Uncovering the Subtlety in Rhys and Frost

From Gilgamesh's lust under love to Ovid to Dante and beyond, literary traditions have emphasized the journey, whether it is the hero, the outcast or just the mundane individual. Jean Rhys “I Used to Live Here Once” and Robert Frost’s “The Road not taken” are no exception to this literary tradition. Although both of these poems possess their own literary nuances, they both confound the reader by presenting ostensible themes but simultaneously entrenching ambiguity between the lines of the text. While many interpretations revolve around the open-ended conclusions of the texts, this paper will explore and demonstrate the mean by which these poems present the archetypal journey of the individual.

From the onset, both poems present two characters at the crossroad of some unidentifiable path. The absence of concrete identities of both characters functions to universalize the texts and coaxes the reader to personalize the themes. Ostensibly, these poems both present romantic, beautifully crafted musings about life’s journey and mellow dramatic reflections of solitude. In fact, most references to these poems, especially “The road not taken,” devolve into over-simplified interpretations. In his own analysis, John Savoie (2005) relates,

of the many collections of Frost and the innumerable anthologies, the poem, or at least its "irreducible bits," lives on in calendars, greeting cards, advertisements, journalistic allusions, sermons, graduation speeches, casual conversations, and private conceptions of self. Some ninety years since the poem's genesis and more than a generation since Frost's death, this most American of poems has conspicuously lent titles to best-sellers in the most American of genres, self-help popular psychology and country music’ (p.5).

Rhys’ work also falls victim, though on a smaller scale, to these same ostensible traps. The overt spiritual, abstract journey of her persona lends itself to over-simplified platitudes that can be reduced to bumper sticker slogans and other idle platitudes. Confronting the ambiguity of these texts unearths the deeper themes buried within them, which sabotages the simplicity that these poems are often interpreted with.

Highlighting the ambiguity of both texts allows any analysis to account for a deeper reading that is not nearly as “clean” as the aforementioned simplistic ones. As Rhys’ persona hopelessly reaches out to the small children in the last paragraph, she comes to the “cold” realization that she was isolated, ostracized, and most likely even dead (para 6). However, the passage from the previous stanza may challenge any interpretation that the persona has indeed died, “Very fair children, as Europeans born in the West Indies so often are: as if the white blood is asserting itself against all the odds” (para. 4). This reference to race may point to Rhys’ own observations and judgments concerning her privileged upbringing in Dominicana. Following the death of her father in 1910, Rhys began to carouse with a group referred to as the demimonde, which was defined by its hedonistic lifestyle, deeply at odds with the morality of the British Aristocracy. Refusing to return to her family in the Caribbean and in on the verge of being a pauper, Rhys posed nude for artists in Britain.

Surely Rhys lifestyle was at odds with what was deemed acceptable in British high society, and it can be reasonably inferred that she felt isolated from her community, which may explain the isolation her persona feels in “I used to live here once.” Moreover, the specific reference to white children may further refer to her isolation from white society along with the sympathy she carried for the Negro population in Dominicana, “Rhys identified with the Negro community in her childhood, and indeed throughout her life...She envied the Negro community its vitality and often contrasts the sterility of the white world with the richness and splendor of black life” (Jean Rhys, n.d., para 3). As the final line of the last stanza of the poem ostensibly suggests that Rhys is alluding to her own death, looking back, Rhys’ biography creates another tenable analysis of the text, which may provide a more cogent analysis, especially in light of her chronological position in the modernist era.

When the abject isolation Rhys’ felt throughout most of her life is considered in conjunction with the theme of the journey in “I used to live here once,” the journey takes on a whole new meaning. The poem suddenly becomes a tale of Rhys’ journey to finding an identity within a world she had been isolated from. Lucy Wilson (1989) corroborates this suggestion as she provides more context of Rhys life,

The question of identity in Jean Rhys's life and fiction is inextricably bound to the condition of exile that shaped her perceptions and those of her characters. Rhys was truly a woman without a country. England, where she lived for most of her adult life, was a cold, unreceptive place for the writer… The daughter of a Welsh father and a white Creole mother, Rhys felt exiled even before she moved to England because she was cut off from the black community in Dominica.bThus Rhys suffered from what Amon Saba Saakana describes as "the mental condition of double alienation” (p.68).

The melancholy mood that consumes the reader throughout the poem underscores Rhys’ struggle and perhaps the universal struggle of those who are trapped between to worlds and denied the solace that comes along with community and identity.

