'The Glittering Coronet of Isles': Jean Rhys and the Rhetorical Grammar of Britain's Island Empire

Froude's rhetorical moves (perhaps unsurprisingly) invite discussion of Michel Foucault's heterotopia, 'a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites ... that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted". Unlike a utopia, a heterotopia is an actual space, 'capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible', in the process highlighting the 'illusory' nature of other real spaces. Foucault suggests that some colonies provide the fantasy of 'compensation' for the problematic real spaces of European empires, offering something 'perfect, meticulous' in the face of the messy socio-political situation the imperial power inevitably faces at home. Froude's 'string of gems' condenses the illusion inherent in and the compensation provided by the colonial island heterotopia into a narrative image. Just after their wedding, Antoinette and her English husband debate their native geography: 'Is it true', she said, 'that England is like a dream? Because one of my friends who married an Englishman wrote and told me so. In Pinet's formulation, the cultural transformation of islands from material cartography to imaginative metaphor paradoxically enabled the 'believable' fictions embodied in the novel genre. Insularity is the core concept in this transformation, where the figure of the island is evacuated of geographic significance in the chivalric romance and invested instead with the discursive 'truths' that would structure the European novel. The containment suggested by island geography, idealized by the British historians and commentators quoted earlier, thus has its literary corollary in the form of a clearly defined, clearly circumscribed story, both plausible and illusory - not a utopia, but Foucault's discordant heterotopia, here compensating for what Pinet reads as the irreconcilable impulses of romance and realism.65 Margaret Doody has suggested that the British novel in particular and its 'Prescriptive Realism' - 'the Realism new in the mid-eighteenth century and dominant in the nineteenth ... [that] cuts out fantasy and experiment, and severely limits certain forms of psychic and social questioning' - is a site both 'home-grown' and descended from classical and modern European principles. In an island nation like Britain, a realist novel (broadly conceived) is not simply another version of the European model: while throughout Europe, geography