An Exploration of the Demi-Monde and the Forgotten in Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight

To find a semblance of home on the borderlines, drifting towards timeless cafes and impasses, bound to be forgotten by the masses yet remembered fleetingly by the occasional passer-by — Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight imparts a sense of entrapment in the lonely listlessness of its excluded characters within the uncaring cityscape. GMM is widely dubbed as one of Jean Rhys’ darkest novels, which is not surprising, given its time of publication. It is explosive and violent in its emotion, the ‘intolerance it registers is intense and brutal’ as is the ‘desperation it charts in those excluded.”[1] Helen Carr suggests that the text charts ‘the beginnings of middle-age rather than the end of childhood.’[2] This sense of uncertainty and ‘sense of the coming apocalypse’ is prevalent amongst Rhys’ works, which, for a long time, tread a thin line between ‘feminist’ and ‘non-feminist, ‘private’ and ‘public’, culturally significant and self-absorbed, being ‘well-executed for a woman, but still women’s fiction’.[3] Teetering on that string also, her identity and background — Rhys was born a white creole, and was painfully aware of the fact that she was an ‘outsider’. During her life, she ventured beyond the middle classes and into the world of the demi-monde, she teetered on the edge of society, and developed a passionate understanding and compassion for the no-hopers of organised society. She suffered from ‘having her life and work read against one another, fused into a myth of feminine distress.’[4] but I would like to argue that her works are not self-absorbed or overly feminine, Rhys, in GMM, explores displacement and alienation within the cityscape, a space that is both politicised and nationalised, through the narrative of no-hopers and the near-forgotten.

GMM’s protagonist, Sasha Jensen, was revealed to be, very early on in the novel, ‘stuck at an impasse’ as she takes in the smell of ‘cheap hotels’.[5] Immediately, a sense of entrapment is established. Along with that, the state of drifting from place to place, an ever-moving listlessness, is represented as well by the connotations the word ‘hotel’ brings — an ephemeral and temporary state of living. Rhys also uses a non-linear narrative to emphasise this listlessness. The lack of structure and rhythmic repetition amplifies the sense of being disorientated and lost, and perhaps this listlessness gradually becomes a cage as well— the burden of inescapability. Rhys, throughout her life, was never truly able to escape discrimination targeted at her identity, no matter where she travelled and the people she encountered. She was born in the Caribbean island of Dominica, where ‘30,000 souls, and only 300 of them white.” which labelled her as a part of the minority.[6] As a child, she often admired and envied ‘the much freer, more colourful life of black people in Dominica.’[7] She was then sent to England to complete her education, and as a colonial, she was not English, ‘only British, which was quite different.”[8] Helen Carr suggests that the creole is “a double outsider, condemned to self-consciousness of difference and deformity by the judgements of those around her.”[9] There is nothing more painfully alienating than living in a shared space, and not being shared the same happiness; banished to live on the borderlines for a lifetime, allowed to look through a thin layer of glass into a world that you are excluded from. Rhys’ identity was a cause for much unhappiness and uneasiness in her life. Other than having been raised in a distressingly divided society, according to Christina Britzolakis, her family was equally destructive of Rhys’ self-worth. Her mother would frequently beat her, and Rhys was left wondering if she saw something ‘alien’ in her daughter she wanted to beat out.’[10] The restless Antoinette says in Wide Sargasso Sea “I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all”.[11] The ‘white creole’ was viewed, for a long time, ‘The Other’, ‘Alien’, like the ‘bad, mad and embruted’ Bertha in Jane Eyre, they are embedded with negative connotations. According to Carr, “Such notions of white Creole degeneracy were still circulating vigorously in the first half of the twentieth century when Rhys arrived in England; the persistence of the stereotype of the highly sexed, unpredictable white Creole woman…” [12]They do not belong. This displacement and discrimination within society is seen in Sasha, the protagonist of GMM, who occupies a space for herself silently and tentatively and is then met with hostile condemnation by a faceless stranger — “What is she doing here, the stranger, the alien, the old one?” and she replies, in her head, “I am asking myself all the time what the devil I am doing here. All the time.”[13]

