Reclaiming the Left Bank: Jean Rhys’s “Topography” in The Left Bank and Quartet

Abstract

The Paris in which Jean Rhys began her writing career—the Paris of the 1920s—cast a culturally imposing shadow over the subsequent years of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Interest in the decade and the city’s significance still resonate today in books such as The Paris Wife by Paula McLain (2011) and films like Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011). This shadow appeared early on. In his novel Goodbye to Berlin, set in 1930s Germany, Christopher Isherwood describes the establishment in which he first sees Sally Bowles perform as “an arty‘informal’ bar, just off the Tauentzienstrasse, which the proprietor had evidently tried to make look as much as possible like Montparnasse” (25). Yet as pervasively iconic as 1920s Paris became in the years following, its significance during that decade constituted a cultural magnitude all its own. During this period Paris as a city became entwined with Paris as a conceptual focal point for the philosophical and aesthetic avant-garde. It became both a place and a non-place (existent only as an idea), a landscape of “elite” modernist iconography, a beacon of prevalent and modern femininity, and most of all, a destination for artistic and cultural aspiration. For that rare confluence of the physical and the ideological, Paris amassed a fame for which it still retains a distinct set of associations. In terms of a study on Jean Rhys, this fame becomes paramount in understanding her own artistic project, for it is an understanding of precisely Paris’s notoriety during the 1920s that allows a reader today to overcome prejudiced readings—particularly Ford Madox Ford’s—that fail to take the city’s iconic fame into account.