Whispers of History: The Challenges of Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma in Jean Rhys’s After Leaving Mr Mackenzie

This article examines the representation of transgenerational transmissions of trauma in Jean Rhys’s interwar novel After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930). It explores the female protagonist’s struggle to understand her sense of alienation in relation to an unspoken history of suffering and neglect within her family. The protagonist’s encounter with her family is analysed as a deeply ambivalent moment where trauma’s lingering presence disrupts rather than enables the transmission of history and affect across generations. In keeping with contemporary approaches to Rhys focusing on the relational dimension of her work, my analysis tackles how the narrative depicts the heroine’s attempt to restore the fractured relationship with her family by struggling to decipher their experience of trauma. Drawing on Meera Atkinson’s “poetics of transgenerational trauma,” this article addresses the ambiguities inherent in the encounters between ancestors and descendants, revealing their paradoxical role as both catalysts for the transmission of traumatic affect and reminders of the impossibility of fully grasping or articulating inherited trauma. In so doing, this study foregrounds the opacity of Rhys’s female characters alongside the eerie, elusive nature of her poetics where silence and disruptions in language not only reflect the enduring impact of trauma, but also expose the challenges of transmitting it through storytelling.