Just as psychological black magic is a major topic in this blog, so are witches, fictional or otherwise, unconscious or otherwise.
Carole Angier's biography Jean Rhys: Life and Work, which is generating a whole string of articles, contains material that suggests that Jean Rhys was witchlike in many ways. This material includes the devastating effect that she had on people close to her and her attitude, behaviour and experiences throughout her life.
It was interesting to learn that in later years she became completely bent over, like an old witch in a fairytale.
This picture makes her look rather sinister:
Jean Rhys said herself that her neighbours in Holt in Norfolk called her crazy and a witch, and that her neighbours in the Devon village of Cheriton Fitzpaine also called her a witch. She said that one of these neighbours was a witch herself, and that there was black magic in the village!
Carole Angier tells us that in later life Jean Rhys had dreadful moods in which she became sinister, witchlike and cruel. As mentioned in the article about Diana Wynne Jones's evil witch Aunt Maria, in one of these episodes Jean terrified her nurse/assistant by locking the door to prevent escape. Carole Angier uses an interesting expression when recounting this incident:
“Janet had 'never been so frightened', 'she'd never wanted to get out of anywhere more'. As though by black magic, Jean had transferred her own worst feelings of terror and entrapment to another person. She had made someone suffer like her.”
When people like Jean Rhys suffer in the way that she did, it may be the consequence or side effect of using unconscious witchcraft or psychological black magic; such people often try to mentally force others and the universe to give them something that they desperately want – money or someone to latch onto for example.
This concentrated willpower or psychic compelling, which can be likened to an evil spell, does a lot of damage to the people it is directed at. Jean Rhys put great and relentless mental pressure on her husbands to make money to support her; they devolved under her influence and turned to crime: two of them were imprisoned for financial fraud.
A man who first met Jean when she was 78 years old mentioned her steely determination to bend people to her current need. She really should have learned to negotiate verbally like a mature adult by then!
Witchlike people rarely grow and develop or learn from experience. The man mentioned above said that Jean Rhys was still complaining about money, the cold and the lies in the newspapers seven years later. She was like a stuck record that plays the same tune over and over again; according to accounts of various people who knew her, she was the same in 1975 as she was in 1915!
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's evil witch Helen Penclosa came from Trinidad. Jean Rhys too grew up in a Caribbean culture in which sorcery and witchcraft were part of everyday life. Her novel Wide Sargasso Sea contains references to black magic in the form of local practices such as Obeah and Voodoo, as do some of her other works; persecution of witches is mentioned too.
In Jane Eyre, another major influence, Mr Rochester calls Jane a witch many times; he also calls her a sorceress.
I wonder whether Jean Rhys ever deliberately attempted to influence people using some of the techiques that she learned about when young. I thought at first that she was sticking pins into something here:
