Reducing Fifi

Abstract

Although I have chosen to make the novels the main focus of my attention in this book, no study of Jean Rhys would be complete without some recognition of her accomplishment as a writer of short stories. The text which I have selected for analysis in this chapter is ‘La Grosse Fifi’, which originally appeared in her first published work, the collection titled The Left Bank.¹ There are two reasons why I have chosen an early piece within the canon. Firstly, I wish to draw attention to the fine quality of the writing, a quality which is often overlooked by critics who tend to damn these stories with faint praise, assessing them as products of the writer’s apprenticeship, and valuing them primarily as forerunners of the novels.² Secondly, in the process of reading ‘La Grosse Fifi’, I hope to demonstrate what an important bearing the story has on Rhys’s feminism. Fifi’s treatment both in the text and at the hands of her lover coincides with Dworkin’s observation about the oppression of women in a patriarchal society. Death is the extreme form of passivity. Fifi’s death is effected in the diegesis³ through her murder. She is silenced at the point at which she tries to assert her own needs and desires. But her death is also effected in the text itself, through a gradual reduction of the character in such a way that the actual narrative, the matrix of the work, literally swallows up the personality.