In enveloping her poem with a morose tone, perhaps Rhys does greater justice to the human condition. Oversimplified romanticizing about this struggle seems to betray the value of that journey. Indeed, Lucy Wilson(1989) further relates Edwards Said’s analysis of this topic, “To think of exile as beneficial, as a spur to humanism or to creativity, is to belittle its mutilations. For exile is fundamentally a discontinuous state of being. Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past" (p.69). As Rhys’ persona walks among the disheveled trees and trampled bushes, she personifies the struggle she herself faced as she returned to Dominicana after spending most of her life in England.

Finding objects and memories at odds with one another, Rhys’ presents the modernist motifs of fragmentation, which compounds the reader’s feeling of displacement. Many critics hurry to impose some greater metaphysical purpose onto Rhys’ writing in order to imbue it with a happy ending. However, Rhys was part of the modernist movement, which attempted to undermine the misrepresentations of reality made by linear narratives. She also joined other modernist writers in endeavoring to represent the chaos of life in modern urban spaces. Her characters manifest the difficulties of the modern city, the intense "nervous stimulation," as Georg Simmel puts it, "which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli” (Linett, 2005, p.440). This reading makes some readers squirm because it robs them of the security and resolution of the linear narrative; however, beneath Rhys’ writings seems to lie a more honest depiction of the human depiction.

Just as “I used to live here once” can be lazily interpreted as some abstract monologue about death, Frost’s “The road not taken” easily lends itself to these oversimplified musings about the human's journey into Neverwhere. Moreover, Frost’s poem also confronts the reader with a fragmented narrative that, when examined closely, presents dizzying contractions. However, most readers focus on the kinship they feel with Frost as he seemingly champions individualism and the courage to blaze new paths.

The contradiction built into Frost’s poem lies with his road. Although Frost’s persona suggests that the road he chose has taken has made all the difference, he simultaneously claims that others is “just as fair.” William Pritchard(1984) explains,

For the large moral meaning which "The Road Not Taken" seems to endorse - go, as I did, your own way, take the road less traveled by, and it will make "all the difference"-does not maintain itself when the poem is looked at more carefully. Then one notices how insistent is the speaker on admitting, at the time of his choice, that the two roads were in appearance "really about the same," that they "equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black," and that choosing one rather than the other was a matter of impulse, impossible to speak about any more clearly than to say that the road taken had "perhaps the better claim"(para 12).

When this contradiction is realized, then the poem takes on an entirely new meaning and subverts decades of analysis and oversimplification. Considering Mr. Pritchard’s analysis, “The road not taken” transforms into an existential narrative concerning the journey of life. From this perspective, the struggle to find meaning and identity underlies the narratives of both Frost’s and Rhys’ work.

Understanding some basic tenants of Existentialist philosophy (which is probably a misnomer in of itself) may help to shed light on the prevalent themes of “The road not taken.” Given that Sartre was the only Philosopher to ever identify himself as an Existentialist, it would be certainly misleading to suggest that Frost was an existentialist; however, examining the work from this perspective allows for an analysis devoid of oversimplified platitudes. Robert Frost himself even indicated that he thought “The road not taken” would confound and mislead many readers. John Savoie (2005) relates, “Frost himself was well aware of what a popular yet difficult poem he had written. At one public reading, he warned his audience "to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem-very tricky." Later he remarked, 'TH bet not half a dozen people can tell who was hit and where he was hit by my 'Road Not Taken'" (p15). Examining “The Road not Taken” from the work of Friedrich Nietzsche offers a new interpretation concerning the journey of Frost’s persona.

This analysis necessitates a cursory review of Nietzsche’s 343 aphorisms from his work The Gay Science. Many are familiar with Nietzsche’s pronouncement claiming God is dead. Many mistake this as Nietzsche’s belief. While he was indeed an Athiest, his pronouncement was his own prognosis of society, for Europe’s pervasive religious apathy had killed God, not Nietzsche. He explains,

The greatest recent event—that "God is dead,"' that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable—is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. For the few at least whose eyes—the suspicion in whose eyes is strong and subtle enough for this spectacle, some sun seems to have set and some ancient and profound trust has been turned into doubt; to them our old world must appear daily more like evening, more mistrustful, stranger, "older." (Nietzsche, n.d.)

