Eight

Good Morning, Midnight

The Paris Exhibition and the Paradox of Style

Good Morning, Midnight takes place during the same historical period in which After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie is set—“the hour between dog and wolf.” Good Morning, Midnight’s text occupies the end of that hour, however, the time nearest the wolf of fascism and the Second World War. Published in 1939, its scenes are set in Paris of 1937, the place and year of the Exhibition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques Appliqués à la Vie Moderne. The novel opens and closes with significant allusions to the exhibition, allusions which set the novel firmly within a Paris of intense social and political conflict, symbolized best perhaps by the two major buildings of the exposition which confronted one another directly on each side of the Champs de Mars—that of the Soviet Union, topped by giant figures of a marching man and woman with hammer and sickle held high, and that of Nazi Germany, crowned by an immense gold eagle grasping a swastika in its claws.1

The novel’s protagonist, Sasha Jansen, describes the setting in a dream she recounts in the novel’s beginning pages. “Everywhere there are placards printed in red letters: This Way to the Exhibition, This Way to the Exhibition. But I don’t want the way to the exhibition—I want the way out. There are passages to the right and passages to the left, but no exit sign.”² In the dream, the placards appear in a London tube station, not in Paris, and the dream’s next images present a man who claims he is her father.

Setting the pattern for subsequent readings of Sasha’s dream and of the novel, Thomas Staley has written that “unlike nearly every other English prose writer of the period,” Rhys’s writing “seemed untouched by the devastating political and military events which had occurred and the even more horrendous ones which were on the horizon.” He states, “Throughout the thirties Rhys’s heroines saw the world from the inside rather than the outside,” and concludes that “her work continued to rest on the power of style rather than new subject matter, intuition rather than analysis, the private rather than the public self.”3 Most critics agree with Staley and read Sasha’s dream as an indicator of her conflicted psyche rather than a description of a city in conflict. I think we can entertain both possibilities. Throughout this book, I have argued that Rhys’s writing undoes such dichotomies of thought as private/public and inside/outside; Good Morning, Midnight undoes them to such an extent that style becomes a political question not only touched by but wholly involved with the rise of fascism and the Second World War.

The intense conflicts between right and left that Paris suffered during the thirties and the rise of fascism within France as well as on its border with Germany are important circumstances to consider in our reading of Rhys’s most complex and perhaps most disturbing novel. Not political in the conventional sense of discussing governments and ideologies, it nevertheless confronts head-on social violence against women and connects it to the persecution of Jews and other racial minorities. It invokes the temptations of order and peace at any price, problematizing such sacrifices in sexual terms. The social-historical context of the novel also helps us to examine and reconsider some of the critical debates that have arisen, in particular concerning the psychological implications of its very disturbing ending.

“Yes—yes—yes . . .” With these final words, Sasha Jansen welcomes into her bed a strange and repellant man, whose white nightgown has haunted her doorway and who has verbally and physically abused her.⁴ The shocking choice disturbs us all the more because it is preceded by passages that portray Sasha being sexually assaulted by a man she confuses with this nameless and detested stranger.

Most often, the conclusion suggests to readers and critics some version of two opposing interpretations. The first sees Sasha’s welcoming embrace of the nightmarish commis (she speculates that he is a traveling salesman) as a welcome to death, a death of self-respect or of the possibility for any unified self at all. Isolation and fragmentation have destroyed Sasha’s attempts to reconstruct her life, and in the final scene she submits to the powers of alienation and sexual domination that overwhelm her. Rosalind Miles, for instance, emphasizes the many allusions to death that describe the commis and claims, “the man who offers sex, also offers death.”⁵

The second interpretation stresses suggestions of rebirth through transcendence of the self in union with another human being. In this meeting with the man she has feared and avoided, parts of Sasha’s splintered self seem to combine, implying the potential for a new whole. In support of this view, Peter Wolfe points to the description of Sasha in a fetal position, and Helen Nebeker describes an archetypal theme of passage, through death to rebirth.6 Most critics, even those sensitive to the sexual submission portrayed in the passage, agree to a certain extent with this view, referring to Sasha’s “psychic triumph”⁷ or “the need for union beyond its simple erotic dimension.”⁸ To take either position means to stress some themes and images and to discount others, reducing a compelling ambiguity to a single dimension.⁹ I would like to argue that we can best understand the ending’s powerful ambiguity through consideration of the specific social conflicts that form the novel’s setting and through analysis of the formal strategies that portray the two possibilities that make critics so uneasy. These formal elements and the conflicting social forces of the setting hinge upon one another in an experiment with form that also involves an exploration of power during a particular period in the history of modern Europe.

