Feeling Angry: White Creole Cognition in Jean Rhys's Novels of Slow Futurity

Abstract

This essay reads Jean Rhys’s early twentieth-century novels through theories of slowness developing in fields like eco-criticism, disability studies, and feminist studies. Reading Rhys through these paradigms suggests that her novels can be understood not just as noting the limitations of narratives of progressive development and their temporalities, but as offering a different way for narrating humanity within them. The recursive, fragmented cognitive representation of Rhys’s writing privileges the slow futurities that exist within developmental time and depicts a story of how someone feels as a valuable story of subjectivity. In the end, an analysis that privileges slowness instead of progress offers insight into the ways Rhys’s novels function, but it also suggests the ways Western conceptualizations of progressive individualism continue to inflect our theories and our criticism.