Carole Angier's biography of the novelist Jean Rhys contains some very insightful remarks about her and her life. Some of these remarks are very similar to what I would have come up with myself if I had looked at the same source material.
The miraculous deliverances and spiralling down elements of Jean Rhys's life have been introduced. This article covers some more key features: she felt different from most people and she felt that she didn't belong anywhere.
Feeling different
There is nothing unusual about Jean Rhys's feeling of being fundamentally different from the people around her; after reading biographies of other writers, I would think it very unusual if she didn't feel like that! It's what they all say; it goes with the territory.
What does seem strange to me is how various people of interest quite independently describe their feelings and experiences in much the same words.
Something that Carole Angier says about Jean Rhys could equally apply to many others, including Stella Benson and Antonia White:
“One of the strongest feelings Jean had always...was that she didn't fit in the world, that life was a game she had never learned how to play...She did not understand the rules.”
This is exactly how some people feel: everyone knows the rules of the game but them; everyone else knows how to behave, what to say, where to go and what to do, but they are baffled and clueless.
Such people may see the world as a club to which they will never belong no matter how much they want to and how hard they try. The article about Jean Rhys and Antonia White contains uncannily similar quotations about how something always goes wrong when they try to be like other people.
This is from Jean Rhy's unfinished autobiography Smile Please:
“So as soon as I could I lost myself in the immense world of books, and tried to blot out the real world which was so puzzling to me. Even then I had a vague, persistent feeling that I’d always be lost in it, defeated.”
Reading to escape is yet another thing that most novelists have in common.
Being different is not acceptable
Something else that many people featured on here have in common is the way they were punished by the people around them for the crime of being different. Parents, teachers, their peers and others sensed or noticed that something was 'off' and tried to bring the deviants into line using a range of measures such as disapproval, criticism, ostracism, pressure, ill treatment and even persecution.
As Jean Rhys said in Smile Please:
“So does one learn the bitter lesson that humanity is never content just to differ from you and let it go at that. Never. They must interfere, actively and grimly, between your thoughts and yourself.”
Jean Rhys had a disapproving, unsympathetic mother who wanted her to be like other girls. She said this about her mother:
“She must have seen something alien in me which would devour me and make me unhappy, and she was trying to root it out at all costs.”
She reports that when she was around 10 years old her mother finally said to her, “I've done my best, it's no use. You'll never learn to be like other people.”
This reminds me of Ayn Rand's experiences: she of course felt different from the girls at school and did not get on well with her mother, who was always demanding to know why she didn't play with the other girls.
Not belonging anywhere
Where there are feelings of being different, there may also be feelings of not belonging anywhere; these features often go together.
Jean Rhys certainly had the 'stranger in a strange land' syndrome:
“Even when I was a child I had this feeling that it was all a mistake, that I didn’t belong. But perhaps in England I’d find what I wanted, I’d think.“
Needless to say, after moving to England from Dominica she felt as much of a stranger as ever:
“I don’t belong here any more than I belong there.”
She belongs with the people who don't belong anywhere!
Fictional connections
Not only does Jean Rhys have elements of her life in common with other novelists, she shares some feelings, ideas and experiences with fictional characters. For example, Jane Eyre and Eoin Colfer's little imp Number One were persecuted for not being like the other children.
Nicolas Stuart Gray's witch Barbara says something that Jean Rhys could have written:
“In this world I’m a stranger...I don’t understand other people at all, and they don’t understand me. My life has been unhappy here from the start. But somewhere there must be a place where I would feel at home...I’m so miserable. Since I was a child I’ve felt different from other humans. Even from my own family!... am I an alien, in fact?”
I wonder whether Nicholas Stuart Gray was using Barbara to express his own feelings.
The Barbara article contains more material on the 'feeling different and not belonging' scenario, both in general and with specific examples. The recent reading of various biographies has made this material seem even more relevant and on target now than it did at the time.
