The main argument of the project is that Jean Rhys is portrayed as an outsider throughout Pizzichini’s The Blue Hour. Throughout the numerous Biographies of Jean Rhys’ life, this representation of Jean as an outsider is evident. But what about her representation in The Blue Hour? Laurence Anthony’s online concordance tool, AntConc, enables us to see at a glance the linguistic and language patterns within The Blue Hour. As our project is interested in the portrayal of Jean Rhys as outsider, the first line of enquiry was to search the usage of the word ‘outsider’ within the biography. Interestingly, this search turned up the surprising result that this word is used only once throughout the whole biography, and this in reference to her lover, Lenglet who is described as an outsider like her.
However, despite this surprising finding, other search results provide further evidence that Jean Rhys did indeed spend much of her life feeling like an outsider, albeit less explicitly. Whilst the word, ‘outsider’ is used rarely, other words such as ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’ appear far more frequently, and the context of the usage of these words is quite illuminating. It is clear from Pizzichini’s biography that Jean Rhys was often ‘so absorbed in her own travails that she was unable to connect with external reality.’ (Pizzichini, 1) As this usage of the word ‘reality’ had been noted in an initial reading of The Blue Hour, we thought it would be interesting to search for the frequency of the usage of this word. This led to the search of the antithesis of the word, ‘reality’—‘fantasy.’ It is interesting that both of these terms, ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’ appear relatively frequently throughout The Blue Hour. Indeed, the word ‘reality’ appears seventeen times, whilst the word, ‘fantasy’ appears nineteen times. This frequency increases when the search was extended to include any words that begin with the search term, ‘fantas*’, increasing from nineteen to thirty-two. This search brought up words such as fantasies, fantastical and fantastique. Of course, contextual material was needed to draw any substantive conclusions from these results.
Screenshot of Antconc Concordance search for fantas* . Anthony, L. (2014). AntConc (Version 3.4.3) [Windows]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University.
Usefully, AntConc provides the user with the ability to view both word frequency and the context of its usage. It was found that although the two usages of the word ‘fantastique’ and ‘fanastiques’ can largely be excluded from the search result, the vast majority of the other thirty references to ‘fantasy’ ,‘fantasies’, and ‘fantastical’ refer to Jean Rhys’ own fantasies. Jean Rhys is thus repeatedly presented throughout The Blue Hour, as a fantasiser, who often lives in the world of her imagination rather than external reality. She is the outsider of society, whilst she lives through her fantasies and internal universe. She is depicted throughout the biography, among numerous other examples, as living in the fantasy of theatreland, the fantasy of her English childhood, the fantasy of her love affairs and the fantasy of Paris. Similarly the context provided on AntConc for the usage of the word ‘reality’ suggests that the word was used in the nineteen examples in reference to Jean’s inability to engage with reality, her feelings that reality were too much for her, and her association of reality as being incompatible, as Nietzche had argued, with the life of an artist. As many of the Biographies discussed within this project have highlighted, Jean’s life is often read in relation to her art. In this sense, her outsider status and fantastical imagination may have enabled her to produce some of her best works of literature.
Works Cited
Anthony, L. (2014). AntConc (Version 3.4.3) [Windows]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. Available from http://www.laurenceanthony.net/