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This essay seeks to trouble the traditional understanding of Jean Rhys’s ‘homelessness’ through a re-examination of the way in which the uncertain identities of her fiction are tied to their geographical settings. This works towards a reading of Rhys’s narratives as ‘literature of the tropics,’ describing not only the landscape within which and from which so many of them operate, but a literature of the unrecognised, the unmapped. In this essay I seek to complicate traditional readings of Rhys’s work that reassert her liminality and sense of unbelonging to propose that it is, paradoxically, the affinity of her work with the unassimilable tropics that produces this ‘outsider status.’ f the fundamental task of postcolonial criticism is, as Robert J. C. Young puts it, to ‘find a way to talk about’ the feeling that ‘you [are] not the subject of your own sentence,’ that you are always already ‘spoken for,’ or ‘the object of speech,’ that ‘you live in a world of others, a world that exists for others’ (1), then it is inarguable that Jean Rhys’s writing – her novels, short fiction, and life writing – figures a performance of this sense of being ‘outside,’ perpetually ‘Othered.’ It is not clear how one should best describe Rhys: as Dominican, English, French? Simply, Creole? How simple can that be? Even Rhys herself remained ambivalent about her racial identity; ‘as far as I know,’ she wrote in a 1959 letter to Francis Wyndham, ‘I am white – but I have no country really now’ (Wyndham and Melly 172). Antoinette Cosway, the protagonist of Rhys’s 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, echoes this sentiment: ‘between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all’ (64). And in the short story ‘I Used to Live Here Once’ (1976) this tenuous grasp on place is taken so far that the narrative can only figure its protagonist as a ghost, unseen by the inhabitants of her tropical island home. The narrator’s conclusion, ‘That was the first time she knew,’ at once works to confirm the protagonist’s spectrality, and the sense in which she was always already less ‘real’ than, unclaimed by, the land (Rhys, Sleep it Off, Lady 176). The instability of Rhys’s own national identity means that most criticism on Rhys’s work describes the gendered and racialised discourses of her narratives as figuring a sense of ‘homelessness’ so that Rhys’s characters, and often Rhys herself, become ‘Guerrillas,’ or ‘outsider personas’ that ‘bridge the gap’ between a Eurocentric self and Other, between Britain and the Caribbean (see, for example, Sheehan 142, and Thomas, Worlding of Jean Rhys 1). But in a manner similar to that which Helene Cixous asserts in her essay, ‘My Algeriance,’ I think that Rhys and her most famous character tremble before, tremble on the verge of, identity; ‘Passport,’ says Cixous:

Jean Rhys’s Tropographies: Unmappable Identity and the Tropical Landscape in Wide Sargasso Sea and Selected Short Fiction