Although some articles on Rhys have appeared in popular magazines, she has received little critical attention, especially from women, despite her exceptional technical skill and the relevance of her subject matter to the women's movement. Is Rhys's relentless portrayal of passive, helpless heroines simply unpalatable to feminist critics? Or, perhaps more seriously, does Rhys's unremitting pessimism become an artistic failure that drives us to dismiss her vision despite her insight and control? Both questions, I believe, may be answered in the negative if we relinquish our expectation of a surface realism and adopt a psychological framework to explain the perversely self-destructive reactions of Rhys's heroines.
These reactions form the crux of Rhys's five novels, whose sparse and repetitive narratives are variations on the themes of failure and rejection. Although Rhys describes her heroines' progressive degeneration, often in excruciating detail, she fails to provide an adequate explanation for this process. A closer look at Rhys's recurrent heroine, however, reveals that in addition to her obvious passivity, she manifests several specific symptoms of schizophrenia: impoverished affect, apathy, obsessive thought and behavior coupled with the inability to take real initiative, a sense of the unreality of both the world and self, and a feeling of detachment from the body. Like schizophrenics, Rhys's heroines experience the world as a hostile environment and lead lives of isolation, detached from family and friends, unable to establish real contact with others. (pp. 155-56)
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