The city is filled with, and home to anonymous strangers, whose origins are often blurred and hidden. There is an intrinsic uncertainty surrounding national identities and labels.[14] They can be cruel, or compassionate, or melancholy. Yet, for all the unreliability and fickleness of names and titles, the city can tell “who is acceptable, who is not.”— “Why don’t you drown yourself in the seine? Who are you, anyway.”[15] If you do not belong, you are better off dead. Even inanimate objects threaten the unknown creature, the one who does not belong, ‘the stranger, the alien’. In GMM, Sasha states that there are friendly houses that knows whether you are “secure and your roots are well struck in”, and respectfully opens their doors to you, while the ‘devil without any friends and without any money’ and frowned and even crushed by those houses that seem to leer and sneer at them.[16] Rhys comments that most people expect and find comfort in normativity and clichés, and tend to reject individuality. Alienation and social rejection is stirred up because the ‘unplaceable’, the ones who tread on borders, are what ‘disturbs identity, system, order.’[17] In turn, this sense of unhomeliness drives the need to belong. Rhys’ characters are in a desperate search for an escape from their loneliness. They “look for love, for acceptance, a chance to join.’[18] Sasha constantly reinvents herself in an attempt to assimilate into society. She re-names herself from Sophie to Sasha, and with her new name, she wears an astrakhan coat and Cossack hat, departing London for Paris. In the search for a sense of belonging, she essentially felt the need to obliterate her identity. Then, when she is in Paris, she reinvents herself time and again, new hair dye, a new hat, new clothes — she looks for the dress that, when she wears it she ‘should never have stammered or been stupid”[19] The line “tomorrow I’ll be pretty again, tomorrow I’ll be happy again, tomorrow, tomorrow…”[20] highlights the urgency and desperation in her struggle to fit in and be accepted, to not be forgotten, to the extent that it becomes a journey that is endless, and seemingly futile. To obtain the hair colour Sasha wants, she is told all her original hair colour must be completely removed first before the cendre is applied. According to Linda Camarasana, Sasha’s self-fashioning “is not just a display of self, but a mask, an obliteration instead.”[21] This destruction of one’s origins and history, in turn, shields her from the critical gaze of her spectators’. To fit it, she must hide the truth of her body. This desperation is, again, emphasised in “please, please, monsieur et madam, mister, missus and miss, I am trying so hard to be like you. I know I dont succeed, but look how hard I try.”[22]

The city is cold, and unforgiving. It is a world that stresses punctuality, calculability and exactness, and never falters in oppressing and constraining the ones who are unable to keep up. The death of Sasha’s child highlights this — The messiness and intimacy of birth and motherhood are erased by the machine-world, and becomes disturbingly cold and orderly. A ticket tied to the baby’s wrist because ‘he died in a hospital”[23] Even birth and death have become unhomely.[24] Sasha states that, “the thought that they will crush him because we have not money - that is torture.”[25] Similar to Woolf, Rhys believes that women are oppressed and constrained by poverty, especially within the cold cityscape, where “only the objective measurable achievement is of interest.”[26] Frank Baldanza asserts that, “the hideous irony that the more desperate one is, the more cruelly people treat one; the more one needs help, the less one gets”[27] Sasha finds herself repeatedly tyrannised by self-important bourgeois men who sneer, like the houses, at the ones who fail to oil their machine-world. The patron of her hotel seems to lord in his own fish tank, staring at the world outside with a “glassy and unbelieving eye.” Mr Blank, views her to be “equivalent to her market value”, and wants to control Sasha’s self-definition, coerces her to “accept that he has the right to nominate her ridiculous and despicable” and that is what scares Sasha most.[28] The terrifying ability that organised society has in obliterating one’s worth and morality.

Although Sasha struggles to make sense of her life, and oftentimes seem to fail to resist and defy hegemonic definitions and society.[29] Sasha is, in fact, in complete control. GMM creates a conversation between “the powerful (who speak out loud) and the disempowered (who speak inwardly)”[30] And “mockery, satire and self-irony” becomes a form of resistance.[31] With this, Rhys explores and exposes the cliches that men often retreat behind to protect their self-interests. Mr Blank, his whole character is satire, “he is an agent of a system [...] a caricature of humanity in itself.”[32] Rhys’ protagonists are not unaware of this fact, they are awfully aware that the machine-world is kept in place through the insistent emphasis on normativity, which ignores “nuance, complexity, deviation, ambivalence [...] a language which preserves the status quo.”[33] Sasha knows clearly that ‘the laughter, the horrible laughter of the world’ is ‘more tragic than all the tears the world has ever shed’[34] Ultimately, Sasha’s narrative is in control of the laughter and mockery in her story, “she, not Mr Blank, decides who is ridiculous.”[35] This is made especially apparent when Sasha addresses Mr Blank as ‘You, who represent Society…” and eloquently, in her head, exposes and underlines the painful and oftentimes needless sacrifices that this cliche machine-world requires in order to function - “The right to ridicule me afterwards because I am a cripple - no, that I think you haven’t got”. Sasha judges Mr Blank with the “oblique gaze of the migrant, rather than be fixed by his ‘boiled’, ‘abominable eyes.”[36] Although she complains of being victimised, she also protesting vigorously against it. Rhys, by giving voice to her heroines, asserts ‘the right and power to speak on their behalf’. Rhys does not “treat alienation as an existential fact but as the specific historical result of social polarisations about sex, class, and morality”[37] She, through her works, highlights the terrifying fear of alienation with the impulse of hope, and anger with the need for love and care, the cold and hopeless machine-world with its moments of beauty and compassion — “Now the room expands and the iron band around my heart loosens. The miracle has happened. I am happy.”

