Jean Rhys and the Price of Happiness

Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight
Lecture by Karina Jakubowicz, Women Writers Season, 3 July 2021
Blog post by Lisa Hutchins

Good Morning, Midnight (1939) is the third novel by Jean Rhys, and very nearly the last thing she wrote. It features a modernist sensibility, a circular plot and a lonely and vulnerable protagonist. For an audience on the brink of a world-shattering conflict, its bleak setting on the fringes of Parisian life represented the realities of the late-1930s world a little too clearly. As Karina Jakubowicz told us in her lecture for the Literature Cambridge Women Writers Season, its bad reception discouraged Rhys from writing for publication for another 30 years.

The book is partly autobiographical, based on Rhys’ experiences living in Paris in the 1930s, a time of alcoholism, poor mental health and the loss of her husband and children. However, from 1949 onwards, a fortuitous friendship with a radio actor would encourage Rhys to start writing again, leading to the publication of her most well-known work, Wide Sargasso Sea, in 1966.

Karina discussed how Good Morning, Midnight uses the lens of the 1937 World's Fair in Paris to examine the brutally transactional nature of Parisian society, the commodification of every kind of human relationship in the city, and the plight of an outsider who, with no family connections or support network, is forced to pay her way at every turn. This is paid with money she can ill-afford to spend, at a much higher cost than more fortunately-placed people would be asked to pay:

Walking in the night with the dark houses over you, like monsters. If you have money and friends, houses are just houses with steps and a front door – friendly houses where the door opens and somebody meets you, smiling. If you are quite secure and your roots are well-struck in, they know. They stand back respectfully, waiting for the poor devil without any friends and without any money. Then they step forward, the waiting houses, to frown and crush. No hospitable doors, no lit windows, just frowning darkness. Frowning and leering and sneering, the houses, one after another.

(Good Morning, Midnight, p. 28)

The novel's protagonist is Sasha Jansen, an older woman who has accepted money from a friend to travel to Paris to 'improve herself' (or maybe to ease her friend's discomfort at her problems by removing herself from sight). The book’s title comes from a poem by Emily Dickinson (see below) which serves to emphasise Sasha's despair, her homelessness and rootlessness, and the alienation she experiences in the city. Throughout the novel, Sasha's body is a site around which deals are negotiated, described by Karina as an economy in miniature. A midwife donates extra services without charge, but makes sure Sasha is aware of the favour that is bestowed. She is obsessed with hats, hair, clothes, and appearance, things she can hardly afford but can’t do without:

There is a customer inside. Her hair, half-dyed, half-grey, is very dishevelled. As I watch she puts on a hat, makes a face at herself in the glass, and takes it off very quickly. She tries another – then another. Her expression is terrible – hungry, despairing, hopeful, quite crazy. At any moment you expect her to start laughing the laugh of the mad. […] Watching her, am I watching myself as I shall become? In five years' time, in six years' time, should I be like that?

But she is better than the other one, the smug, white, fat, black-haired one who is offering the hats with a calm, mocking expression. You can almost see her tongue rolling round and round inside her cheek. It's like watching the devil with a damned soul. If I must end like one or the other, may I end like the hag.

(p. 58)

 Perhaps the most contested relationship in the novel is formed between Sasha and René, a handsome young gigolo whose relations with others are also largely transactional, giving them common ground to attempt a genuine friendship that never quite succeeds. Karina posed the question of whether René is genuinely interested in Sasha and feels a kinship with her, or is playing up to her. Sasha seems to have sympathy for his position and it is interesting to note that most of the people who attract her sympathy and love are at the mercy of exchange, as she is. The couple are ultimately unable to realise the relationship, despite Sasha softening towards René at the end of the narrative, because they cannot get past its initially transactional nature. Karina also pointed out the many occasions in the novel where being a purchaser or consumer does not protect Sasha, for instance, overhearing the hat transaction described above, being ostracised in a café, or in an uncomfortable encounter in an artist’s studio when it is not clear whether she is expected to buy a picture or sell herself.  

By the novel's ending, Sasha accepts two things she has resisted throughout: a visit to the World's Fair exhibition and a sexual encounter with an unpleasant neighbour at her hotel. We discussed whether this might represent a nod towards the ending of that most famous of modernist novels, Joyce's Ulysses, a book which Rhys would certainly have known. Karina included some fascinating illustrations of the 1937 World's Fair, which featured two huge pavilions from Nazi-ruled Germany and the Soviet Union, facing off across the exhibition site beneath the Eiffel Tower in a foreshadowing of the conflict to come. Silent and closed up for the night, described by René as mean and shabby, it nevertheless represents for Sasha a brief suspension of commerce which brings her peace but cannot save their friendship. The novel's open, ambiguous ending brings no closure. Yet Rhys manages to inject this grim tale with a great deal of dark, ironic humour. It’s a brilliant, enigmatic work. This is an author who deserves to be more widely taught and read.

Further reading

• Bowlby, Rachel, Shopping with Freud (London: Routledge, 1993).

• Camarasana, Linda, ‘Exhibitions and Repetitions: Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight and the World of Paris, 1937, in At Home and Abroad in the Empire: British Women Write the 1930s, ed. Robin Hackett, Freda Hauser and Gay Wachman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009).

• Parsons, Deborah, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

• Pizzichini, Lilian, The Blue Hour: A Portrait of Jean Rhys (London, Bloomsbury, 2009).

• Rhys, Jean, Jean Rhys, Letters, 1931-1966 (London, Andre Deutsch, 1994).

• Rhys, Jean, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (London, Andre Deutsch, 1979).

• Rhys, Jean, Good Morning, Midnight (1939; London: Penguin, 1967).

• Rhys, Jean, and Burton, Peter, 'Jean Rhys: Interviewed by Peter Burton', The Transatlantic Review, 36 (1970): 105-09

• Zimmerman, Emma, '"Always the Same Stairs, Always the Same Room": The Uncanny Architecture of Jean Rhys' Good Morning, Midnight', Journal of Modern Literature 38, 4 (2015): 74-92.

_________________________

Emily Dickinson, Good Morning – Midnight

Good Morning – Midnight –
I’m coming Home –
Day – got tired of Me –
How could I – of Him?

Sunshine was a sweet place –
I liked to stay –
But Morn – didn’t want me – now –
So – Goodnight – Day!

I can look – can’t I –
When the East is Red?
The Hills – have a way – then –
That puts the Heart – abroad –

You – are not so fair – Midnight –
I chose – Day –
But – please take a little Girl –
He turned away!

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The Literature Cambridge Women Writers Season continues with a lecture on Rosamund Lehmann's Dusty Answer (1927) with Alison Hennegan on 24 July 2021 at 6pm BST. Full programme and booking details here.