 losing his identity, reduced to the level of the black inhabitants of the island. This idea of be foulment and racial reduction is explored by Paul B. Rich who explains that there was a belief in the early twentieth century that white people in the tropics risked in the absence of continual cultural contacts with their temperate northern culture, being reduced to the level of those black races with whom they had made their unnatural home.21In Hesters eyeball this apparent loss of identity is also experienced by Anna. She continually criticizes her speech, her relationship with Francine the black servant, and also insinuates degenerative behaviour on the part of her family, particularly Uncle Bo. Hesters views reflect the growing disapproval in England at that time, of relationships between white people and the black population in the West Indies. Inter-racial relationships were discouraged for fear of contamination of the white Self. In voicing her disapproval of Annas friendship with Francine along with her continual use of the racist and derogatory term nigger, Hester is allu ding to the fact that, in her opinion, Anna, especially through her speech, has indeed been contaminated and reduced racially and that Annas association with Francine thwarts her attempts to reconnect her with the colonizers cultural contacts.Hester rails that she finds it inconceivable to get you Anna away from the servants. That awful sing-song voice you had Exactly like a nigger you talkedand still do. Exactly like that dreadful girl Francine. When you were jabbering away together in the pantry I never could tell which of you was let looseing.22 Hesters constant criticism only serves to undermine Annas real identity and dislocate her further from the Caribbean world she once inhabited and the alienating London world she is now experiencing. Her accent sets her apart, drifting between two worlds.Annas difficulties in negotiating these two worlds is a result of the return of the diasporic to the metropolitan centre where the perplexity of the living is most acutely experienced.23 This can certainly be seen in her response to the weather which, according to Bhabha, invokes the most changeable and imminent signs of national going away24 The novel opens withIt was as if a chill had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again. The colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave you right down inside yourself was different. Not just the remnant between heat and cold light, darkness purple, grey. But a expiration in the way I was frightened and the way I was happy. I didnt like London at first. I couldnt get used to the cold.25And later upon arriving in England with Hester she describes it as being divided into squares like pocket-handkerchiefs a small tidy look it had, everywhere fenced off from everywhere else 26and then in London where the dark houses all alike frowning down one after another27 Throughout the novel Anna continually experiences feelings of being enclosed. Many of the bedsits are restr icting and box-like. On one occasion she remarks that this damned modes getting smaller and smallerAnd about the rows of houses outside gimcrack, rotten-looking and all exactly alike.28 The many small rooms between which Anna moves emphasize her disempowerment through enclosed spaces. These spaces, in turn, serve as metaphors for the consequences in voyaging into the metropolitan centre. She is at once shut inside these small monotonous rooms and shut out from that world which has sought to colonize her. It is perhaps ironic that the further she moves into the centre of the city, ending up as she does on Bird roadway, just off Oxford Street , the more she is shut out and marginalized by that imperialist society.Her memories of the West Indies are in sharp contrast to her impressions of England. The images of home are always warm, vivid and exotic, persuasion of the walls of the Old Estate House, still standing, with moss on them. That was the tend. One ruined room for roses, one for orchids, one for ferns. And the honeysuckle all along the steep flight of move.29 When comparing the two worlds she remarks to herself that the colours are red, purple, blue , gold, all shades of green. The colours here are black, grey, dim-green, pale blue, the white of peoples faces like woodlice. 