I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys

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Oh Ray, this is perfect,’ cried Sandra looking through the open window. ‘Come and listen. I can hear the sea!’ Sandra wondered if that’s how her children would have described her and Ray if they’d been blessed. Perhaps not the intellectual bit.

Some readers will relish it when Rhys is to be found in Paris, hanging out with notable bohemians. But it’s the second half of the book, in which she is old and “potty” and half-cut, that is Seymour’s triumph. The narrative has the tension of a thriller as Rhys struggles to finish Wide Sargasso Sea, and once she has been rediscovered, there are the shabby hotels she haunts; the jaunts with Sonia Orwell and Diana Melly; the literary hangers-on who call for tea. Here is the poet Al Alvarez flirting with her, and here is the memoirist David Plante preparing to stitch her up (the portrait of a sodden Rhys in his book Difficult Women is among the most chilling things I’ve ever read). The story “I used to live here once” is a short story based on a woman’s journey returning to a place she once called home. The author uses symbols throughout the story to demonstrate to the reader that the woman is no longer alive. The ultimate theme is not discovered until the end of the story. The purpose of this paper will be to discuss my interpretation of the theme and symbol of this story.Seymour has explored other challenging females in her distinguished writing career, notably Mary Shelley and the wife and daughter of Lord Byron. In this work, she has dusted off and brought to sparkling view even the smallest aspects of Rhys’ bizarre bouts of self-destruction contrasted with her undeniable talent. Rhys struggled with and generally lost herself to alcohol; she employed heavy makeup and wigs to disguise herself as she aged; and her dark side was often on display, with tantrums and her ironically titled, though never completed, autobiography, Smile Please. Her short story, “I Used to Live Here Once,” was an eerie tale whose narrator considers herself to be a ghost, unseen by others, trying to chart a path through the unknown. What Didn't Work: For how sensitively she treats Rhys's complicated mental health, towards the end of the book, some of the language she uses to describe Rhys in older age reads as a little . . . cruel? And there are a frustrating amount of gaps in Rhys's biography, so Seymour is forced to speculate. She's always upfront when she does it--which I appreciate--but it felt like she took a few too many liberties. I just found these gaps a little frustrating. We're never going to have a truly complete record of Rhys's life--and that's exactly how she wanted it. I was disappointed by just how little of an impression I still have of Rhys's early life, in particular, and the biography felt lean in this section.

On pon innocen la ou van ba de demon la. – You took an innocent child and sold her to the two devils. For Seymour, all this is about “performance”; Rhys is flirtatious, “a siren”. But it tells also, surely, of a writer not getting it quite right in her recollections, the long and difficult remembrance, the intractable past and its songs and stories. The fact that the woman is in constant movement till she reaches her old home may also have some significance. Rhys could be using the woman’s constant movement to highlight how important it is for an individual to keep moving forward. Though the reality may be that the woman’s destination is most likely the after-life. Something that becomes clearer to the reader by the fact that despite calling out to the two children the woman is not heard or seen by the children. Which adds an element of loneliness to the story. It may also be a case that Rhys is highlighting the fact that the transition from the real world to the after-life can be a lonely journey. Just as the woman may have once struggled on the stepping stones when she was younger. Now in death she may also face a struggle making the transition from the real world to the after-life. It is also possible that the woman is attempting to make an impossible connection with the children. Impossible because she is dead and they cannot see her.From this, the sudden appearance of her death helps the reader understand the different implications of what the heroin felt, thus relaying to the connection with Jean Rhys life. As said by Myranda Grencinger (2012) the use of symbolism in this tale allows the emphasis on the ending, which had transported the theme of the narrative to the eyes of the reader; in addition, it had not only showed but also set the tone of the story. If this is a proper supernatural story, then the narrator was about to pass from earthly life. We realize this because she tries to cross carefully over the ‘stones’ without slipping into the waters, ‘the abyss’ rather.

In depicting the long, often tortured life of author Jean Rhys in I USED TO LIVE HERE ONCE, British biographer Miranda Seymour has found metaphor and meaning in the development of a dynamic woman, a feminist and deep thinker who was rarely able to fully enjoy the fruits of her labor. This story is written in limited third person point of view. This means that narrator is not a character in the story. Based on the fact that; the narration is focused on only the woman’s actions, views, feelings and emotions. That leads me to believe that this particular story is limited third person point of view. The theme is a representation of the idea behind the story. (Clugston, 2010) Throughout the story the author gives clues to inform the reader of underlying meaning of the story. My understanding of the theme of “I used to live here once” is a woman’s spiritual journey. The plot of this story is a woman visiting a place she once called home. There are various symbols the author mentions. The symbols help the reader to understand the theme of the story. The overall theme of this story is the woman’s spiritual journey through the afterlife. I believe that the author using limited third point of view helped me to connect with the woman. The symbols expressed throughout the story were intriguing. The symbols made me think about the statements in a new light. “I used to live here once” is a lot more complex than I first thought. This story is very well written and I enjoyed looking deeper into the meaning behind it.Probably 3.5 stars, but I rounded down because this felt kind of sloppy in the end. It's a mixed bag, and I agreed a lot with Dwight Garner's review in the New York Times, so I'd definitely suggest reading that. Rhys’s editor Diana Athill excised the story, troubled by its apparent endorsement of the colonial project. “Am I prejudiced?” Rhys wondered in a letter to her friend Francis Wyndham. “I don’t know. I certainly wasn’t …” Dominica is intractable for Rhys, but never straightforward. These are several hints in connection to some of the traumas Jean Rhys had experienced in her life, as said by author Maren Linett (2005) “consider Rhys’s exploration of the dark subject of/in female masochism – not, as has been argued by some critics, as an individual psychological kink from which Rhys suffered…” these traumas has therefore raise more questions on Jean Rhys’ writing influence. Furthermore, her incorporation of the two kids in front of the house shows a lot on what and how the author thinks. Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century. Memories of her Caribbean girlhood haunt the four short and piercingly brilliant novels that Rhys wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and later in England, a body of fiction—above all, the extraordinary Wide Sargasso Sea—that has a passionate following today. And yet her own colorful life, including her early years on the Caribbean island of Dominica, remains too little explored, until now. The last point of view is the most frightening of all the other aspects. There is a possibility that this story, rather than being a simple ghost story, is a realistic story about how individuals like Jean Rhys were ignored or overlooked in the West Indies. People like Jean Rhys just did not fit in.