pioneers, oh pioneers
Setting in Jean Rhys’s “Pioneers, oh Pioneers”
How does the setting underline the main conflict and the meaning for characterization? Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1
2. Setting
2
2.1 Dominica
3
2.2 Dr Cox’s house
4
2.3 Ramage’s house
5
2.4 Comparison Imperial Road and Market Street
7
3. Conclusion
8
4. Bibliography
10
5. Honesty Statement
11
1. Introduction
___________________________________________________________________________
This seminar paper analyses the different functions of the setting in Jean Rhys’s short story
“Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers.”
The author Jean Rhys was born in 1890 and brought up in Roseau, Dominica (Rhys 1981:
10). Her father was Welsh and her mother Creole (Rhys 1981:6), so she grew up between two worlds. Savory underlines that this is manifested in her divided attitude towards cultural identities (1998: 35).
Rhys was an author of novels, short stories and an autobiographical fragment which is called
“Smile Please”. But not only this book is autobiographical. Jean Rhys had almost always some autobiographical aspects in her stories. To her friend David Plante, who later became the ghostwriter of her autobiography, she said:
“I can’t make things up, I can’t invent. I have no imagination. I can’t invent character. I don’t think I know what character is. I just write about what happened” (1983: 52).
In “Pioneers, Oh Pioneers”, which was originally published under the name “Dear Darling Mr
Ramage” in The Times and later became a part of the story collection “Sleep It Off Lady”
(Rhys 1976), the reader will also find some autobiographical aspects. The female child protagonist Rosalie is “aged 9” (Rhys 1970: 12)1 and “her father is the local doctor” (Hooper
2005:122). In 1899 Rhys was the same age and her father also had “decided to become a doctor” (Rhys 1981: 68).
Malcolm and Malcolm point out that Ramage “is neither white nor black” just like Jean Rhys was. In her family she was the one with the palest skin (Rhys 1981).
How does the setting underline the main conflict and the meaning for characterization? Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1
2. Setting
2
2.1 Dominica
3
2.2 Dr Cox’s house
4
2.3 Ramage’s house
5
2.4 Comparison Imperial Road and Market Street
7
3. Conclusion
8
4. Bibliography
10
5. Honesty Statement
11
1. Introduction
___________________________________________________________________________
This seminar paper analyses the different functions of the setting in Jean Rhys’s short story
“Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers.”
The author Jean Rhys was born in 1890 and brought up in Roseau, Dominica (Rhys 1981:
10). Her father was Welsh and her mother Creole (Rhys 1981:6), so she grew up between two worlds. Savory underlines that this is manifested in her divided attitude towards cultural identities (1998: 35).
Rhys was an author of novels, short stories and an autobiographical fragment which is called
“Smile Please”. But not only this book is autobiographical. Jean Rhys had almost always some autobiographical aspects in her stories. To her friend David Plante, who later became the ghostwriter of her autobiography, she said:
“I can’t make things up, I can’t invent. I have no imagination. I can’t invent character. I don’t think I know what character is. I just write about what happened” (1983: 52).
In “Pioneers, Oh Pioneers”, which was originally published under the name “Dear Darling Mr
Ramage” in The Times and later became a part of the story collection “Sleep It Off Lady”
(Rhys 1976), the reader will also find some autobiographical aspects. The female child protagonist Rosalie is “aged 9” (Rhys 1970: 12)1 and “her father is the local doctor” (Hooper
2005:122). In 1899 Rhys was the same age and her father also had “decided to become a doctor” (Rhys 1981: 68).
Malcolm and Malcolm point out that Ramage “is neither white nor black” just like Jean Rhys was. In her family she was the one with the palest skin (Rhys 1981).
Bibliography: Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Orlando: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1988. Chatman, Seymour. Reading Narrative Fiction. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993. David Plante. Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three. 1983. Hooper, Glenn (Ed?). Landscape and Empire. Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2005. Hulme, Peter. “Islands and Roads: Hesketh Bell, Jean Rhys and Dominica’s Imperial Road.” The Jean Rhys Review 11:2 (2000), 23-51. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. Rhys, Jean. “Pioneers, Oh, Pioneers.” Sleep It Off Lady. London: Penguin Books, 1979, 1121. Rhys, Jean. Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography. London: Penguin Books, 1981. Savory, Elaine. The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Smith, Michael Garfield. The Plural Society in the British West Indies. London: University of California Press, 1974. Toolan, Michael J. Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction. London: Routledge, 1988. Wende, Peter. Das Britische Empire: Geschichte eines Weltreichs. München: Beck, 2012. http://anthurium.miami.edu/volume_3/issue_2/davis-jamette.htm/ (accessed July 6, 2013), 2005. Jung-Hwa Lee. Unhomely Homes: Postcolonial (Re)Locations and Self-Fashioning in Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, and Chang-Raelee, 2008.