30 Her memory of home is experienced sensuously as she recalls the sights and smellsMarket Street smelt of the wind but the narrow street smelt of niggers and wood smoke and salt fishcakes fried in lard and the sound of the black women as they call out, salt fishcakes, all sweet an charmin, all sweet an charmin.31Anna attempts to convey this richness to Jeffries. His failure to appreciate the beauty she describes merely underlines the differences between the two. He expresses a preference for cold places remarking that The tropics would be altogether too lush.32 Jeffriess reaction to the West Indies in fact reflects the colonizers view that the ruined room for roses and orchids po rtray a disorder, a garden of Eden complete with its implications of moral decay and as Bhabha states, a tropical chaos that was deemed despotic and ungovernable and therefore worthy of the civilizing mission.33 Annas association with this world sets her up, in Walters eyes, as a figure representing a secret depravity promising forbidden desires. Anna, like the West Indies is something to be overpowered, enslaved and colonized, where the colonizer seeks to strip their identity and impose their own beliefs and desires.It is significant, therefore, that fol be slightding this scene Anna loses her virginity to Jeffries and recalls the memory of the mulatto slave girl, Maillotte Boyd, aged 18, whose record Anna once found on an old slave list at Constance.34 Like Maillotte Boyd, Anna is now merely a commodity and Jeffries has no intention of ever seeing her as an equal. Her purity, in his eyes isnt worth preserving as he already considers her the contaminated Other. By his actions he su cceeds in maintaining that patriarchal imperialism which relies on institutional forms of racial and national separateness. Anna, as a twentieth century white Creole, is no freer than the nineteenth century mulatto slave. Just as Maillotte Boyd is, as racially mixed, suspended between two races, so Anna as a white Creole is suspended between two cultures, leaving her dislocated.Annas voyage into the imperialist city leads to boundaries and codes of behaviour, language and dress being constantly imposed upon her. She is aware for example of the importance of clothes as a means of controlling her social standing and also her standing as a woman. Through her dress Anna almost becomes that elegant white lady, mimicking Londons female high society. For Jeffries, Anna represents the menace of extravaganza, which , according to Bhabha is a difference which is almost nothing but not quite and which turns to menace- a difference that is keep down but not quite.35 This mimicry serves to em power Anna as it in conclusion destabilises the essentialism of colonialist political orientation, resulting in Jeffries imposing upon Anna the identity of the West Indian Other This in turn leads to feelings of loss, alienation and dislocation, a rejection of being white and a desire to be black. I always wanted to be black.I was happy because Francine was there.Being black is warm and gay, being white is cold and sad.36 Annas association with Hester meant that she hated being white. Being white and getting like Hester, old and sad and everything.37 Yet the warmth she expresses in her memories of Francine are always normalize by her realisation that Francine disliked her because I Anna was white.38 Her feelings of being between cultures and feeling dislocated are never fully resolved. Annas voyage in the dark, reflects Rhyss own sense of exile and marginality as a white West Indian woman. Teresa OConnor remarks that Rhys, herself caught between places, cultures, classes and race s, never able to identify understandably with one or the other, gives the same marginality to her heroines, so that they reflect the unique experience of dislocation of the white Creole woman.39The language used to express feelings of exile and loneliness, destitution and dislocation is both sparse and economic. It is neither decorative nor contrived, devoid of sentiment or without seeking sympathy. In commenting upon an essay written by Rhys discussing gender politics, Gregg writes that It is important to note her Rhyss belief that writing has a subversive potential. Resistancecan be carried out through writing that exposes and opposes the governmental and social arrangements.40 Helen Carr, in her exploration of Rhyss language believes thatRhys in her fictions unpicks and mocks the language by which the powerful keep control, while at the same time shifting, bending, re-inventing ways of using language to open up fresh possibilities of being.41Una Marson, another Caribbean to voya ge into the metropolis, also experienced loneliness, isolation and a struggle with the complexity of identity. Like Rhys, Marson fought with these feelings end-to-end her life, resulting in long periods of depression. Her belief in womens need for pride in their cultural heritage established Marson as the earliest female poet of substance to emerge in West Indian literature.42 She not only challenged received notions of womens place in society but also raised questions about the relationship of the colonized subject to the mother country43 there was a considerable amount of poetry emerging out of the West Indies around this time but most of it was dismissed as being not truly West Indian,44 the reason for this being partly because many of the writers were English but also because many of the styles used by these writers mimicked colonial forms. Many of Marsons early poetry reflects this