Narrating from the Margins

Book excerpt: In Narrating from the Margins, Nagihan Haliloğlu 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 construction and self-narration, in a modernist and postcolonial idiom. It draws attention to particular subject-categories that Rhys’s protagonists fall into, such as the amateur and the white Creole, and delineates 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 become 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-narrator responds when her narrative is obstructed by society; such as creating a community of stories in which her own makes sense, and/or resorting to third-person narration.