Jean Rhys, Madness.

Posting the first draft of my Literatures In English Internal Assessment piece as a favour to a friend.


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A reinterpretation of Meditation on Red by Olive Senior, a narrative about Jean Rhys.

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Madness is a hell of a thing.

If you’d asked, Jean Rhys would have vehemently denied madness. Jean Rhys was a pretty girl, a beautiful woman. She was good at getting what she wanted from men and she was good at giving men what they wanted.

She first met England at seventeen, back when she was Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams. It shook her hand with a cold which would never leave her fingertips and endless green seas of countryside that would haunt her.

“I hated the mountains the hills, the rivers and the rain.”

“I’ll be an actress,” she’d say.

Unfortunately, her West Indian accent was far too thick and she could never land the best roles. Not to be dismayed, she travelled with performance companies and chorus lines—anything to stay in the world of theatre. She seamlessly transformed into Vivienne or Emma or even Ella Grey.

Lancelot Hugh Grey Smith was the first man who Jean Rhys discovered would take care of her if she knew how to make him happy. A bat of her eyelashes here and a swoon there and he had fallen for her.

When the shiny copper coins stopped pouring in, pretty little Jean Rhys had to fend for herself. With a dead father and no acting job, she sought a different set of men to lean on.

These men did not have Smith’s kind eyes or hold her and whisper ‘I love you’s against her silken skin. These men had rough hands that bruised and stank of stale cigarette smoke… but all of these men left the money on the bed when they left, and these men always came back.

Jean Rhys started to drink. (“So much drink / flowing / so much tears / so much …”) She made wet glass rings stain the furniture, one for every man she sold a piece of herself to.

“I have an irresistible longing for a long, strong drink to make me forget that once again I have given damnable human beings the right to pity me and laugh at me.”

Her scarlet letter was stitched onto the breast of every dress she owned.

Smith paid for the abortion of a child they both knew wasn’t his and that was the end of that.

Jean Rhys was a rudderless boat, anchored in a murky green English countryside and dreaming of blue skies and wanting to go home, longing to get away, dreaming of places but never people; Rhys learned that people leave and die and change. Places don’t.

Rhys learned early: if she called herself English, they would remind her she was but a horrid colonial. She most certainly wasn’t English.

Jean Rhys knew the power of red. (A red dress worked on men in ways few other things could. Red would blind their consciences. Red would dazzle. Red was awfully pretty.)

“I took the red dress down and put it against myself. ‘Does it make me look intemperate and unchaste?’ I said.”

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“Your red dress,’ she said, and laughed.”

A Christmas-cracker red dress in the back of her closet for when they whispered. A red wig to shock them. A red housecoat, frayed, for when she couldn’t manage to escape.

 (escape was a pretty word and Jean Rhys was good with pretty words
and theatrics and mad people)

Jean Rhys once wrote a very successful story named The Wide Sargasso Sea about Mr. Robinson’s mad wife in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.

(Bertha Antoinette Mason was locked in the attic with a drunken nurse and abandoned by her husband because nobody seemed to understand madness. They called her attacks ‘explosions’, but if mad women could make things blow up then they wouldn’t be stuck in attics, now would they? It is written by Bronte that Edward Rochester was enchanted by her loveliness—but pretty girls are always just a little mad. You can ask Jean Rhys about this.)

Jean Rhys just couldn’t shake her inner drama queen. Her breakdowns were awfully theatric; lots of screaming and scratching… and she pretended to be a ghoul in her own attic and the neighbours were all convinced by her performance. As a little girl, Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams made her daddy check under her bed for monsters… but as a grown woman, Jean Rhys learnt that monsters don’t live under beds, they live inside our heads.

Depression is a funny tasting word that comes with a funny tasting set of pills – red, what else? – that she had to remember to take three times a day. Red pills drove away her monsters.

“I am not used to happiness.”

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“…I want to be happy. Oh, I want it so badly. You don’t know how badly. I don’t want to be hurt. I don’t want anything black or miserable or complicated anymore.”

Jean Rhys made up her pretty face and dressed carefully, a string of pearls around her neck and a fine dress. The village children called her a witch, but she couldn’t even spell her seeds into pushing up blossoms of bright red. She bled her pain into paper—black ink that smudged and blue murder in her heart. She honed her craft. She planned to write brilliantly.

In her last days, she wrote in notebooks and on napkins and in Parisian hotels. She, fearing that she would be forgotten and never good enough, buried parts of herself in her writing to be exhumed at a later date. She returned to drinking, letting the drink flow until she could barely distinguish between Jean Rhys and Anna Morgan and Sasha Jensen and Julia Martin and Marya Zelli.

“If you want to write the truth, you must write about yourself… I am the only real truth I know.”

Even with her last breaths, Jean Rhys would have denied the madness that defined her life. Her ebb and flow, her come and go. But the madness was in Jean Rhys.

“She lifted her eyes. Blank, lovely eyes. Mad eyes. A mad girl.”