mimicry showing a reliance upon the Romantics of the English poetic tradition, particularly She lley, Wordsworth and Byron. The metrical composition Spring in England reveals this indebtedness to the Romantics, including as it does a stanza where, having observed the arrival of Spring in London, the poet asksAnd what are daffodils, daffodilsDaffodils that Wordsworth praised?I asked. Wait for Spring,Wait for the Spring, the birds replied.I waited for Spring, and lo they came,A host of shining daffodilsBeside the lake beneath the trees(The Moth p6)45Clearly there are echoes of Wordsworths Daffodils throughout the stanza, reflecting the drive by colonialism through education to eradicate the West Indian selfhood. Yet for Marson this harnessing of English culture not only posed few problems but indeed was, I would argue, a necessary step in her voyage of self discovery. As seen with Rhys, mimicry was a subversive threat to colonial ideology, especially through language. Homi Bhabhas notion of mimicry seeks to explore those ambivalences of such destabilizing colonial and post-colo nial exchanges.The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority. The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly turns from mimicry a difference which is almost nothing but not quite to menace a difference that is almost total but not quite. And in that other scene of colonial power, where history turns to farce and presence to a part can be seen the twin figures of vanity and paranoia that repeat furiously, uncontrollably.46Bhabhas essay in recognising the power, the play and the dynamics between the colonizer and the colonized offers an secondary to the pessimistic view held by V.S. Naipaul who believed that West Indian culture was doomed to mimicry, unable to create anything original. Marsons mimicry of the Romantics could be seen as a preparation to enter the colonizers metropolis, and to attempt to assimilate into the colonizers world. In making that voyage to the metropolis, Una Marson succee ds in taking that step from the copy to the original. By remaining in Jamaica Marson risked remaining in an environment too rigidly ingrained by colonial prescriptions.Una Marsons voyage into the heart of the Empire, however, resulted in intense disappointment. For the first time, Marson experienced open racialism and according to Jarrett-McCauley The truth was that Una dreaded going out because people stared at her, men were curious but their gaze insulted her, even small children with short dimpled legs called her NiggerShe was a black foreigner seen only as strange and unwanted. This was the Fact of Blackness which Fanon was to analyse in Black Skins, White Masks(1952), that inescapable, heightening level of consciousness which comes from being dissected by white eyes. 47Unlike Rhys, Marson was finding it impossible to blend visually within London. Consciousness of her colour made Marson conscious of her marginality. This consciousness led her seriously to question the values of the mother country. Marsons work moved from mimicry to anti-patriarchal discourse, seen in her poem Politeness where she responds to the William Blake poem teeny-weeny Black Boy withThey tell usThat our skin is blackBut our hearts are whiteWe tell themThat their skin is whiteBut their hearts are black(Tropic Reveries p 44)The poem demonstrates Marsons growing resentment at being alienate by the colonial power. There is an uncertainty in her desire to both belong and to challenge, echoing Rhys in her sense of cultural unbelonging. Those anti-patriarchal feelings are present once more in her poem Nigger where she communicates the anger she feels at being abused and marginalized as the racial Other.They call me NiggerThose little white urchins,They laughed and shoutedAs I passed along the street,They flung it at meNigger Nigger NiggerShe retorts to this abuse furiously withYou who feel that you are sprungOf earths first blood, your eyesAre blinded now with arrogance.With ruthlessness you searedMy peoples flesh and now you stillWould crush their very mindAdd fierce insult to vilest injury.48In its repetition of the shocking term Nigger, Marson is confronting the white colonialists use of the word to exert power over and oppress the colonized. The violence of its use reflects the violence of their shared history where Of those who drove the Negroes / To their death in days of slavery, regard Coloured folk aslow and base.49 In highlighting this history of violence, oppression and slavery, Marson is attempting to invert this oppression and dislodge the notion of white supremacy, whilst attempting to negotiate a position from West Indian to African and in doing so, fashion an identity. By writing the poem in the first person singular and moving from They to You when addressing the white colonizers, Marson succeeds in concentrate herself and reversing the double star system of Self and Other.Nigger marks Marsons sharpened perspective on issues such as racism and id entity. Her voyage into the metropolitan centre triggers those emergent identifications and new social movementsbeingplayed out.50 It was a time in Marsons life where she was made to feel inadequate, lonely and humiliated but it also roused her to resist the corrosive force of her oppressive world.51 Nigger reveals this sense of belonging and not belonging felt by Marson, of being part of the empire but never part of the Motherland, yet it simultaneously challenges the very essentialism in which the colonial Self is rooted.Moreover, the hostility she experiences in many ways acknowledges the achievement of Marsons performance as a hybrid. Marsons frustration and anger was compounded by the fact that in being middle class and educated she possibly saw herself as a notch above the poor, black working class women from the old communities in Cardiff, Liverpool and London52 Marson explores this question of how middle class West Indians negotiate being educated and yet marginalized and e ven considered inferior in her play London Calling. The play, based on the experiences of colonial students in London charts the story of a group of expatriates who, upon being invited to the house of an aristocratic English family, dress up in outlandish native costume and speak in broken English.The play, a comedy, takes a light hearted look at the stereotypical images held by the British, at the same time countering the myth of black inferiority. There is, in the play, a curious twist as the students from Novoko are presented as black versions of the British in their dress and behaviour, mimic men and yet they themselves attempt to mimic their own folk culture. They are eventually discovered by one of the family, Larkspur, who then proposes marriage to Rita, one of the Novokans. The play ends with Rita declining Larkspurs proposal in favour of Alton, another Novokan. This rejection of Larkspur places Rita in a powerful position. Rita is no longer the undesirable Other, she has re sisted the oppressive world of the colonialists and placed herself as the centralised Self. Rita is Marsons fantasy where the black woman is recognised as beautiful and an equal.Marsons activities in the League of Coloured Nations gave her purpose, direction and the opportunity to advance her political education whilst introducing her to the Pan African movement a sort of boomerang from the horrors of slavery and colonialism, to which Una, like many of her generation, was being steadily drawn.53 Marsons work around this time reflects a desire to reclaim and restore that Other cultural tradition, a difficult task as the Caribbean was not an homogeneous delegacy and it was not easy to establish a pre-colonial culture. The ethnic mix was large and hybrid making the notion of Caribbeanness less easy to define. The Pan-African movement provided links with an alternative body to European colonialism and offered Marson a platform to renegotiate and redefine her idea of Caribbeaness and r ace, an option not offered to Rhys. Having established a sense of being a black person in a white imperialist centre, she now needed to make sense of being a black woman within this paternalistic centre.The poem Little Brown Girl attempts just this, constructing a dialogue of sorts between a white Londoner, whose gender is unclear, and a little brown girl. The poem begins with a series of questions put to the childLittle brown girlWhy do you wander aloneAbout the streetsOf the great cityOf London?Why do you start and winceWhen white folk stare at youDont you think they wonderWhy a little brown girlShould roam about their cityTheir white, white city?(The Moth, p11)The questioning of the little brown girls presence in London suggests a linguistic imperialism. It may be construed as the loudspeaker system challenging her right to be in the city, establishing her as the nameless, black Other. Her feeling of difference is emphasized in the repetition of the word white on the final line of the second stanza. The third stanza plays out an interesting reversal in notions of blackness. The speaker asks why she has left the little sunlit land / where we sometimes go / to rest and get brown54 alluding to the desire of white skinned people to tan which for the white colonialist signifies wealth, for the black Other being inferior and uneducated.From here there is a subtle shift of speaker and London is seen through the eyes of the little brown girl. Her perception of the city is distinctly unattractive where There are no laughing faces, / people frown if one really laughs andTheres nothing picturesqueTo be seen in the streets,Nothing but people cladIn Coats, Coats, Coats,(The Moth, p11)If the poem began with the strangeness of the brown girl to the white gaze, here it teases out those feelings of alienation felt by the little brown girl at being in such a cold, drab place, so different from her own home. Once more Marson creates a reversal in the stereotype as she seeks to objectify white people observing that the folks are all white -/ White, white, white, / And they all seem the same.55 In homogenizing the colonizers, the hybridity of the West Indians are then celebrated in the many varied skin tones of black and bronze and brown which are themselves homogenized by the label Black. The vibrancy, colour and friendliness of back home where the folks are Parading the city draining Bright attractive bandanas contrasts with the previous stanza of the dour images of London.The dialogue is handed back to the white speaker who attempts to establish the origins of the little black girl but succeeds in once more re-establishing the homogeneic white gaze indicated in the speakers inability to distinguish between many distinct nations And from whence are youLittle brown girl?I guess Africa, or India,Ah no, from some islandIn the West IndiesBut isnt that IndiaAll the same?(The Moth, p13)More than anything the poem conveys that sense of isolation felt by the little brown girl in the city. She never answers the white speaker directly and is positioned in the middle of the poem, again centralizing the colonized. In asking the question Would you like to be white/Little brown girl? there is a sense of the colonizer attempting to manipulate and dominate the colonized, to Europeanise, ultimately leading to mimicry. Yet the questioner responds himself with I dont think you would / For you toss your head / As though you are proud / To be brown. 56 Marson, here, signals a move away from being a mimic man seeking to challenge that whole Eurocentric paternalistic world and centralise the black women, the most marginalized figure in society.The themes central to Little Brown Girls themes echo Rhyss own negative reactions to London seen in the opening page of Voyage in the Dark. Like Rhys, Marson succeeds in capturing that colour and warmth of the West Indies contrasting greatly with the bereavement of London, experienced by both and which reinforc e that racial and national separateness. Those differences prove for both to be irreconcilable, making it impossible for both Rhys and Marson to integrate, leaving both women dislocated from the metropolis. Little Black Girl serves as a useful reminder that many immigrants were women. This encounter between the city and a woman (in Marsons case, a black woman) echoes Annas encounter in Voyage in the Dark albeit as a prostitute.Both walk the streets of the city and as women-as-walkers encounter the metropolis, negotiating its spaces. Denise deCaires Narian suggests that certainly Marson could be considered as a flaneuse.57 Neither Rhys nor Marson, however have the confident panache of the flaneuse and neither fulfil the requirements of flanerie originally set out by Baudelaire. The flaneur, he asserted, saw the convention as his domain, His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd.58 The flaneur and therefore the flaneuse is engaged in strolling and looking but most im portantly merging with the crowd. For Marson this is impossible as she is a black woman in a white city.Moreover, Baudelaire expands upon the idea of the flaneur as having the ability to be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world.59 Again this is problematic for both Marson and Rhys as their wanderings around the metropolis seek only to reinforce those feelings of separateness, isolation and marginality. For Marson these feelings of alienation gained her the reputation of being a true loner who didnt exactly seek out company60 leading to a heightened level of bodily consciousness which comes from being dissected by white eyes.61In her struggle with being marginalized as a black women always at the mercy of the white metropolitan gaze, Marson was always aware of that Europeanised sense of beauty being white. This idea of beauty was so entrenched, even within the black community that they themselves set beau ty against the paleness of their own skin. The importance of popularly disseminated images is tackled in Cinema Eyes where a black mother in addressing her daughter attempts to challenge the idea that Europeans still provide the aesthetic reference point.62 The speaker urges her eighteen year old daughter to avoid the cinema fearing that it might reinforce the idea that white is beautiful causing the girl to lose sight of her own beautyCome, I will let you goWhen black beautiesAre chosen for the screenThat you may knowYour own sweet beautyAnd not the white turn inlinessOf others for envy.