The Failures of Citizenship in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight

Abstract

This paper examines Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1939) through the lens of citizenship in order to complicate previous readings that flatten the protagonist Sasha Jensen’s disenfranchisement, and resulting misery, as conclusively defining her plight. Citizenship serves as a useful rubric in that the novel is clearly engaging with its contemporary historical context in which the categorization of documented nationality across international borders emerged as a key issue, but also in that Rhys’s heroines, including Sasha, have been discussed in terms of a more figurative sense of social disenfranchisement. By shifting and expanding my focus to the variable relations that connect Sasha to her expatriate milieu in both predictable and surprising ways, I attempt to delineate a social landscape not necessarily always determined by an official, state discourse that requires a stark opposition between citizen and non-citizen. Curating three concepts―interrogation, performance, and solidarity―that refer to specific acts and modes that constitute citizenship, I analyze through each the ways in which Sasha is at times completely subject to citizenship’s exclusionary categorizations and, at other times, finds herself in unscripted relations that can circumvent that allegedly pervasive logic.