The man to whom Sasha says yes in this ending first appears in the opening dream, “dressed in a long white night shirt.” In the dream he entreats her to “remember that I am your father.” Blood streams from a wound in his forehead, and he cries “Murder, murder” until Sasha wakes from her own cries of “murder” (Midnight, p. 14). Leaving her room, she encounters on the landing her neighbor, “parading about as usual in his white dressing gown.” The costume identifies the two figures; they metonymically replace each other through the white gown that evokes Sasha’s dread and fear. The father in her dream implies that Sasha has forgotten his paternal relation; her forgetfulness seems connected to his wound, as if it makes her somehow responsible. Yet she, too, cries “murder” so that the victim’s identity blurs in the ambiguity associating guilt and victimization.

The neighboring commis, whom she meets after awakening, appears to Sasha as “the ghost of the landing . . . thin as a skeleton” with “sunken dark eyes with a peculiar expression, cringing, ingratiating, knowing . . .” (Midnight, p. 14). She says she is always running into him and states, “I don’t like this damned man . . .” (Midnight, p. 14). In various scenes in the novel she avoids him, physically resists him, and finally welcomes him into her arms. We are tempted to conclude with Miles and other critics in her camp that, by embracing the commis in the final scene, Sasha does welcome death. If so, her death is elevated to that of religious sacrifice, for Sasha compares the commis (the word also means “appointed one”) to “a priest, the priest of some obscene, half-understood religion”; his dressing gown seems to her “like a priest’s robes” (Midnight, p. 35).

The vision of this “father” completes the longer dream in which Sasha wanders about the passages of a London tube station where placards announce “This Way to the Exhibition.” The placards suggest Paris as the dream’s latent and more significant setting, and Sasha’s inability to find a way out in the dream corresponds to her description of the Parisian street in which she rooms—“What they call an impasse.” Her wish to avoid the exhibition brings to the dream image her perpetual anxiety and self-consciousness whenever she inhabits a public place. Though Sasha carefully constructs her days—“I have decided on a place to eat in at midday, a place to eat in at night, a place to have my drink in after dinner. I have arranged my little life” (Midnight, p. 9)—she plots them according to rituals of avoidance, hoping to escape the scenes of a previous love affair which still haunt her memories. When she awakens from her dream, she confronts an emotional impasse as she hears a man outside her room singing, “C’est l’amour qui flotte dans l’air à la ronde.”

The dream does indicate the threat of death, but also of Sasha’s possible complicity and guilt concerning the father-figure’s wound. Her guilt is tied to the shame she feels for wanting to “be different from other people,” for wishing to disobey the “steel finger [that] points along a long stone passage” (Midnight, p. 13). The dream inscribes difference and disobedience, masculine wounds, accusations of murder that blur victim and perpetrator, feminine feelings of shame and guilt, the fear of exhibition or humiliating public exposure, and political oppositions of left and right to which there appear no alternatives. As an introduction it presents both social and psychic conflicts, insisting that they are inseparable, and it suggests in the feminine consciousness that internalizes them an explicitly sexual dimension. As in Wide Sargasso Sea, the text of a dream makes possible the scripting of such complexly intertwined conflicts; the overdetermined quality of a dream, its openness and multiplicity, present problems and also various ways of posing, enacting, and resolving them. The dream sets the scene of narrative possibilities.

Good Morning, Midnight develops and brings together many of the elements of Rhys’s other novels, the earlier ones as well as Wide Sargasso Sea. Like After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, it takes place “after” more significant events, in this case, Sasha’s love affair with Enno and, more broadly, Paris of the 1920s. It operates in at least two time frames then, as does Voyage in the Dark, the present time of 1937 and the previous decade, and Sasha tries without success to keep them separate. She quotes her friend Sidonie, who has recently given her money to stay for a while in Paris: “. . . one mustn’t put everything on the same plane” (Midnight, p. 12). Like After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Good Morning, Midnight also brings up the possibilities of romance only to drop them, continuing the narrative through a nameless quest toward something unknown and threatening. The narrative thus counters conventional romance plots and makes interpretation through those conventions irrelevant. The guilt imposed upon and internalized by women between the two world wars, which structures After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, also shapes Good Morning, Midnight in its circling around to the past and also, twice, to its own beginnings. Part III of the novel concludes with the same words that open Part I: “The room says: ‘Quite like old times. Yes? . . . No? . . . Yes’” (Midnight, p. 145). Two more paragraphs appear as if in postscript, and then a final Part IV ensues that returns to the beginning dream, but, as in Wide Sargasso Sea, enacting it with important differences.