(The Moth, p88)By growing up with a cinema mind the mother has allowed herself to be at the mercy of those tools used by the colonizer to marginalize and indoctrinate, promoting their own superiority. Once again the mimic man re-emerges when black women reject their own in seeking an ideal man. No kinky haired man for me, / No black face, no black children for me.63 This rather melodramatic narrat ive within the poem tells of the mothers fair husband shooting her first suitor whom she had initially rejected for being too dark, and then committing suicide.The shooting scene, a re enactment of a gun fight in a western, presents the cinema as a racist and degenerate institution. By the end of the poem, the speaker acknowledges her mistake in rejecting the first lover and finds a sense of self, previously denied by the saturation of cinematic images. In shaking off the colonizers indoctrination, which seeks to marginalize her, she addresses the question posed by Franz Fanon which is to what extent authentic love will remain unattainable before one has purged oneself of that feeling of inferiority?64 Black invisibility in the cinema results in white ideology being forced upon a black body and essentially commodifying it and it is this which Marson seeks to deconstruct.Another poem which tackles the reconstruction of female identity is Black is Fancy, where the speaker compares her reflection in the mirror with a picture Of a beautiful white lady.65 The mirror serves to reclaim the idea of black as being beautiful and a rediscovery of selfSince Aunt Lisa gave meThis nice looking glassI begin to feel proudOf my own self(The Moth, p75)The speaker eventually removes the picture of the white woman suggesting that black worth and beauty can only really exist in the absence of white colonialism. The poem ends in a mastery of sorts as she declares that John, her lover has rejected the pale skin in favour of His black ivory girl.66Kinky Haired Blues represents Marsons quest for a more effective and authentic poetic voice in its use of African American speech.. The poem explores the rhythms and musical influences found in Harlem and gathering caprice about this time. Kinky Haired Blues like Cinema Eyes and Black is Fancy criticizes the oppressive beauty regime of white colonialism which seeks to disfigure and marginalize the black woman. The poem opens with the spea ker attempting to find a beauty shopGwine find a beauty shopCause I aint a belleGwine find a beauty shopCause I aint a lovely belle.The boys pass me byThey say Is not so swell(The Moth, p91)The speaker seeks to Europeanise her black features in an attempt to make herself more attractive. Male indifference experienced in the metropolis forces the speaker to see herself as an aberration, thrusting her onto the margins of a society which is continually projecting the idea that white is right. The beauty shop contains all the caparison of the colonizers idea of beauty, ironed hair and bleached skin. Yet she is caught between being left to die on de shelf 67 if she doesnt change herself, or eradicating her ethnic features and therefore her inner self if she does. By using blues within the poetry she is able to communicate this misery felt within her, that male perceptions of beauty projected by the colonizers dictate that she must distort her own natural beauty in order to fit in and co nform. The poem highlights the struggle Marson experiences in trying to preserve her selfhood against such oppressive cultural forces.Marson defiantly attempts to stand against this patriarchal order. She proudly announces that I like me black face / And me kinky hair. Inspite of this brave stand Marson eventually succumbs and admits that she is gwine press me hair / And bleach me skin. She, like Rhys can only resist internally to the colonialists ideals imposed on them.As writers voyaging into the metropolis both Rhys and Marson share in their writing a pervasive sense of isolation where, from the location of London, their particular voices and concerns are, at the time, not recognised. Both writers, from this isolated position on the periphery of the centre. explore issues of womanhood, race and identity,. Marsons experiences bring about an acute awareness of her difference and Otherness as a Black woman. Her work is a defiant voice against this marginalisation and isolation. She was, as Jarrett MaCauley claims the first Black feminist to speak out against racism and sexism in Britain.68 She was a pioneer in a growing literary culture which was to become the new postcolonial order.Rhys, by contrast, a white West Indian from Dominica was experiencing a declining white nonage status against a growing black population, itself an isolating factor both at home and within the metropolis. Kenneth Ramchard suggests that the work of white West Indian writers is characterized by a sense of embattlementAdapted from Fanon we might use the phrase terrified consciousness to suggest the White minoritys sensations of shock and disorientation as a smouldering Black population is released into an awareness of power.69It is this terrified consciousness which contributes to the struggle experienced by Anna in Voyage in the Dark . Located simultaneously both inside and outside West Indian socio cultural history, her journey to the mother