Nietzsche relates this news with enthusiasm because, from his perspective, with the elimination of God and the moral paradigms of Christianity comes a freedom for the individual to find meaning and value independent of the constructs of Christianity, “at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an "open sea" (Nietzsche, n.d.). With these ideas, Nietzsche contributed to the Romanticism era of this period. This idea of the open sea and the individual’s opportunity to navigate that sea offers the context to evaluate “The road not taken” from an existentialist perspective.

As Frost’s persona stands before the two roads, he (or she) figuratively stands before Nietzsche’s open sea, absolutely free to choose his own path. Furthermore, this Nietzschean perspective reconciles this aforementioned paradox concerning the personas claim that no substantive difference exists between the two roads. The difference in choosing the less traveled road is that the persona chose it. It was not a compulsory decision mandated by some power structure but a freely chosen road. The persona even briefly laments his decision, “Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads to way, I doubted if I should ever come back” (13-15). This comment underscores the fact that there are no differences between these two roads. Consequently, the reader can infer that the persona could have made all the same “difference” in his life by choosing the other road. Additionally, it seems most modern laypeople impose a positive connotation into the final stanza, although the persona claims that he will speak of his choice with a sigh, another trick may have constructed into his poem.

From this Existential perspective, “The road not taken” shakes off the vulgar interpretations concerning individualism. The poem further becomes an avenue by which the reader can remove the scales from their eyes and recognize that the archetypal journey of life is not circumscribed within any path but is an open sea. The only difference between the disparate paths of life becomes the individual’s willingness or ability to affirm their life. Consequently, as the persona looks back and sighs, perhaps “The road not taken” may be a cautionary tale, exhorting the reader to choose their own path. The title of the poem may even further support this analysis. The author is speaking of the road he did not take, not the one he did take. Surely many competing interpretations exist and are tenable, but Robert Frost surely had something deeper in mind when writing this poem than just encouraging his audience to be unique.

The greatest difference Rhys’ “I Used to Live Here Once” and Frost’s “The Road not Taken” becomes the ability of the individual, of the persona, to affirm life. While Frost strives to open his audience’s eyes to the open sea before them, Rhys underscores the inability of the individual to construct an identity, which results in fragmentation and isolation. The greatest similarity among these poems remains the ostensible themes that romanticize the archetypal journal and dilute it into some mundane truism. Both texts demand that the reader look deeper to find more subtle themes, which hopefully coaxes the reader to reflect on the implications these texts present. Nathaniel Hawthorne (n.d.) once suggested,

When romances do really teach anything or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtle process than the ostensible one. The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral, as with an iron rod,--or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly,--thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude that when literature teaches the individual anything worth more than the ink on the page, it is typically conducted through a far more subtle process than the ostensible one (para 3).

This essay has attempted to dismiss these ostensible interpretations as vulgar popularizations and highlight the subtler, messier themes of these texts because it seems to mock the human condition when it is presented like a fair tale. It robs the individual of the ability to find meaning within the chaos and peace from that meaning.

References

Frost, R. (n.d.). 1. The Road Not Taken. Frost, Robert. 1920. Mountain Interval. Bartleby.com: Great Books Online -- Quotes, Poems, Novels, Classics and hundreds more. Retrieved March 25, 2013, from http://www.bartleby.com/119/1.html

Hawthorne, N. (n.d.). Preface, The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851. Eldritch Press. Retrieved March 26, 2013, from http://www.eldritchpress.org/nh/sgpf.html

Linett, M. (2005). "New Words, New Everything": Fragmentation and Trauma in Jean Rhys. Twentieth-Century Literature, 51(4), 437-466. Retrieved March 20, 2013, from the JSTOR database.

Nietzsche, F. (n.d.). Selections from Nietzsche, The Gay Science. UW Faculty Web Server. Retrieved March 26, 2013, from http://faculty.washington.edu/cbehler/teaching/coursenotes/Texts/selNietzGay.html

Pritchard, W. (n.d.). On "The Road Not Taken". Welcome to English « Department of English, College of LAS, University of Illinois. Retrieved March 26, 2013, from http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/road.htm

Rhys, J. (n.d.). I used to live here once. wordpress.com. Retrieved March 18, 2013, from khristinagonzalez.files.wordpress.com/.../c2a0i

Savoie, J. (2004). A Poet's Quarrel: Jamesian Pragmatism and Frost's "The Road Not Taken". The New England Quarterly, 77(1), 5-24. Retrieved March 18, 2013, from the ProQuest Library database.

Wilson, L. (1989). European or Caribbean: Jean Rhys and the Language of Exile. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 10(3), 68-72. Retrieved March 19, 2013, from the JSTOR database.