The Creation of Space: how claustrophobic are you?

Jean Rhys-so intriguing! I always feel like a giddy psychoanalyst when I confront her characters, perhaps even more so than other experimental/modernist novelist…but only perhaps! As prefaced by Dr. Stuber last class, I can’t help draw glaring (exciting, no doubt) and complex similarities between The Waves and Voyage in the Dark. I am, in this sense, immensely appreciative of the novel’s comparable agendas as I have been haunted upon the completion of The Waves. Rhy’s frazzled, frustrating, while also somewhat endearing characters/setting function as helpful extension of what it means to “be” in or out-with or without- a moment. Like Bernard, Anna relies on a sort of external aspect of processing and displaying her experiences, thoughts, and information. He thoughts are often relayed with quotations marks mixed in with her analysis. At once this aesthetic display acknowledges her obsession with appearance and what it mean to be seen; she wants to cover, hide, and layer herself with clothes and material items, ostensibly insecure in her external perception and overall place in the world. Anna’s consistent references to various glass surfaces evident in her declaration “I don’t like your looking-glass” (37) paired with her observations of “the shop-windows sneering and smiling in your face” reveals Anna’s insecure tendency to suppress her individual self and replace her external appearance and interiority with things of her external environment. While this notion of Anna’s oneness with the cityscape and board rooms could, in a sense, recall a universality of the characters in The Waves, Anna’s attempts result in a entirely more in peculiar, disjointed, angry, and pathetic manors. Anna’s isolation appears so catastrophic that I sometimes feel claustrophobic-a prisoner of her mind. In The Waves, there seemed to be an effortless flow of flux of each other.

Conversely, Anna’s tendency to imitate or forge characteristics of her environment into her own, whether it be the coldness of her room or her arms that “hung straight down” (22) seem inorganic, incomplete and artificial. At time, these intense moments of isolation, however, enable Anna to powerfully take ownership. This exertion of control is exemplified in instances of the ellipses. Though not always a positive moment of extension, though the manipulation, of language extends her once fleeting experience and consequential thoughts into an almost immortal thought or feeling. This display of perpetuity predicts that she ,like Woolf, will perhaps return to this moment later? This preservation a moment for another time when she exists as more seasoned with different perspectives, a result from future moments that are to come and pass? In Anna’s moment of exaltation as “he put his hand on [her] knee”, she merges the internal “thought” and the repetition of language ‘Yes…yes…yes…” with her masochistic relationship to appearance, represented by the quotation marks. This collision of the internal and external excites the intimidating potentiality of Anna being not only heard by us but also seen. What does it means when internal thoughts and feelings collide with the externality of touch and then lingers “…”? Can this be compared to Woolf’s notion of “non-being”? This is one of the few examples, so far at least, where Anna uses our existence as the audience to make an aesthetic and impulsive stride across the page as purely herself and not a monstrous combination of an object, temperature, color or size of her environment. She creates space with the ellipses and proudfuly dwells in her own moment. Perhaps it was the combination of the physical touch of another and the right balance of consciousness to facilitate such majesty-something I would have liked to explore more with Woolf. Conversely, do you think Anna is hiding in within these spaces of dashed and ellipses-the repetition and mimicry that seem to close in and suffocate any pure potentiality for selfhood, autonomy, or just a more broad desire for self-content? She is, a sense, creating her own space-one in the moment of London but dreamily referential to home. We are there to confirm, though perhaps less objectifying with than a stare? How will our relationship with Anna develop: we will become a product of her manipulated space?