The Motive of Imprisonment on Joan Rhys’s Short Stories “From a French Prison”, “The Sidi”, “Outside the Machine”

Abstract

The article examines the motive of imprisonment (supervision and punishment) in the concept of Jean Rhys’s short stories written in the first half of the XX century. The placement of female (Inez, Madame Tavernier, Mrs. Murphy) and male (the old man and the boy, Sidi) characters in the closed loci of the hospital and prison is seen as an emblem of alienation and identity crisis. The possibilities of philosophical and psychological interpretation of the imprisonment, the key leitmotif of the British writer’s stories, and the accompanying motives of loneliness, accidental encounter, non-involvement, guilt, inner human freedom and existential insight are analyzed in detail. The hospital/prison space turns out to be symbolic, irrational. It acquires metaphysical meaning, correlates with the key ideas of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Special attention is paid to the representation of the motive of imprisonment in the poetics of the stories «From a French Prison», «The Sidi», «Outside the Machine» (internal psychologism, the unreliability of the narrator, the accentuation of detail).