Through GMM, Rhys draws on her own life of displacement and alienation to explore the consciousness of those under threat, and of those of threatening, in the paranoic interwar period of 1937. Rhys woman had always seen to be “more pathetic than sympathetic, a singular figure of failure, defeated by her life and unable to pet past her past.”[38] Critics express that Rhys explores solely a “women’s emotional life”, and lack “an enlarged vision of the world”.[39] However, I believe that Rhys, though GMM and other works, serve as a commentary on social inequalities and shed light onto the anguish that people who are deemed of a lower stature, the working class, the underdogs, experience —“bare, sturdy legs, felt slippers, black dress… I know her. this is the girl who does all the dirty work and gets paid little for it. Salut!”[40] Rhys, in GMM, established a world in which many things orbit the problematic and strained relationships between people of different nationalities, races, languages, classes”[41] This novel, with its modernist emphasis on repetition and memory, illustrates the unavoidable - and sometimes horrifying, but always interconnected - presence of a political and personal past.”[42]Sasha, from the vantage point of the borders, is made acutely aware of all the problems that organised society has by peering in through the thin layer of glass that separates her and people like her from others. Sasha’s story is, thus, both a history of setbacks and sufferings on one individual and a representative fable.[43]

[1] Carr, Helen, Jean Rhys (Oxford: Liverpool University Press, 2018) [2] Carr, p. 51 [3] Carr, p.1 [4] Carr, p. 1 [5] Rhys, Jean, Jean Rhys, the Complete Novels (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985), p. 9 [6] Angier, Carole, Jean Rhys: Life and Work (London: Faber and Faber, 2011) [7] Carr, Helen, “Williams, Ella GWENDOLINE REES [PSEUD. JEAN RHYS] (1890–1979), Writer,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography <https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-31833> [accessed 9 August 2021] [8] Angier, p.19 [9] Carr, p. 51 [10] Britzolakis, Christina, “‘This Way to THE EXHIBITION’: Genealogies of Urban Spectacle in JEAN Rhys's Interwar Fiction,” Textual Practice, 21 (2007), 457 [11] Rhys, Jean, Wide Sargasso Sea (London: Penguin Books, 2019) [12] Carr, p. 89 [13] Rhys, p. 56 [14] Carr, p. 52 [15] Rhys, p. 92 [16] Rhys, p. 28 [17] Kristeva, Julia, “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection,” SubStance, 13 (1984), 140 http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3684782, p. 10 [18] Carr, p. 68 [19] Rhys, p. 17 [20] Rhys, p. 48 [21] Linda Camarasana, “Exhibitions and Repetitions: Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight and The World of Paris, 1937,” in At Home and Abroad in the Empire British Women Write the 1930s (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009)p. 29 [22] Rhys, p. 106 [23] Rhys, p. 116 [24] Carr, p. 77 [25] Rhys, p. 50 [26] Simmel, Georg, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Metropolis, 1995, 30–45 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23708-1_4> [27] Baldanza , Frank, “Jean Rhys on Insult and Injury,” Studies in Literary Imagination, 11 (1978), 64 [28] Carr, p. 61 [29] Carr, p. 62 [30] Harrison, Nancy, “Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women's Text,” University of North Carolina Press, 26 (1988) <http://dx.doi.org/10.5860/choice.26-3740> [31] Carr, p. 69 [32] Carr, p. 108 [33] Carr, p. 109 [34] Rhys, p. 115 [35] Carr, p. 71 [36] Carr, p. 65 [37] Gardiner, Judith Kegan, “Good Morning, Midnight; Good NIGHT, MODERNISM,” Boundary 2, 11 (1982), 233–51 http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/303027, p. 233 [38] Linda, p. 51 [39] Staley, Thomas F., Jean Rhys: A Critical Study (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) p, 84 [40] Rhys, p. 87 [41] Savory, Elaine, Jean Rhys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) p, 92 [42] Linda, p. 54 [43] Davidson, Arnold E., “The Dark Is Light Enough: Affirmation from Despair in Jean Rhys's ‘Good Morning, Midnight,’” Contemporary Literature, 24 (1983), 349–64