Jean Rhys and the Fiction of Failed Reciprocity

Jean Rhys’s second novel, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, focuses on a woman who is dependent on others for charity and all but excluded from the social contract at an historical moment when the institutional forms of charity and contract were in flux. Situating the novel in the context of literary, feminist, psychoanalytic, and deconstructive accounts of a gendered opposition between charity and contract, this chapter argues that Rhys’s text exposes the psychological work required on the part of both men and women to maintain this opposition. In After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, social and sexual relations are never strictly charitable or strictly contractual, but freighted with meanings that exceed both parties’ intentions. Though framed by widespread economic insecurity and lack, the novel is, paradoxically, about excess and, with Rhys’s other fiction, strategically counters the modern myth that reciprocity between the sexes is bound to fail because women alone are essentially excessive.