리스(Jean Rhys)의 후기단편소설 「선구자, 오 선구자여와「수상한 상황」:‘위치지울 수 없는’ 이방인의 존재를 통해 드러나는 제국 시민의 내면

Jean Rhys's many short stories, published in the 1960s and 1970s, are set in the turn of the century and the early 20th century when the British empire had spurted to educate the British people to embody its imperial ideology. Among them, “Pioneers, Oh Pioneers” and “Fishy Waters,” included in Sleep If Off, Lady (1976), capture the moment that British colonists living in Roseau of Dominica get isolated and deteriorated inside their soul. The moment is revealed through colonists's encounter with strangers such as Mr Ramage in “Pioneers, Oh Pioneers” and Jimmy Longa in “Fishy Waters.” Zygmunt Bauman explains in Modernity and Ambivalence that strangers are, in principle, unplaceable in between the subject and the other. Thus strangers are the ones that can question the very principle of the opposition of the subject and the other which should be clearly placed under the social norms of the European colonialists. This paper examines how the British colonists presented in these two stories respond to these strangers. Rhys portrays the white colonial society through Rosalie's point of view, a little girl aged 9, to reveal its blindness while applying the detective narrative in “Fishy Waters” to expose its doubleness. The narrative of each story interestingly reveals the monstrosity of British colonists in the process of investigating hybrid and seemingly monstrous strangers. In doing so, Rhys criticizes the British imperialism by disclosing the way in which the intolerance of anything different and unplaceable lead people to violence and blindness.