A modernist meeting in Montparnasse: precarity and freedom in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight and Cora Sandel’s Alberta and Freedom

Abstract

ABSTRACT When Jean Rhys was living in Paris in the years between 1918 and 1921 it is entirely likely that she at least saw the Norwegian writer Cora Sandel in the Dome café or elsewhere around Montparnasse, at Sylvia Beach's book store, or on the streets that form a character in both writers' Paris novels. Sandel, who was ten years older than Rhys, lived in Montparnasse between 1906 and 1921. Within just a few years of one another these two writers published achingly similar portraits of displaced women living in Paris among various cohorts of other foreigners. In gestures that decenter both the European hegemony that Rhys so resented and what Sandel saw as suffocating Nordic provincialism, both writers present a de-nationalized Paris that affords their characters certain radical freedoms while at the same time grinding them down economically and psychologically. This essay examines the precarity of the freedom that Sandel explores in Alberte og friheten (1931) [Alberta and Freedom] and the glimpses of rebellious freedom expressed in Rhys's portrait of precarity, Good Morning, Midnight (1939), as they mutually illuminate one another.