Abstract
In Good Morning Midnight, Jean Rhys’s fourth novel published in 1939, dissent is manifested in a different way. While Anna in Voyage in the Dark tried to assert the existence of an alternative signifying mode, Sasha Jansen, a more experienced heroine, chooses controlled, parodic mimicry of the master discourse. Mimicking the mimicry imposed upon woman, she tries to undo the effects of patriarchal logic by overdoing them. Sasha is a middle-aged woman returning to Paris for a short holiday. She too is an outsider but, unlike the other heroines who go to great lengths to voice their difference, Sasha is intent on hiding it. One of the figures of this deliberate obliteration of difference is the novel’s concern with intertextuality. This concept, coined by Julia Kristeva, refers to the ways in which any literary text is inseparably linked to other literary texts. Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, Julia Kristeva argues that ‘any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another’.1
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