Postures: Jean Rhys in the Modern World at Michael Werner Gallery is the perfect exhibition for dank autumn days when the sun is low on the horizon and the evening comes too soon. As befits the subject, it is literary as much as visual. You read your way around the walls, which fittingly combines text and image. The result is a powerful atmosphere in which a Gothic sensibility of strangeness is threaded with post-coital tristesse and quiet desperation.
The exhibition centres on Rhys’ personal biography, and the book that rescued her from obscurity in 1966 when she was living in abject poverty in a small Devon village, which she referred to as “a dull spot which even drink can't enliven much.” Wide Sargasso Sea imagines the earlier life story of the Creole woman locked in an attic and treated as mad by Mr Rochester in Emily Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre. Rhys’ book recounts the disempowerment and abuse that Antoinette suffers at Rochester’s hands, as well as the racism implicit in his rejection of her Creole identity. As such the book is considered now to be an important early example of feminist and post-colonial literature, though Rhys likely did not define it in this way herself. Nonetheless, she has been an acknowledged influence on younger Caribbean writers and Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid and Caryl Philips’ imposing black and white portraits by Mariana Cook preside in the downstairs gallery.
