Emotional Mapping in Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight

2018 ◽  
pp. 325-346
Author(s):  
Tone Selboe
Keyword(s):  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Good Morning

Conformity and Idiosyncrasy: Jean Rhys

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vike Martina Plock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Left Bank ◽  
Female Images ◽  
Image Construction ◽  
Political Modernity ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Good Morning ◽  
Professional Mobility

By looking at Jean Rhys’s ‘Left Bank’ fiction (Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Good Morning, Midnight, ‘Illusion’, ‘Mannequin’), this chapter investigates how new operational procedures such as Fordism and Taylorism, which were introduced into the French couture industry at the beginning of the twentieth century, affected constructions of modern femininity. Increasingly standardized images of feminine types were produced by Paris couturiers while the new look of the Flapper seemingly advertised women’s expanding social, political and professional mobility. Rhys, this chapter argues, noted fashion’s ability to provide resources for creative image construction but she simultaneously expressed criticism of its tendency to standardize female costumes and behaviour. Ultimately, Rhys demonstrates in her fiction that the radically modern couture of the early twentieth century was by no means the maker of social change and women’s political modernity. To offset the increased standardization of female images that she witnessed around her, Rhys created heroines and texts that relied on an overt display on difference.  

Jean Rhys and drunken consciousness (1929–1939)

2018 ◽  
pp. 83-97
Author(s):  
Steven Earnshaw
Keyword(s):  
Jean Rhys ◽  
The Self ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Gender Consciousness ◽  
States Of Consciousness ◽  
Good Morning ◽  
The World ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
The Way

Jean Rhys published four novels which have female protagonists who all drink at levels beyond those regarded as socially acceptable: Quartet (1929), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934), Good Morning, Midnight (1939). These four novels present the reader with a complex of self, consciousness, and modernity, inflected by an argument that women are forced to live differently in the world from men, and therefore experience and understand the world differently from men. One of the major achievements of the novels is the way in which they render the various states of consciousness of the female protagonist in the modern capitalist world, and this chapter considers the way in which Rhys integrates questions of gender, consciousness, modernity, alcohol and the self. Rhys’s protagonists choose their orientations as a way to define their selves and to define what is true in and about the world they inhabit. The modernist focus on alcoholic consciousness ensures a form of self-validation against a patriarchal and increasingly rationalistic society. This chapter also considers Rhys’s presentation of consciousness alongside our contemporary understanding.

scholarly journals GENDERED URBAN SPACES AND STRANGENESS IN JEAN RHYS’ GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT (1939)

2021 ◽  
pp. 137-149
Author(s):  
Carla Martínez del Barrio
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Spatial Constraints ◽  
Gendered Spaces ◽  
Good Morning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Encounters ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Do So

This article analyses Jean Rhys’ 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight from the standpoint of spatial and gender theory. Firstly, it explores the portrayal of gendered spaces in the modern city. In order to do so, it examines how Sasha Jensen challenges spatial constraints but is then identified as a stranger to the social order. Secondly, a parallelism between the urban automatisation of production and the female body is established to explore how consumer culture affects Sasha. Finally, it examines how the influence that Sasha’s fractured subjectivity has on her social encounters, which situate her on a liminal space.

Paris

2019 ◽  
pp. 24-75
Author(s):  
Andrew Thacker
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Geography ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Blaise Cendrars ◽  
Guillaume Apollinaire ◽  
Good Morning ◽  
Cafe Culture ◽  
The City

This chapter explores the affective pull that Paris exerted upon modernist writers and artists, attracting outsiders from around the globe to experience its cultural institutions and openness to creative experimentation. The chapter first discusses the writers T. S. Eliot, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Blaise Cendrars as ‘outsider-insiders’ (in Peter Gay’s terms), figures who come to the city as outsiders but who, by virtue of status or identity, are able to function as insiders within its cultural geography. The second group of writers discusses include Hope Mirrlees (in her poem Paris), Jean Rhys (in novels such as After Leaving Mr Mackenzie and Good Morning, Midnight), and Gwendolyn Bennett (in her story ‘Wedding Day’), female modernists who remain marked as outsiders in the city. The chapter discusses how all of these writers engaged affectively with various aspects of the technological modernity of Paris, including features such as the Eiffel Tower, café culture, hotel rooms, and the Grands Boulevards.

Housekeeping and the Fiction of Subjectivity in Eva Trout

2019 ◽  
pp. 165-181
Author(s):  
Jasmin Kelaita
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Good Morning ◽  
Nominal Protection ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines how Bowen’s final novel, Eva Trout, amplifies the issue of the domestic and the ‘things’ that build subjective containment and betray non-normative, unstable and difficult narrative subjects, by claiming that Eva Trout is such a subject: difficult and utterly indeterminate. In order to draw on the value-laden potency of ‘home’ for women in fiction the chapter calls upon Bowen’s contemporary, one who might be described as the quintessential author of homelessness, Jean Rhys. Rhys’s novel Good Morning, Midnight (1939) to show how the issue of domestic space becomes paramount to the workings of narrative for women writers and their female protagonists. Unlike Rhys’s protagonist Sasha Jensen, who does not attempt to make any specific space her home but rather moves between rented rooms in a hope for nominal protection, Eva Trout repeatedly attempts to make herself in relation to domestic spaces. Eva is unable to establish a stable domestic existence in accordance with conventional gender expectations. The way that women make homes and, in very material and embodied ways, occupy space is significant in Bowen’s fiction, where objects, ephemera and domestic stability are crucial to the development of character and narrative.

Jean Rhys

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Affect Theory ◽  
Postcolonial Literature ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Sargasso Sea ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Wide Sargasso Sea ◽  
Good Morning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Critical Discourses

Jean Rhys (1890-1979) is the author of five novels and over seventy short stories. The essays collected in Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches demonstrate Rhys’s centrality to modernism and to postcolonial literature alike by addressing her stories and novels from the 1920s and 1930s, including Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and Good Morning, Midnight, as well as her later bestseller, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The volume establishes Rhys as a major author with relevance to a number of different critical discourses, and includes a section on affect theory that shows how contemporary interest in Rhys correlates with the recent “affective turn” in the social sciences and humanities. Strangely haunting and deeply unsettling, Rhys’s portraits of dispossessed women living in the early and late twentieth-century continue to trouble critical categories and easy conceptualisations of the periods her work spans.

Modernism, Space and the City

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Thacker
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Jean Rhys ◽  
Transport Systems ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
European Cities ◽  
Blaise Cendrars ◽  
Stephen Spender ◽  
Christopher Isherwood ◽  
The City

This innovative book examines the development of modernism in four European cities: London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna. Focusing upon how literary and cultural outsiders represented various spaces in these cities, it draws upon contemporary theories of affect, mood, and literary geography to offer an original account of the geographical emotions of modernism. It considers three broad features of urban modernism: the built environment of the particular cities, such as cafés or transport systems; the cultural institutions of publishing that underpinned the development of modernism in these locations; and the complex perceptions of writers and artists who were outsiders to the four cities. Particular attention is thus given to the transnational qualities of modernism by examining figures whose view of the cities considered is that of migrants, exiles, or strangers. The writers and artists discussed include Mulk Raj Anand, Gwendolyn Bennett, Bryher, Blaise Cendrars, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Isherwood, Hope Mirlees, Noami Mitchison, Jean Rhys, Sam Selon, and Stephen Spender.

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