Good Morning, Midnight also invokes carnival images—masks and fairs—along with allusions to West Indian music and women from Martinique. In this way it posits an “elsewhere” and the logic of turnabout that may cue joyful liberation or madness and modern despair. However, the most important elements of this novel, which it shares with Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark, are the inscription of social conflict within a dream text and the protagonist’s continual efforts to revise, through her visions and through internalized voices, the meaning of a life imbued with that conflict.

Sasha cannot escape, in her dream, the exhibition, nor in her life can she find a way out of her painful self-consciousness. Susan Squier has described her anxiety as “stage fright,” linking it to the perpetual pressure Sasha feels to carry off a performance.10 Always aware that she is acting, Sasha is never convinced of her role or of her interpretation. She recalls a scene in which her employer, whom she calls Mr. Blank, questions her qualifications. As she enters his office, she coaches herself: “Come on, stand straight, keep your head up, smile . . . No, don’t smile. If you smile, he’ll think you’re trying to get off with him . . . Don’t smile then, but look eager, alert, attentive. . . . You fool, stand straight . . .” (Midnight, p. 24). She has difficulty interpreting his role—“Of course he isn’t doing it on purpose. He’s just writing a letter . . . He is, he is. He’s doing it on purpose . . .” (Midnight, p. 24). But Mr. Blank retains the ultimate authority and finally casts her as a “hopeless, helpless little fool”; on cue, she begins to cry.

Once in a restaurant, Sasha is sure that two of the customers stare at her, murmuring, “la Vielle.” In another restaurant, the waiter and the customers seem to collude in ridiculing Sasha. “Now everybody in the room is staring at me; all the eyes in the room are fixed on me. It has happened” (Midnight, p. 50). Later Sasha reconstructs the scene and is able to piece together what she thinks probably happened: the waiter must have simply remarked to one of the customers that both she and Sasha are English. Nevertheless, Sasha continues to revise both scenes, fusing them in an accusatory question: “What is she doing here, the stranger, the alien, the old one? . . . I quite agree too, quite” (Midnight, p. 54).

“The stranger, the alien” suffers from social marginality that obliterates identity: “no name, no face, no country” (Midnight, p. 44). Sasha’s marginality forces her to play roles without scripts, improvising parts for every situation because no stable social relations define, reinforce, or repeat a particular performance. Knowledge of her part depends upon her audience and critics—on how others see her. Her success depends on her ability to interpret their judgments, which she alternately resists and internalizes. The theatrical images that recur throughout the novel invoke a playfulness that becomes simultaneously a matter of life and death. Lacking even the illusion of a stable self, Sasha’s life depends upon her theatrical success.

The audience that ridicules Sasha assaults her in a battle waged with “voices like uniforms. . . . Those voices that they brandish like weapons” (Midnight, p. 51). They win the war when Sasha surrenders and says, “I quite agree too, quite.” As instruments of war, these internalized voices contrast sharply to the voices recalled by Antoinette and Anna from their Caribbean communities of women, and they differ, too, from the ironically rendered voices enjoining Anna to act like a “lady.” These military voices speak in a social context of rising fascism and impending war. I don’t think it is simply coincidental that Sasha suspects Mr. Blank will interrogate her on her ability to speak German. Unable or unwilling (“All the little German I know flies out of my head”) to speak the language of the Nazis, who already in 1937 occupy the Rhineland border with France, Sasha instead recalls the poetry of the Jewish Heine, identifying with Germans victimized by Germans and with a poet who makes “little songs” out of his pain.11 Her association of Mr. Blank with the language of the Nazis characterizes his authority as fascistic; indeed, he terrorizes and humiliates her. She leaves her job because of his abuse and only later is able to revise the meaning of her surrender. His power appears to her then as an objective economic force which she can bitterly analyze:

So you have the right to pay me four hundred francs a month, to lodge me in a small, dark room, to clothe me shabbily, to harass me with worry and monotony and unsatisfied longings till you get me to the point when I blush at a look, cry at a word. We can’t all be happy, we can’t all be rich, we can’t all be lucky—and it would be so much less fun if we were. Isn’t it so, Mr. Blank? Let’s say you have this mystical right to cut my legs off. But the right to ridicule me afterwards because I’m a cripple—no, that I think you haven’t got. And that’s the right you hold most dearly, isn’t it? You must be able to despise the people you exploit. (Midnight, p. 29)

The nightmare arises when, ashamed, Sasha blames herself for being different:

I say: “I want the way out.” But he points to the placards and his hand is made of steel. I walk along with my head bent, very ashamed, thinking: “Just like me—always wanting to be different from other people.” The steel finger points along a long stone passage. This Way—This Way—This Way to the Exhibition. . . .

