Essay - What Does It Mean to Be A Hero? Does It...

What does it mean to be a hero? Does it depend on whether one is a man or a woman? Is the nature of heroism engendered? Are ********** different categ*****ies ***** heroism - a heroism of the mind and a heroism of the body, for ex*****mple? The life and work ***** the novelist Jean Rhys help us to understand the nature of ***** heroic. Rhys herself may be considered to ***** a hero even though her ***** w*****s not by conventional *****s a success. Indeed, ***** might be considered ***** be a stereotypic*****l failure: She drank heavily, had a number ***** unhappy love affairs, and seems to have lost ***** talent or at least her will to write f***** decades. But in the end. A woman who called herself a "doormat ***** a world of boots" proved by her life and in her ***** that doormats are durable *****deed.

***** sense of herself as a certainly less-then-conventional-***** presence is reflected in the descriptions she pr*****fers of her characters, descriptions that seem essentially autobiographical, like this passage from After Leaving Mr Mackenzie.

She found pleasure in memories, as an old wom***** might ***** done. Her mind was a confusion of memory and imagination. It ***** always places ***** she thought of, not people. She would lie thinking ***** the dark s*****ows of houses in a street white with sunshine; or trees with slender black branches and young green leaves, ***** the ***** of a London square in spring; or of a d*****rk-purple sea, the sea of a chromo ***** of some tropical country that she had never seen.

Born in the West Indies, and thus always to some extent a writer marked by the experience of belonging ***** a colonized place, her first novels were set not in her homeland but in the bohemian circles of Europe in the years between ***** world wars. ***** this early burst of creativity, ***** ceased to write altogether until she wrote what ***** prove in many ways to be her most *****ful novel, set this time at home in the West Indies.

Rhys, whose fat***** was a Welsh doc*****r and ***** mo*****r ***** a Creole native of the West Indies, Rhys was raised and educated in Dominica until ***** age of 16, when ***** moved to London ***** find work as an actress. When she moved to Paris shortly afterward, she met the English novelist Ford Madox ***** who encour*****d her to write - a striking point because she closely resembles in ***** ways the ***** ***** particular k*****d of heroism embodied in Ford's most famous *****, The Good Soldier. Rhys's first book of short s*****ries, ***** Left Bank ***** published in 1927. Shortly after this and in quick succession she published several full-length novels: Postures (in 1928), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (in 1931), Voyage in the Dark (in 1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (in 1939).

She spent the middle years of her life in Cornwall, a beautiful ***** relatively isolated and isolating part