recognition is insignificant only as a speculative model. It ceases to be so with regard to the ends which it serves and to which it leads us. What is recognised is not only an object but also the values attached to an object. For some reason I am very vexed at this. I start wondering why I am there at all… I want to get away. I want to be out of the place […] I want to go by myself, to get into a taxi and drive along the street, to stand by myself and look down at the fountains in the cold light. It is not just the loneliness, it’s the inability to pull oneself out of it, of making nothing out of her youth, of pouring out her existence into the vapidness of the Parisian cafes, seedy hotel rooms. Of being the failed participant of her own life. Her life which is splattered on those forgetful streets, and bars where everyone is cruel, everyone disapproves. She is the witness of her dissolution. And how hard she tries to sink in her invisibility, the muteness of her self. But think how hard I try and how seldom I dare. Think and have a bit of pity. That is if you ever think you apes which I doubt. Rhys, then, is the anti-Miller. She’s a gigantic but necessary buzzkill. Where Miller is all about acquisition—of books, women, experiences—Rhys is all about loss. Her fictional alter ego is slowly losing everything: her looks, her faith in humanity, her will to live. There’s no self-pity; just the bitter resignation of someone who, out of pure disgust, has decided to drink herself to death. These are words spoken with truth and clarity. They’re simple and honest. And not for a single moment in the novel did I doubt them, not for a single moment did I conceive that there could be an alternative ending. I’m not going to sugar coat it for you: this isn’t a nice novel. There is very little in the way of redemptive themes, and the motif of freedom is only fully achieved through the ultimate rejection of human happiness and interpersonal relationships.

Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys - BBC

Rhys fans should go for Good Morning, Midnight or a group of her astonishing stories (I’d suggest Vienne, Till September Petronella, and Tigers Are Better-Looking.) But those new to Rhys will enjoy discussing Wide Sargasso Sea, the heartbreaking prequel to Jane Eyre which was published in 1966. Rhys was 76 and had almost given up hope of literary recognition until it won the WH Smith literary award and she was propelled into the limelight. Set in Jamaica and on another unnamed Caribbean island, Sargasso draws on Rhys’s intense memories of Dominica, where she told friends that she wanted to be buried, “under a flamboyant tree”. And that – if you really want to understand what made Jean Rhys the great writer she would become – is where to go and look for her. Given Sasha’s inability to physically mask herself to satisfaction, her relationships with men—the root of her mental disarray— prove disastrous. Consider, again, Mr. Blank. Having already botched their initial meeting, Sasha describes a later incident wherein she is summoned to his office and asked to deliver a letter to the cashier. She misinterprets his German, and finds herself walking in circles, unsure of who to deliver the letter to: “Kise—kise . . . It doesn’t mean a thing to me. He’s got me in such a state that I can’t imagine what it can mean” (25). Or was she another victim of straddling two worlds, the inner and the outer, two cultures, two expectations, hers and the other that society nursed on her since her birth?

In the present, Sasha goes to the Luxembourg Gardens the day after she was supposed to meet the Russian. Funnily enough, she runs into the other Russian man, who is clearly fond of her. His name is Delmar, and he’s a very kind, pensive man who believes in simply taking life “as it comes.” He also senses that Sasha is lonely and says that he, too, used to feel isolated and alone—until, that is, he started forcing himself to be social. Thinking companionship will also do Sasha some good, he arranges to introduce her the following day to a painter friend of his named Serge. In Sasha’s mind, Mr. Blank is no different than Rene, or the old man who continually haunts her from the hotel room next door. Her life, to this point, has been a continual line of men who have harmed her in some way. Sasha perceives all of these men to be one entity, to whom she assigns a different mask. Therefore, we have “Mr. Blank”, “the gigolo”, “the commis”, and so forth. Sasha holds no illusions about the young man. René, as Emery writes, “wants Sasha’s money; he wants to use her sexually” (165). They meet again and, despite Sasha’s resistance, the gigolo breaks her down for good. After a night of verbal sparring, Sasha finally reveals to René why she is so afraid of living: This idea of seeking comfort by staying in bed brings forth another theme: her preoccupation with rooms. The rooms that she lives in become another way that routines and structures are imposed – both physically and emotionally. Physically, it gives Sasha somewhere to hide: It seems appropriate to end with the poem for which this novel is named. It’s worth reading it alongside the novel:

Good Morning, Midnight; Good Night, Modernism - JSTOR Good Morning, Midnight; Good Night, Modernism - JSTOR