Now a little man, bearded, with a snub nose, dressed in a long white night-shirt, is talking earnestly to me. “I am your father,” he says. “Remember that I am your father.” But blood is streaming from a wound in his forehead. (Midnight, p. 13)

The internalization of the authority of “other people” and her submission to the mechanical power of their steellike commands and questions prefaces the shift in Sasha’s dream to the vision of the murdered father, or rather, the man who claims he is her father and thus hopes to assert patriarchal authority at the same time he imputes the guilt of patricide. This is the moment in the dream text when the modern machine, fascistic domination, and patriarchal authority become coextensive with one another. The threat of war architecturally represented in the confrontation between the Nazi and Soviet exposition buildings joins the futurist emphasis on the machine, celebrated in the exhibition’s tremendous Italian pavilion devoted to Mussolini’s Italy. This threat becomes simultaneously a sexual threat linked to paternal authority and the subordination of women in the family, principles held firmly by both the Italian and German fascists and, it might be argued, democratic and socialist states as well.12

In making these connections, Rhys implies a vision and analysis shared by other modernist women writers. In 1936 Gertrude Stein wrote: “There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing. Everybody now-a-days is a father, there is father Mussolini and father Hitler and father Roosevelt and father Stalin and father Trotzky [sic] and father Blum and father Franco is just commencing now and there are ever so many more ready to be one. Fathers are depressing.”¹³ Virginia Woolf, too, wrote quite explicitly of the tyranny exercised hand in hand by fascism and patriarchy. In Three Guineas, published in 1938, just one year before Good Morning, Midnight appeared, Woolf describes “the figure of a man, . . . tightly cased in a uniform . . . And behind him lie ruined houses and dead bodies . . .”¹⁴ In Woolf’s image, these are the ruined houses and dead bodies she viewed in photographs of the war in Spain, a direct result of fascism and war, but they are also the ruined “private houses” of England and the dead bodies of tyrannical fathers’ rebellious daughters. To illustrate her point further, she alludes to the punishment given Antigone, the espoused daughter of Creon, who dared to obey a law higher than his: “And he shut her not in Holloway or in a concentration camp, but in a tomb. And Creon we read brought ruin on his house, and scattered the land with the bodies of the dead.”¹⁵ Here Woolf is developing the analysis that made Three Guineas at once so radical and so unacceptable to many readers: “. . . that the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.”¹⁶

Woolf’s essay addresses and speaks for the “daughters of educated men,” middle-class women barred from education and the professions, made to curry the favor of men on whom they were forced to depend for their livelihood. While identifying metaphorically with the plight of prostitutes and marginal women, Woolf nevertheless concerned herself with the sufferings of respectable women, confined domestically, but still placed within the “system of the fathers.” Rhys’s novels, on the other hand, perceive the same forces at work from the point of view of those women displaced by them, enduring not only the humiliations of dependency but also lacking even the respectability granted by middle-class fathers’ incomes.

In this light, we can revise, at least provisionally until we examine the concluding scenes more carefully, the interpretation of the ending of Good Morning, Midnight as an embrace, through sex, of death. If the commis in his white nightshirt is metonymically identified with the murdered father in Sasha’s dream, the “sex” he offers is far more than a physical act. It is a nameless and questionable patriarchal authority, demanding submission to tabooed relations and forcing, through fascistic terror, Sasha’s complicity in her own abuse and death. With this provisional interpretation, we are farther than ever from the possibility in the final scene of the rebirth that many critics suggest.

However, the numerous allusions to death and suicide throughout the novel precede scenes that suggest transformation. For instance, when Sasha feels humiliated in a restaurant, her anxiety and self-consciousness prompt suicidal fantasies—“Now I am going to cry. This is the worst. . . . If I do that I shall really have to walk under a bus when I get outside” (Midnight, p. 51). Instead of walking under a bus, Sasha does what some anthropologists claim people do everywhere when the danger of death looms too menacingly—she invents a ritual:17 “I try to decide what colour I shall have my hair dyed and hang on to that thought as you hang on to something when you are drowning. Shall I have it red? Shall I have it black? . . . First it must be bleached, that is to say, its own colour must be taken out of it—and then it must be dyed, that is to say, another colour must be imposed on it” (Midnight, pp. 51–52). In her fantasy, she even includes the voice of the shaman or priest of the ritual—“But blond cendré, madame, is the most difficult of colours” (Midnight, p. 52). The ritualistic stripping of the victim’s own identity (its own color) so that a new one may be imposed is precisely enacted in this otherwise ordinary feminine activity.

Sasha repeatedly performs similar rites, all part of what she calls “the transformation act.” She buys a hat, a procedure that takes two hours and involves an intensely intimate interaction with the shop girl—“there is no one else in the shop. It is quite dark outside. We are alone, celebrating this extraordinary ritual” (Midnight, p. 70). The celebration restores calm and order, preventing for a while any further violence. After she has her hair dyed (“a very good blond cendré. A success.”), Sasha notes, “It’s curious how peaceful I feel—as if I were possessed by something” (Midnight, p. 62). With other people, all very orderly, she watches some fish in a pool in the Luxembourg Gardens: “We stand in a row, watching the fish” (Midnight, p. 63). And following the hat purchase: “I feel saner and happier after this. . . . Nobody stares at me, which I think is a good sign.” A man begins a conversation with her: “I think: ‘That’s all right . . .’” (Midnight, p. 71).

The rituals and their results contain dual possibilities: on the one hand, they create beauty; they allow strangers to meet in orderly ways, enjoying prescribed intimacy; and they restore calm. On the other hand, Sasha must submit to the priestlike administrations of others who manipulate her body, so that she is “possessed by something.” The calm achieved seems to require a robotlike order and passivity; it allows safe but empty conversations. While allaying the danger of actual death or suicide, the rituals enact the death of a previous self, restoring peace and order through procedures designed to transform Sasha into someone else.

We might see Sasha as preparing herself for an even larger ritual, the sacrifice foreshadowed by her dream and the priestlike commis. We can also see the temptations of order at any price, including the annihilation of unique individual identity. Yet Sasha acts, improvises, defends herself against death. Transforming herself, she connects with others, loses for a moment her fear and paranoia. The dual possibilities of death and rebirth are initiated and recreated throughout the novel in rituals which, while indicating danger, also codify her marginality and temporarily integrate her into a social order.

The rituals allow Sasha to rescript her role; however, as in her dream, she creates a part that then seems to control her, appearing as her fate. Each new role requires a new costume. Again, as for Rhys’s other protagonists, clothes become charms or fetishes on which her fate depends. When Mr. Blank humiliates Sasha, she assures herself that if she had only been wearing a particular black dress with embroidered sleeves, the incident could never have happened. She always wears over her other clothes a fur coat that her lover Enno had given to her. She remembers that, at the time of his gift, she had also changed her name from Sophia to Sasha. The coat, she later guesses, is ironically responsible for attracting a hopeful gigolo, the young man who eventually assaults and robs her. “Of course. I’ve got it. Oh Lord, is that what I look like? Do I really look like a wealthy dame trotting round Montparnasse in the hope of—? After all the trouble I’ve gone to, is that what I look like?” (Midnight, p. 72). Again, she cannot be certain of her role or audience.

Ironically, though, the fur is fake, her hair color is false, and she could not afford the authentic “taste” of the black dress. She consumes and is consumed by a world of artificiality, false objects whose only significance is symbolic, the props of ritual and theater.18 For Sasha herself is not a “real” person—she is only whatever her appearance, current name, and image make her. When Sasha states, “. . . no name, no face, no country,” she adds, “I don’t belong anywhere” (Midnight, p. 44). Echoing Antoinette’s words describing lack of place, Sasha suggests that selfhood does not result from character but from location. She lacks both the patria and the patronym which would place her in the social order. Though she speculates that others perceive her as English, she never states for certain her national identity. We discover, instead, the instability of national identity for a woman, no longer married, in this period. The “patron” demands to see her passport twice when she rents a room: the numbers are missing, she should have put nationality by marriage. But the marriage has dissolved; it no longer identifies her and really it never could have—Enno resembled a stranger more than a husband: “He was a chansonnier, it seems, before he became a journalist. He enlisted during the first week of the war. From 1917 onwards a gap. He seemed prosperous when I met him in London, but no money now—nix. What happened? He doesn’t tell me” (Midnight, p. 114). Displaced from family, country, and marriage, Sasha appears to herself and to others as a fake (an illusion, mask, role) who consumes false objects (fake fur, artificial color) in relation to others who also lack authentic identity. All is illusion, magic, a shamanistic trick.

However, she becomes aware of the also illusory but empty and cruel nature of the apparently stable and consolidated selves enjoyed by men like Mr. Blank and the “extremely respectable”: “They think in terms of a sentimental ballad. . . . Everything in their whole bloody world is a cliché. Everything is born out of a cliché, rests on a cliché, survives by a cliché. And they believe in the clichés—there’s no hope” (Midnight, p. 42). With her theatrical gestures Sasha fights enemies of style and language, the overused metaphors of a stale hypocrisy. Gesture undermines the certainty of what is. It mimes and parodies that which is real and confuses lies with truth.19 As Rhys’s character realizes, these “respectable tongues” already confuse lies with truth in their reified formulae for living and dying; but when one takes into one’s own hands the magic of appearances, one grasps the possibility of turning that magic back against the world. Hence, in her successful moments, Sasha creates her own rituals, invents her own transformations; at other times she becomes the victim in ritualistic sacrifices designed by others.