country seeks only to exacerbate these fe elings of in-betweenness and to suffer feelings of dislocation and alienation.Both writers, therefore, in their voyage into the metropolis endure different kinds of anxieties in their sense of unbelonging to either or both cultural worlds. Both use their writing to speak for the marginal, the hegemonic, the dispossessed, the colonized silenced female voice situated as they were within the cold, oppressive, hierarchical colonial metropolis attempting to impose an oppressive identity upon the exiled women.1 George Lamming The Pleasures of Exile (London Alison, 1960) p152 Palmer Adisa De Language Reflect Dem Ethos in The Winds of veer The Transforming Voices of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars ed. By Adele S. Newson and Linda Strong Leek. (New York Peter Lang 1998 p23)3 The Winds of Change The Transforming Voices of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars ed By Adele S. Newson and Linda Strong-Leek. (New York Peter Lang 1998 p6)4 V.S. Naipaul New York Review of Books 1992. Quoted in Helen Carr Jean Rhys (Plymouth Northcote House Publishers Ltd., 1996) p155 Helen Carr Jean Rhys (Plymouth Northcote House Publishers Ltd., 1996) p. xiv6 Delia Jarrett-MaCauley The liveliness of Una Marson (Manchester Manchester University Press, 1998) p517 Edward W. Said Representations of the Intellectual (London Vintage 1994) p498 Molly Hite The Other Side of the Story Structures and Strategies of contemporaneous Feminist Narrative Quoted in Joy Castro Jean Rhys in The Review of Contemporary Fiction Vol. 20, 2000. www.highbeam.com/library/doc.3.asp p6.Accessed 1 December 2005.9 Elaine Savory Jean Rhys p9210 Elaine Savory Jean Rhys p9311 Gayatri Spivak triple Womens Text and a Critique of Imperialism in Henry Louis Jr. Gates Race, Writing and Difference (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1987) p26912Jean Rhys Voyage in the Dark (London Penguin Books 1969)13 Elaine Savoury Jean Rhys (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1998) p 9514 Homi Bhabha Remembering Fanon, forward to Fr anz Fanon s Black Skin, White Masks (London Pluto, 1986) p ix15 Homi Bhabha The Other Question Location of glossiness (London Routledge 1994)p6916 Ibid p6917 Veronica Marie Gregg Jean Rhyss Historical Imagination Reading and Writing the Creole (North Carolina The University of North Carolina Press, 1995) p11518 Sue Thomas The Worlding of Jean Rhys ( Westport Greenwood Press 1999) p10619 Jean Rhys Voyage in the Dark p5320 Ibid21 Paul B. Rich Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1986) p1922 Voyage in the Dark p5623 Ibid p32024 Homi Bhabha DissemInation Time, Narrative and the margins of the Modern Nation The Location of Culture p31925 Voyage in the Dark p726 Ibid p1527 Ibid p1628 Ibid p2629 Ibid p4530 Ibid p4731 Ibid p732 Ibid p4633 Homi Bhabha The Location of Culture p31934 Voyage in the Dark p4535 Homi Bhabha Location of Culture p8536 Ibid p2737 Ibid p6238 Ibid p6239 Teresa OConnor The Meaning of the West Indian welcome for Jean Rhys (PhD diss ertation, New York University, 1985)cited in Caribbean Woman Writers Essays from the first International Conference. p1940 Taken from Rhyss non fictional analysis of Gender Politics. Veronica Gregg, Jean Rhyss Historical Imagination p4741 Helen Carr Jean Rhys, (Plymouth Northcote House Publishers Ltd, 1996) p 7742 Lloyd W. Brown, West Indian Poetry (London Heineman, 1978) p 3843 Denise deCaires Contemporary Caribbean Womens Poetry Making style (London Routledge, 2002) p 244 Ibid p445 Una Marson The Moth and the Star, (Kingston, Jamaica Published by the Author, 1937) p2446 Homi Bhabha The Location of Culture, (London Routledge, 1994) pp85-9247 Delia Jarrett-MaCauley The Life of Una Marson pp 49, 5048 The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature ed. Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh (London Routledge, 1996) p140-14149 Ibid50 Homi Bhabha Location of Culture p 32051 Jarrett-MaCauley The Life of Una Marson p5152 Ibid p5153 Ibid p5454 Una Marson Little Brown Girl, The Moth and the Sta r. (Jamaica The Gleaner. 1937) p1155 Ibid56 Ibid p1357 deCaires Narain puts forward an interesting link between Marson and Sam Selvons The Lonely Londoners highlighting remote identity in her book Contemporary Caribbean Womens Poetry p 2158 Baudelaire The Painter and the Modern Life cited in Keith Tester The Flaneur (New York Routledge, 1994), p 259 Ibid p360 Jarrett-MaCauley, p5361 Ibid p5062 Laurence A. Brainer An Introduction to West Indian Poetry (Cambridge CUP, 1998), p15463 Una Marson Cinema Eyes The Moth and the Star. (Jamaica The Gleaner.1937) p8764 Franz Fanon Black Skins, White Masks (London Pluto, 1986), p465 Una Marson Black is Fancy The Moth and the Star p7566 Ibid p7667 Una Marson Kinky Hair Blues The Moth and the Star p9168 Jarret MaCauley pvii69 Kenneth Ramchard The West Indian overbold and its Background (London Faber, 1870), p225