Jean Rhys’s ‘Temps Perdi’: Space, Disability, and the Second World War

Abstract

Correspondences between key settings in Jean Rhys’s “Temps Perdi,” as suggested by analytics proffered by postmodern theories of space, suggest the Benjaminian notion of history as a perpetual state of emergency. Introduced in the three discrete sections of the story, these key settings are a house on the east coast of England during WWII, Vienna in the aftermath of WWI, and an unnamed Caribbean island (which the narrator visits between the wars). Further, the story’s key disabled characters, the narrator and a young Carib woman, point to Walter Benjamin’s notion of a revolutionary, “messianic” break with time, as suggested by analytics proffered by disability studies.