Kissing Statues: Eroticism and Satire in the Short Stories of Jean Rhys.

Within the short stories of Jean Rhys we can observe her attempting to find a means to write the erotic by using descriptions of the visual arts as a way to explore female desire and sexuality. In these moments of engagement with the visual arts, Rhys finds a way to subvert the supposed "neutrality" of ekphrasis and satirize male depictions of the female body and female desire. Working alongside this satirical intent to critique male artistic practice, we witness Rhys adopting prototypical modernist techniques but using them to describe moments of eroticism. Fragmentation, ellipsis, intense subjectivity, a sense of timelessness—all are revealed by Rhys to have a much wider application beyond depicting the trauma and confusion of early twentieth-century European culture. Instead, Rhys shows how these techniques might be ideally suited to describe female desire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]