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Ferocious Things: Jean Rhys and the Politics of Women’s Melancholia
Author(s): Cathleen Therese Maslen (Author)
- Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
- Publication Date: 17 Mar. 2009
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 266 pages
- ISBN-10: 1847186610
- ISBN-13: 9781847186614
Book Description
It’s fatal making a fuss … . -Jean Rhys, Quartet. Cathleen Maslen’s Ferocious Things: Jean Rhys and the Politics of Women’s Melancholia closely engages with the most obvious theme of Rhys’s writing: the speaking and inscription of feminine anguish. Maslen resists easy generalisations with respect to Rhys’s portrayal of women’s psychic pain, attending carefully to the nuances of sexual, cultural and ethnic displacement which inform the suffering of Rhys’s protagonists. Acknowledging the many fine recent critical engagements with Rhys’s unique corpus of novels, Maslen insists that Rhys’s particular articulation of women’s pain presents a significant literary transgression, defying the intractable cultural interdiction against women ‘making a fuss.’ At the same time, this book engages with the problematic privileging of melancholic and nostalgic discourse in the Western canon in general. Rhys’s work, Maslen argues, simultaneously celebrates and resists fundamentally Eurocentric and anti-feminist paradigms of melancholia and nostalgia. In short, the ferocious melancholia of Jean Rhys’s female voices poses constructive paradoxes and points of departure for feminist and post-colonial debates in the 21st century.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“This book pursues an original and fascinating analysis of melancholic identification in Rhys’s fiction … one of the pleasures of reading this book was Maslen’s excellent and subtle reading of the texts, again and again giving new and sophisticated explications of how they work”.Helen Carr “Rhys’s heroines have always been a problem for feminist critics … this book offers a way to read both the profound alienation of these heroines and also Rhys’s narratives with their gaps between female subjective experience and brittle satirical surfaces.”Coral Ann Howells’At all times deeply engaging … this book is a major contribution to Rhys scholarship and is sure to establish Rhys – rightly – as a major, deeply moving and critical writer within the melancholic tradition.’Sue Thomas”Cathleen Maslen’s Ferocious Things: Jean Rhys and the Politics of Women’s Melancholia amplifies Karl’s shrewd insights. Maslen focuses on the articulation and inscription of feminine anguish in the early fiction, resisting glib generalizations with regard to Rhys’s portrayal of women’s psychic pain. Like Karl, Maslen is responsive to the subtle and significant inflections of sexual, cultural, and ethnic displacement imbuing the trials of Rhys’s heroines. Rhys’s corpus, according to Maslen, simultaneously certifies and complicates basically Eurocentric and anti-feminist paradigms of melancholia and elegiac yearning. In short, the existential ennui of Jean Rhys’s female voices poses constructive paradoxes and points of departure for feminist and postcolonial debates in the twenty-first century. […] Jean Rhys continues to attract scholarly attention. The suffering, alienation, and melancholic identification of her female protagonists have long been a dilemma for feminist critics, but Cathleen Maslen, in Ferocious Things: Jean Rhys and the Politics of Women’s Melancholia, shows how both self-articulation and textual inscription of female psychic suffering can be read as transgressive strategies. The discourse of melancholia is not only celebrated but also undermined and resisted in Rhys’s texts. Maslen acknowledges the difficulties arising from her understanding of ‘Rhys’s work as an appropriation of the melancholic identity on behalf of the marginalized and socially isolated woman’ (p. 184), as it might be seen to perpetuate masculinist and Eurocentric discourses. But based on readings of Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Good Morning, Midnight, Voyage in the Dark, and Wide Sargasso Sea from postcolonial and feminist perspectives, Maslen accuses some of Rhys’s critics of reducing a wider political agenda to a personal account of depression, and defends Rhys against accusations of her non-feminist portrayal of women’s weaknesses and sufferings.”The Year’s Work in English Studies, Volume 90, Issue 1, 2011
About the Author
Cathleen Maslen was born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1973. She graduated with a PhD from the University of Western Australia in 2006. Cathleen is the author of many essays on melancholia and mourning theory, and has published articles and lectures on these themes. Currently, Cathleen teaches contemporary literature, cultural theory and Renaissance studies at the University of Western Australia. Cathleen lives with her young daughter in the port city of Fremantle, Western Australia.