You imagine the carefully pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn't. The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it's in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth.” Another passage that tells us more about the terrible mental state she is in: “People talk about the happy life, but that’s the happy life when you don’t care any longer if you live or die.” I had heard of this author from her well-known book Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel and a feminist response to Jane Eyre’s ‘crazy woman in the attic.’ Although I have not read that book I decided to give this one a try. I am talking away, quite calmly and sedately, when there it is again — tears in my eyes, tears rolling down my face. (Saved, rescued, but not quite so good as new...)” People masquerade as themselves all the time; the mythology of self-imitation stretches from ancient India to Hollywood and prevails in real life as well as fiction, which is sometimes, contrary to public opinion, stranger than truth. (102)After the first week I made up my mind to kill myself- the usual whiff of chloroform. Next week, or next month, or next year I’ll kill myself…… Rhys’ language use here is heavy with meaning. The word ‘saturated’ gives a sense of how overwhelming Sasha’s world is becoming. Her sense of being trapped is escalating, exacerbated by the long sentences and repetition. The sentence structure is as ‘undulating’ as the images that torment her, so that we are as dizzied by the sight as Sasha is. Now a little man, bearded, with a snub nose, dressed in a long white night-shirt, is talking earnestly to me. ‘I am your father,’ he says. ‘Remember that I am your father.’ But blood is streaming from a wound in his forehead. ‘Murder,’ he shouts, ‘murder, murder.’ Helplessly I watch the blood streaming. At last my voice tears itself loose from my chest. I too shout: ‘Murder, murder, help, help,’ and the sound fills the room. (13)

Good Morning, Midnight Summary and Study Guide | SuperSummary

But it also acts as a mask to stop the world looking in, just as the routines do. This is why the type of room becomes so important to Sasha, and why she places so much hope in finding the right place. It’s her way of feeling like she belongs:Good Morning, Midnight does not offer the reader much sense of hope. We are so firmly entrenched within Sasha’s consciousness that it is hard to see outside of her experience. We drown alongside her as she struggles to stay afloat of all her routines – those self-imposed and not. The past has a powerful pull. At the beginning of the novel, we hear the following: In the middle of the night you wake up. You start to cry. What’s happening to me? Oh, my life, oh, my youth… In an essay on Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid and Michelle Cliff, Mary Lou Emery argues that these writers are invested in writing against the ‘European epistemology of the visual – sight as the dominant way of knowing’ (Emery 1997: 259). Emery proposes that forms of representation predicated on the imagination as ‘image-making process’ are bound to ‘an image-producing and consuming global capitalism’ and seem ‘also inseparable historically from the "imperial eye" or "commanding gaze" of colonialist practice and discourse’ (261). She reads these Caribbean women writers as inscribing ‘counterdiscursive revisions’ of narrative devices which ‘figure' visuality. This revision - in which, for example, the device of ekphrasis is extended to ‘excess’, or its absence rendered a ‘significant present’ - serves to expose ‘the constitutive processes of the colonialist imagination’, and also creates ‘resistance to it, renewing vision for subversive and newly creative purpose’ (262). Extending and twisting this argument, I propose that Good Morning, Midnight presents a counterdiscursive refiguration of the lofty Image of thought as Deleuze describes it - in image composed of the presuppositions that attend a universal ‘I think’. This refiguration is foregrounded early in the text in Sasha’s encounter with her fascist tormentor, Mr Blank. In assigning him this name Rhys is clearly parodying his inability to comprehend Sasha in a humane manner: there is a capitalised unthinking ‘Blank’ where his compassion should be. He derides Sasha’s nonsensical response to his demand and calls her a ‘helpless little fool’ ( Good Morning, Midnight, 24), [1]but her nonsense and her inability to make sense of his mispronounced demand to find the cashier serve to make him see her and she becomes a visible irritant rather than remaining an invisible cog in his capitalist machine. Her nonsense serves to stall his business (his cheque is not delivered), and is her means of escape from the oppressive situation. It is a refutation of the capitalist, imperialist ethic of mastery that he embodies and throughout the novel Sasha’s act of thinking is contrasted to established and fascist forms of thought. [2] Repeatedly Sasha encounters cliché and prejudice, and Rhys depicts Sasha’s ‘nonunitary subjectivity’ as a navigation through these things, a matter of surviving them and affirming a different act of thinking. [3] V. S. Naipaul wrote in 1973 that it is "the most subtle and complete of [Rhys'] novels, and the most humane." [4] What to say about the protagonist? She has a name, seldom mentioned, since the narrative is in the first person - but I won't bother looking it up - let's just call her "Jean" - will that do?