Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- Note on Ellipses
- Introduction
- 1 Jean Rhys and Her Critics
- 2 Feminist Approaches to Jean Rhys
- 3 The Caribbean Question
- 4 Writing in the Margins
- 5 Autobiography and Ambivalence
- 6 ‘The Day They Burned the Books’
- 7 Fort Comme La Mort: the French Connection
- 8 The Politics of Good Morning, Midnight
- 9 The Huge Machine of Law, Order and Respectability
- 10 Resisting the Machine
- 11 The Enemy Within
- 12 Good night, Day
- 13 Intemperate and Unchaste
- 14 The Other Side
- 15 The Struggle for the Sign
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
12 - Good night, Day
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- Note on Ellipses
- Introduction
- 1 Jean Rhys and Her Critics
- 2 Feminist Approaches to Jean Rhys
- 3 The Caribbean Question
- 4 Writing in the Margins
- 5 Autobiography and Ambivalence
- 6 ‘The Day They Burned the Books’
- 7 Fort Comme La Mort: the French Connection
- 8 The Politics of Good Morning, Midnight
- 9 The Huge Machine of Law, Order and Respectability
- 10 Resisting the Machine
- 11 The Enemy Within
- 12 Good night, Day
- 13 Intemperate and Unchaste
- 14 The Other Side
- 15 The Struggle for the Sign
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Summary
The cycles of resistance and defeat, self-creation and despair, mockery and mourning, are repeated again and again in this novel. Sasha describes her failed attempt to drink herself to death, after she has been finally disowned on behalf of her family by a nameless ‘extremely respectable’ relative, since she has had the temerity to stay alive, which in his eyes, no self-respecting fallen woman should do.
I've had enough of those streets that sweat a cold, yellow slime, of hostile people, of crying myself to sleep every night. […] I watch my face gradually breaking up – cheeks puffing out, eyes getting smaller. Never mind. […] Besides, it isn't my face, this tortured and tormented mask. I can take it off whenever I like and hang it up on a nail. Or shall I place on it a tall hat with a green feather, hang a veil over the lot, and walk about the dark streets so merrily? Singing defiantly ‘ You don't like me, but I don't like you either. “ Don't like jam, lamb or ham, and I don't like roly-poly…. ” ’ Singing ‘One more river to cross, that's Jordan, Jordan…. ’
I have no pride – no pride, no name, no face, no country. I don't belong. I don't belong anywhere. Too sad, too sad … It doesn't matter, there I am, like one of those straws which floats round the edge of a whirlpool and is gradually sucked into the centre, the dead centre, where everything is stagnant, everything is calm. (GMM 37–8)
Despair, defiance, desolation: the condition of the marginal, the unacceptable, those without country, those who don't belong, those caught up in the ‘unwinnable war’ of the excluded. Sasha is not the only straw in the metropolitan whirlpool. Good Morning, Midnight is the darkest of Rhys’ novels, not surprisingly given its date. Its emotional violence and explosiveness, the intensity and brutality of the intolerance it registers, the desperation it charts in those excluded, all suggest Rhys’ sense of the coming apocalypse.
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- Information
- Jean Rhys , pp. 78 - 81Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012