Against the Capitalist Narrative of Success and Failure – the Precarious Lives of Jean Rhys’s Interwar Women

Abstract:

Rhys’s interwar novels all portray the lives of destitute women, populating the big European cities in the 1930s. Constantly pressed for money, her heroines are forced to occupy precarious social positions as vagabonds, which only perpetuates their emotional and economic bankruptcy. As a result, they lack the resources to resist such injustice. Unimpressed by capitalist promises of work and wages as the bringer of happiness, her texts reveal the significant constructivist efforts behind this ideology. In this paper, I explore how Rhys’s interwar novels thus challenge the capitalist narrative of success and failure, the economic imperative of growth and progress as well as the concept of rewarding work.