Though Sasha’s anxiety in these situations appears “paranoid, obsessive” to the reader perhaps,²⁰ she nevertheless represents, in every way, the perfect victim. In his discussion of ritual sacrifice, René Girard states,

If we look at the extremely wide spectrum of human victims sacrificed by various societies, the list seems heterogeneous, to say the least. It includes prisoners of war, slaves, small children, unmarried adolescents, and the handicapped. . . . Is it possible to detect a unifying factor in this disparate group? We notice at first glance beings who are either outside or on the fringes of society. . . . What we are dealing with, therefore, are exterior or marginal individuals, incapable of establishing or sharing the social bonds that link the rest of the inhabitants. Their status as foreigners or enemies, their servile condition, or simply their age prevents these future victims from fully integrating themselves into the community.21

Girard notes that in most communities women are never fully integrated individuals but retain a secondary status. Nevertheless, he claims that they are not often offered as sacrifices because they belong to families who might interpret the act as murder and counter with an act of vengeance, thereby escalating the violence the sacrifice sought to allay. Girard proposes that the threat of violence among members of a community requires the sacrifice of someone who is both inside and outside the community—someone who will substitute for its members but not provoke retribution. While women in traditional societies may not fulfill the last of these requirements, single women in modern urban societies, especially single foreign women, wanderers and derelicts, may become fully “sacrificeable individuals.” Without kin or allies, Sasha can only fantasize her revenge: “One day, quite suddenly, when you’re not expecting it, I’ll take a hammer from the folds of my dark cloak and crack your little skull like an egg-shell” (Midnight, p. 52).

As Girard points out, sacrificeable individuals may be accused of some fundamentally threatening transgression such as parricide, incest, or infanticide. The sacrifice of such a victim, who need not be actually guilty, thus upholds the taboos that make civilization possible and promotes peace and order among a community that came dangerously close to somehow annihilating itself. Living on the verge of a second world war, Sasha recalls the aftermath of the first in the 1920s: “But people are doing crazy things all over the place. The war is over. No more war—never, never, never. Après la guerre, there’ll be a good time everywhere . . .” (Midnight, p. 114). The Great War, of course, involved more than single opposing communities, as did the Second World War. In their international scope, they created thousands of homeless gypsies like Sasha, her husband, the gigolo, the Russian Jews she meets, even the traveling stranger in the white dressing gown. These marginalized individuals may indeed have committed various crimes. The gigolo, whose national identity, like Sasha’s, is entirely uncertain, searches desperately for forged papers. Enno’s money, when he could acquire it, came from unknown sources and disappeared just as mysteriously. But only Sasha is associated with the worst crimes since her baby died just after birth. The woman at the nursing home swathed Sasha in bandages to erase all stretch marks from the pregnancy in another ritual act of transformation: “And there he is lying with a ticket round his wrist because he died in a hospital. And there I am looking at him, without one line, without one wrinkle, without one crease . . .” (Midnight, p. 61). She had not been able to welcome the birth in the first place because of her poverty. Now, the child dead, all appearances testify to her never having given birth at all; an illusion acquires a life-and-death magic. And then she is haunted by a man, who claims he is her father, claims he has been murdered, and wants her to sleep with him. Circumstances threaten to frame Sasha, making her appear guilty at a time when the precarious communities of Paris and Europe seem about to annihilate themselves once again.

Describing Janet Flanner’s letters from Paris to New York during the 1930s, Shari Benstock has highlighted their concern with “French psychology and the stronghold of Fascism within its own borders.” Flanner attributed France’s indigenous fascism to an inability to accept its status, in relation to Hitler’s Germany, as a second-rate European power.22 By 1932 France was seriously affected by the international economic depression. Unemployment was high and wages low. As one writer describes the economic and political situation of the 1930s: “The French economy entered a period of stagnation that continued to the outbreak of World War II . . . [and] coincided with a declining international position that also lasted throughout the decade.”²³ The economic crisis resulted in a shift to “political extremes.” In particular, right-wing and fascist groups held forth in the streets of Paris. The largest of these groups, the Croix de Feu, wore uniforms and held mass maneuvers. Another writer, living in Paris at the time, has described a riot that took place in February of 1934. In this confrontation, numerous right-wing groups, including the Crois de Feu and led by the Royalist Action Française party, battled police for days. Shooting broke out, and hospitals filled with the wounded. The mob seemed to this witness clearly intent on a coup, and was prevented from actually succeeding by a wavering leadership.²⁴

