The previous two articles in the series inspired by Carole Angier's biography Jean Rhys: Life and Work were created to answer one big question and one small one. One article gave some good reasons for reading such a depressing book; the other looked into the possibility that Diana Wynne Jones had used material from the biography in her book Black Maria.
The time has now come to attempt to answer the question of questions: does Carole Angier's psychological interpretation of Jean Rhys's personality, behaviour and experiences cover and provide an explanation for everything?
The connections and familiar metaphysical features and elements covered in previous articles support the idea that certain unseen influences were at work in Jean Rhys's life, but it is good practice to start with the most obvious explanations and move on and widen the enquiry only if these are found to be unsatisfactory.
Just as Aunt Maria operates on three levels, Jean Rhys and her life can be looked at from three viewpoints: the psychological, what might be called the occult, and something in between the two.
Carole Angier's psychological viewpoint is the first to be considered.
Carole Angier makes many insightful remarks about Jean Rhys and provides much biographical material to support her ideas.
She makes the point that Jean Rhys never grew up. This is very obvious: we do not need to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that one!
She provides indisputable evidence in the form of many examples with much detail that Jean Rhys remained stuck and infantile throughout her life.
Jean Rhys's lifelong refusal to take responsibility for anything, her poor impulse control, her inability to manage money, her passivity, dependency and wanting to be taken care of and relieved of all adult duties and responsibilities with nothing expected of her in return, her lack of coping ability and hopeless incompetence when performing basic adult and parental tasks are just a few examples of her failure to develop and grow into adulthood.
If Jean Rhys's deficiencies can be attributed to a failure to grow up, what can this failure be attributed to?
Carole Angier tells us that Jean Rhys was born to a grieving mother and that this can make people feel lost and empty, like ghosts in the world. They feel a void inside; they have no sense of self. Her mother was critical and not very nurturing, and this together with the lack of a suitable upbringing can cause many problems.
Carole Angier also mentions borderline personality disorder; this too might explain why Jean Rhys was always looking for someone to latch on to, could not bear to alone and was devastated by rejection and abandonment.
All this seems convincing; it seems very likely. I agree that much of Jean Rhys's bad behaviour and many of her problems can certainly be attributed to immaturity and not feeling real; alcoholism and a desperate need for money were major factors too.
However, while Carole Angier's explanations might seem satisfactory to many people, I believe that she doesn't go far enough. What she says may well be true, but it is not the whole truth.
While Carole Angier gives the failure to grow up as the key to just about everything in Jean Rhys's life, she mentions some features that can not be directly attributed to this; while she explains Jean Rhys's personality and behaviour in basic psychological terms, she occasionally says things that show her awareness of other and deeper factors.
She tells us for example about Jean Rhys's hypersensitivity to what lay below the surface, her ability to sense peoples' deep-down feelings, motives and reactions, picking up their hidden hostility for example, but gives no explanation for this perception of undercurrents.
She notices patterns such as the spiralling down, the miraculous deliverances and the re-enactment of the same few scenes over and over again, but she doesn't attempt to explain what caused them.
However, she says things that show some awareness of what might be called metaphysical mind power. For example, she says this about Jean Rhys:
“...terrible things happen because she expects, creates and deserves them.”
She also says that Jean Rhys tried to will reality to fit her dreams.
While her biography does contain a few references to witches and magic, Carole Angier doesn't deal with the supernatural side of things. She doesn't put anything into the context of other writers' lives and personalities either.
So the answer to the question is, in my opinion, no!
Carole Angier's psychological approach is not enough to explain everything in Jean Rhys's life; there are more dimensions and possibilities to explore.
Jean Rhys was a chorus girl for a time. She looks very young in this picture from circa 1910, when she was 20 years old. She is standing on the right:
