The Leitmotif Organization of Jean Rhys’s Short Story “Till September Petronella"

Abstract

The article examines the leitmotives found in the central story of Jean Rhys's collection "Tigers are Beautiful". Jean Rhys' short stories researcher and reader inevitably encounters a series of key images that largely predetermine and constitute a number of references to the subtext, elements of the author's artistic world. The problem-thematic complex of the story "Till September Petronella" consists of gender confrontation, existential crisis and war. It is revealed through elements of external psychologism (leitmotivs of the garden (tree, flowers, stone), mirrors and dresses), iconic loci of the cell (rooms) and recurring themes of loneliness and suicide, the search for identity. The leitmotif organization of Jean Rhys's narrative, underestimated by contemporary literary critics and readers, is of particular interest to researchers of modernist prose. A close reading of the story "Till September Petronella" allows us not only to get acquainted with Jean Rhys's literary work, but also to consider the principle of poetics elements in the process of revealing a complex of topics.