Other acts of violence erupted in the 1930s, including the murder of the Yugoslavian king and a French official, as they walked through Paris, by Mussolini-supported fascists. Though a socialist was elected prime minister in 1936, he resigned in the midst of chaos and corruption a year later (the year in which Good Morning, Midnight takes place), having lost support of even the leftists. Also in 1937 a bomb exploded near the Étoile. At first the Communists received blame for the violence, but it was later discovered that the Cagoulards, a right-wing group, were responsible. At the time of the exhibition’s opening, most displays and buildings were not even ready due to the unrest and disorganization caused by severe labor disputes.25

The narrative of Good Morning, Midnight does not, in any explicit way, allude to these events. It concentrates instead on the intensely rendered perceptions of an isolated and marginalized woman, who wages her own internal battles while inhabiting the violent and chaotic streets of Paris. But as her dream makes clear, these battles are not separate ones. The violence of the public world manipulates Sasha’s physical movements, directs her rituals, and threatens her psyche. In the figure of the commis, it seeks her out and harasses her with criminal accusations and the threat of death. Her theatrical gestures and ritualistic attempts at transformation seem merely holding operations—with one exception: when Sasha meets an exiled Russian painter, she experiences a moment of carnivalesque community that truly, though temporarily, transforms her. The catalysts of her metamorphosis are the West African masks that line the painter’s studio.

In earlier passages, theatrical allusions have signified manipulation, deceit, and desperate artificiality. For instance, Sasha describes the shop in which she worked under Mr. Blank as if it were a stage set: “It was a large white-and-gold room with a dark-polished floor. Imitation Louis Quinze chairs, painted screens, three or four elongated dolls, beautifully dressed, with charming and malicious oval faces” (Midnight, p. 17). Sasha says of these dolls, “. . . what a success they would have made of their lives if they had been women. Satin skin, silk hair, velvet eyes, sawdust hearts—all complete” (Midnight, p. 18). Indeed the women she works with are called mannequins. Sasha often describes faces as masks and says “you can almost see the strings that are pulling the puppets” (Midnight, p. 90). These passages recall Bakhtin’s discussion of the mask and the marionette, particularly the change in their meanings that he attributes to romanticism and modernism. In these periods, Bakhtin argues, the mask’s earlier carnival significance gives way to a form that “hides something, keeps a secret, deceives . . . ,” and the marionette presents “the puppet as victim of alien human forces.”²⁶ Eventually Sasha’s own face becomes another prop: “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?” (Midnight, p. 43).

The relationships between Rhys’s characters and men remind some readers of more pornographic connotations of wearing a mask. Judith Thurman refers to the woman in The Story of O who wears a mask given by her master to excite him. Though he treats her with sadistic brutality, she finds she cannot or does not wish to remove the mask.27

The masks that line the painter’s studio walls play a different role in the construction of ritual and performance. In this scene, probably the only one of its kind in the entire novel, Sasha becomes neither a victim nor a solitary fanatic, but acts in concert with others. And here we find several clues to her background and the site of other possible identities. At first the masks threaten Sasha; she thinks they must be West African but then says she has seen them before: “That’s the way they look when they are saying: ‘Why didn’t you drown yourself in the Seine?’ That’s the way they look when they are saying: ‘Qu’est-ce qu’elle fout ici, la vieille?’. . . Peering at you. Who are you anyway? Who’s your father and have you got any money, and if not, why not? Are you one of us?” (Midnight, p. 92). All of these questions target Sasha as the perfect “sacrificeable victim” and give the masks the alienating and cruel intentions that Bakhtin associates with the modernist mask. Serge, however, transforms them by holding a mask over his face while dancing to the Martinique beguine music that is playing on an old gramophone. His dance brings them together, comrades in their exile and in their masquerade. With him, Sasha loses even her compulsive desire for a drink. She begs Serge to continue dancing as a vision of herself appears: “I am lying in a hammock looking up into the branches of a tree. The sound of the sea advances and retreats as if a door were being opened and shut. All day there has been a fierce wind blowing, but at sunset it drops. The hills look like clouds and the clouds like fantastic hills” (Midnight, p. 92).

