SOURCE: "Mirror and Mask: Colonial Motifs in the Novels of Jean Rhys," in World Literature Written in English, Vol. 17, No. 1, April, 1978, pp. 328-41.

In the following essay, Tiffin discusses the portrayal of exploitative male-female relationships, distorted female self-identity, and imperialism in Rhys's fiction.

Since Wally Look Lai's illuminating study of Wide Sargasso Sea, the importance of West Indian history and character in Jean Rhys's writing has been generally recognized, though both he and later critics such as Dennis Porter tend to regard Wide Sargasso Sea as a "new departure" rather than a culmination of moods and motifs. Rhys's fiction in its entirety, however, presents a complex picture of the mind of a people uniquely isolated by the vagaries of history and winning a grip on their "postage stamp of native soil" not, like Faulkner's Southerners, by revolutionary war but from the Sargasso Sea of an ambiguously divisive yet...