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Abstract:

The article examines the “women’s issue” in Jean Rhys’ early short stories, which fit into the artistic discourse of Modernist culture, addressed to women’s writing. We consider the genre of the short story itself as marginal: the formal features of the story, such as incompleteness, discontinuity, low eventfulness, entailing the ambiguity of the overall picture, are associated with ideological marginality of the genre, which underwent changes in the first half of the 20^th century. Choosing as the central theme of her work the helplessness of the heroines, the cause of which is the socio-economic system, the Englishspeaking writer looks at Paris from the perspective of a number of female social types, which brings an element of novelty to the tradition of describing and perceiving this city. The focus of the writer’s significant debut stories, included in the collection The Left Bank and Other Stories (Illusion, Mannequin, In a café), are women who are aware of their own dependent position; this “marginality” alienates them from society, imposing on them full identification with this status. The pain point is the inability to express oneself, which manifests itself at different levels of the text’s organization.