The Power of the Victim. A Study of Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie and Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys

It is easy to dismiss Jean Rhys's heroines as passive victims of men. Yet this passivity, so disturbing to the reader, is also a form of rebelHon. Lacking the power to change their Uves in a society which offered women without family or money few options, her women negate themselves. They say no not only to self-defmition and an orderly life but to the bourgeois code, 'the soul-destroying middle' (p. 20). And it is with the soul, in particular the female soul, that Jean Rhys is most concerned.