Smiling as Labour in the Work of Jean Rhys

This lecture was organised by Vanessa Guignery as part of a research residency at IHRIM (ENS de Lyon).

'Cheer up.' 'Look gay.' 'Don't look so sad.' 'Smile please.' Jean Rhys's major female characters are frequently shown to be subject to such demands and admonitions. Just as frequently, they struggle or fail to respond to them. These characters simply cannot look happy when they don't feel happy and are, moreover, deeply and often aggressively suspicious of the smiling faces of others. Using Arlie Russell Hochschild's concept of 'emotional labour' as a starting point, this paper will argue that the marginalised women that populate Rhys's novels and stories are alienated, in part, because they are unable to regulate their emotions effectively or in ways that might allot them any kind of social or financial security. What happens, Hochschild asks in The Managed Heart (1983), when the 'private management of feeling is socially engineered and transformed into emotional labor for a wage'? This is a question that also informs Rhys's writing throughout. Like Hochschild, she shows a preoccupation with the implications and effects of attaching emotion to money, of turning feeling into a commodity, both in the contexts of interpersonal relationships and the various forms of low-paid private or public-facing service work that her characters are so often shown to undertake. With particular attention to Smile Please, Voyage in the Dark and a selection of stories, I will suggest that failures of emotional labour are central to Rhys's aesthetic, both in terms of subject and theme and in terms of her own authenticity as a writer. Above all, I will show that her representations of the nuances and contours of this experience of failure are shaped by her status as a displaced migrant woman writer.

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Pour citer cette ressource :

Emily Ridge, Smiling as Labour in the Work of Jean Rhys, La Clé des Langues [en ligne], Lyon, ENS de LYON/DGESCO (ISSN 2107-7029), février 2025. Consulté le 22/02/2025. URL: https://cle.ens-lyon.fr/anglais/litterature/litterature-postcoloniale/smiling-as-labour-in-the-work-of-jean-rhys