Narrating from the Margins.: Self-Representation of Female and Colonial Subjectivities in Jean Rhys's Novels. (Cross/Cultures 135)

In Narrating from the Margins,Nagihan Haliloglu casts a discerning look at Jean Rhys's protagonists and the ways in which they engage in self-narration. The book offers a close reading of Rhys's novels, with particular attention to the links between identity construc-tion and self-narration, in a modernist and postcolonial idiom. It draws atten-tion to particular subject-categories that Rhys's protagonists fall into, such as the amateur and the white Creole, and de-lineates narrating personas such as the mad witch and the zombie, to explore aspects of de-essentalization, narrative agency, and dysnarrativia. The way in which Rhys's protagonists engage in self-narration reveals the close link between race and gender, and how both are contained by similar metaphors, or how, indeed, they be-come metaphors for each other. The narrators are defined in relation to their place in the 'holy English family' and how they transgress the rules of that family to become 'exiles'. The study explores the ways in which the self-nar-rator responds when her narrative is ob-structed by society; such as creating a community of stories in which her own makes sense, and/or resorting to third-person narration.