Abstract
This article centers on Dominican-born Jean Rhys’s novel Good Morning, Midnight (1939). Rhys’s West Indian roots are often referenced and Anglicized both in terms of, and because of, her engagement with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (vis-a-vis Wide Sargasso Sea). I argue that Good Morning, Midnight’s protagonist, Sasha Jensen, refracts the uniquely Caribbean experience of dislocation through the modernist aesthetic of detachment. Good Morning, Midnight is the last book in a series of four that Rhys published in a period of eleven years after World War I. The disturbingly ambiguous nature of her characters reveal the complex intersectionality of race and gender in “foreign” bodies and the ways that Rhys searched to recalibrate the discourse of colonial modernism. Jean Rhys’s fiction features disjointed, hybrid, and fractured female characters that seem to lack any type of agency, but are champions of survival. Without discounting Rhys’s seminal contribution to Caribbean women’s literature (largely through Wide Sargasso Sea), her oeuvre demands a deeper engagement. Rhys’s female protagonists refuse to comply with networks of power outside of their control. Their movement signals an implicit critique of unjust hegemonic structures (patriarchal and colonial) and foreshadows recent developments in postcolonial feminist studies.
Highlights
The West Indian roots of Dominican-born Jean Rhys are often referenced solely in terms of her engagement with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
As Lesley McDowell commented when reviewing the latest biography on Rhys, Lilian Pizzichini’s The Blue Hour (2009), Rhys’s own life is the “kind of narrative we don’t really want to read in a post-feminist age.”
As modernism and postcolonialism shore up against one another, Rhys’s writings are an expression of the sociopolitical challenges facing a racialized, sexualized “foreign” subject suspended in space between shifting national tides
Summary
Athanassakis, Yanoula (2016) "The Anxiety of Racialized Sexuality in Jean Rhys," Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal: Vol 13 : Iss. 2 , Article 7. While earlier waves of modernists adhered to the “novel of manners” and the bildungsroman tradition, Esty notes that writers like Rhys express “a resistance to the twin teleologies of the classic bildungsroman: adulthood...and nationhood” (Unseasonable Youth 3). Sasha is an addict who spends most of her time in altered states that parallel her waking world; she is often dreaming, drinking, taking barbiturates, or fantasizing From her autodiegetic narrative we learn that she used to live in Paris and both lost a baby and attempted suicide there, and that she has traveled around Europe and was once married. After they talk and drink, he tells her of the “Martiniquaise,” the mulatto woman who lived by him in London. Seems content in his “speechifying,” Sasha finds verbal communication a problematic medium
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