I Used to Live Here Once by Jean Rhys - Essay Example

“I Used to Live Here Once" by Jean Rhys The short story begins with a description of a woman visiting her childhood home; one can deduce this from her description of the environment as it is and comparing it to her retrospective view. The narration is done from a limited omniscient point of view, moreover, through the description of the woman’s feeling from her past as the readers’ sees into her and one concludes she must have been very happy, since even as she walks this road she is feeling extraordinarily happy. The description of the stones helps the reader draw a parallel to the writers seemingly rootless life since apparently to cross the river she had to step on three stones each presenting different challenge or advantage and symbolic of the stages of her life she had to pass through. She comes across two children in a house in which she resided in the past and when she tries to greet them, they seem to ignore her. Moreover, when she finally gets close and tries to greet them again, they do not see her and one remarks on the cold, they enter the house without having seen her, and that is when she realizes they cannot see her since she must have stopped living. The narrator’s displacement and apparent alienation form an environment that must have been retrospectively natural to can be compared to the writers own life of displacement. From a psychoanalytical perspective, it is possible that the writer was expressing and living out her memories in the land that was her home and from whence she was uprooted at a tender age. The fact that the narrator was female helps the reader draw an easier parallel to the writer and feel her disappointment when her attempts at maternal affection are ignored by the children giving the story an emotional edge. This underlying connection implies that since she moved from the Dominicas where she was born at the age of 17, she lost touch with her land of birth and never actually felt at home even in England and hence the general alienation of the writer is expressed in her character’s displacement. The authors past has considerable effects on the bearing of the story since she is able to portray the character’s emotional confusion, and alienation accurately, herself having been quoted in the past expressing ambivalence about her origin and the country to which she belonged. The writer takes the reader back to the narrator’s past through her reminiscing as she nostalgically remembers the place, as she knew it in the past. She remembers the stones and the dexterity needed to get across, her affection for the place is evident in that she walked with joy on the road although she described it as wider but messily expanded with trees not being cleared and trampled on. She remembers the house had screw pine, which was still there although the pine screws were gone as well as the summerhouse. The children’s color is of interest to the writer who describes them as being fair despite being in the tropics, which as a symbol of resilience the whites were forced to adopt in to survive. The idea of reaction and adaption to nature especially on a racial perspective can be tied to the writers past since although she was white living in a predominantly black country, she often interacted with black and admired their culture and nature (Eimer, 1997). Most of the things she remembers are symbolic of the narrators past and present feeling and the writer has clearly injected considerable aspects of her life in the same. Take ether fact that she finds the road to be incomplete, this could symbolize the fact that she thought she had unfinished business with the place hence her return, besides, considering the authors history of prostitution and drug abuse. (The Independent, 2009), she might have been projecting her need to make amends by traveling to the past to fix, or get a bearing on her life. The story ends rather abruptly as the protagonist comes to relies that she is not alive, alluding form the writers unsettled life, one can suppose that she had travelled so much in the world to look for her that she that she is not alive any more, this can be related to the writes life. In her adulthood, she is stuck between two worlds where she tries to reach out to her childhood home to search for a sense of belonging. However, when she is almost getting it, she realizes that even there she has no home and like a ghost can only live in the past but cannot be welcomed and is hardly recognized, except by an unpleasant cold feeling that makes the children want to get away from her. This ending depicts unstable life and struggle for an identity in that she didn’t even know she was “dead” until someone pointed it out(albeit indirectly) and even the she cannot tell where she belongs. The write uses several literally devices to bring out the themes of displacement and alienation and they include; flashback through which she gives us insight into the narrators past experiences in and that way we can appreciate and sympathize with her present situation. Vivid description is another device used along flashback in order to present the reader with a contrast between the present and past conditions in the “homeland.” The ending is arguably an anticlimax since the writer has been building up a story, which pointed to a reunion, when at the last moment she reveals the subject is a ghost; this creates an expected twist in the plot while terminating it at the same time. On first reading the reader will be misled into imaging that the write is indeed on a real journey back to her home, this notion is orchestrated by the writers’ use of a limited omniscient point of view. This ensures that none of other characters can describe the nature of the visitor since if the children’s minds had been revealed to us as the narrator was. We would have known beforehand that they could not actually see or hear the woman; however, the reader follows the narrator expecting that clones in proximity will help the children hear or see her. In my opinion this is an intriguing and emotional story especially in view of the writer’s lifetime struggle with an identity and rejection a theme that appears in many of her books possibly reflecting her own life. The story helps one appreciate their identity by showing how painful it can be not to know yourself and to live virtually as ghost in your own life as the narrator and writer did in her parts of her own life. Being a short story the reader’s attention is unlikely to stray very far but the writer ensures the reader keeps focused by using a journey motif in which the reader seemingly follows the writer sharing her memories and hopes. The climax is the ending at which brings stops the readers and narrator journey in a jolt and dramatically end the journey before it has even begun in earnest. References Eimer. (1997). Jean Rhys Biography. Web. 20 Sept. 2012. http://www.qub.ac.uk/imperial/carib/rhysbio.htm "Jean Rhys: Prostitution, alcoholism and the mad woman in the attic - Features - Books - The Independent." The Independent | News | UK and Worldwide News | Newspaper .N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Sept. 2012. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/jean-rhys-prostitution-alcoholism-and-the-mad-woman-in-the-attic-1676252.html Read More