The ghostly, the uncanny and the abject in Jean Rhys’s After Leaving Mr Mackenzie

Abstract

My aim in this chapter is to analyse the Gothic elements in Jean Rhys’s After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), an important dimension of the novel that has suffered from critical neglect. In particular, I would like to call attention to Rhys’s use of the figure of ghost to underline her characters’ alienated and marginal condition. Their liminality between life and death must be seen as related to the blurring of other conceptual categories pervading the novel – familiar and unfamiliar, heimlich and unheimlich, self and other, human and animal, animate and inanimate –, with the subsequent emergence of the Freudian uncanny and the abject as discussed by Julia Kristeva.