This image describes in part a photograph of Jean Rhys taken during a return visit to her native Caribbean just three years before the publication of Good Morning, Midnight.²⁸ But even if we did not know about the picture, we could identify through the West African allusions and West Indian music the locale of Sasha’s vision. The connection with the Caribbean extends throughout the evening as Serge tells her of his encounter in London with a Martinique woman—“She wasn’t a white woman. She was half-Negro—a mulatto . . . She was drunk too” (Midnight, p. 95). The woman had presented herself at his door, desperately unhappy because of the prejudice and open hostility she encountered. Serge could think of no way to help her. He had the feeling that she “was no longer quite human, no longer quite alive” (Midnight, p. 97)—in other words, a zombie. He might be describing his encounter with Sasha, and the similarity suggests Sasha’s identification with the woman from Martinique. The suggestion becomes even more certain when we remember that Sasha has changed her name from Sophia to the one she now claims. Remembering this metamorphosis herself, Sasha recites the lines from a ballad of probable Caribbean origin: “Sophia went down where the river flowed—Wild, wild Sophia . . .” (Midnight, p. 42).

Listening to the beguine music, Sasha begins to cry, but this time she does not feel humiliated, though she apologizes and calls herself a fool: “‘But cry,’ le peintre says. ‘Cry if you want to. Why shouldn’t you cry? You’re with friends’” (Midnight, p. 93). His sympathy reverses the meaning given earlier by Mr. Blank to her tears and deletes the role of fool Mr. Blank had forced Sasha to accept. Her part as potential victim is thus erased by Serge who seems to be replaying, with more success, his own earlier part with the mulatto Martinique woman.29 For the first time, Sasha trusts another person when the painter says that he, too, cries, especially about Van Gogh. “He isn’t lying, I think he really has cried over Van Gogh” (Midnight, p. 94).

Indirectly this exchange refers to the Exhibition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques Appliqués—but to the part that concerns “des Arts” rather than “des Techniques Appliqués.” While the exhibition emphasized industrial and mechanical innovations with an entire pavillion each devoted to plastic, aluminum, linoleum, radio, cinema, and the new “aero-industry,” it also held the new Museum of Modern Art. Here were displayed works of art in many media from the fourteenth through the twentieth centuries, including an exhibit of Van Gogh paintings.³⁰ The Nazi exposition is particularly dangerous for Serge since he is Jewish; he already lives in exile from the Soviet Union and thus must avoid its exhibit. By alluding to Van Gogh and the Museum of Modern Art, he has shown Sasha a way out of the exhibition or at least of those sites that offer only “passages to the right and passages to the left.” Appropriating the symbols of her worst fears—the cruelty and artificiality signified at first by the masks—he transforms their meaning and enables Sasha to re-envision herself and her past in another place “somewhere else.”

It has become apparent that the two Russian exiles are even more impoverished than Sasha, and finally Delmar shows Sasha the paintings in which they hope she will be interested enough to make a purchase. The moment becomes an epiphany:

“Now you can see them,” he says.

“Yes, now I can see them.”

I am surrounded by the pictures. It is astonishing how vivid they are in this dim light. . . . Now the room expands and the iron band round my heart loosens. The miracle has happened. I am happy. (Midnight, p. 99)

When Sasha admits that although she very much likes one of the paintings—of an “old Jew with a red nose, playing the banjo”—she cannot afford to purchase it at the moment, Serge laughs and then resignedly but kindly offers to give it to her.

When he says this, he smiles at me so gently, so disarmingly. The touch of the human hand. . . . I’d forgotten what it was like, the touch of a human hand. . . .

Then he gives my hand a long hard shake and says “Amis.”

When he shakes my hand like that and says “Amis” I feel very happy . . . (Midnight, pp. 100–101)

The passages are remarkable for the absence of cynicism, betrayal, fear, and anxiety. Sasha discovers in these moments an authentic human contact which not only makes her happy but provides a way out of the impasse of her memories. “Now I am not thinking of the past at all. I am well in the present” (Midnight, p. 101). Paradoxically this unofficial exhibition has somehow freed her, for the moment at least, from her fear of the official exhibition. In these pictures, “The misshapen dwarfs juggle with huge coloured balloons, the four-breasted woman is exhibited, the old prostitute waits hopelessly outside the urinoir, the young one under the bee de gaz . . .” (Midnight, p. 101). In this carnival company Sasha finds an exaltation.

During her visit to Serge’s studio, another vision appears to Sasha of a peaceful room and a bed in Paris and “the dreams that you have, alone in an empty room waiting for the door that will open, the thing that is bound to happen . . .” (Midnight, p. 100). In this vision, following the earlier one of a seaside vista, Sasha sees anew her past and the possibilities for her future. Though the passage describes the setting of the novel’s disturbing conclusion, it does so with a difference—a sense of possibility in the opening door. The possibility is linked, through the image of the door, to the Caribbean vision in which “the sound of the sea advances and retreats as if a door were being opened and shut.” The “thing that is bound to happen” in this later scene may be fated by Sasha’s initial dream, but here she has rewritten its possible meanings through another vision, of the Caribbean sea, imagined in carnivalesque comaraderie. Now her fate remains unnamed, as if waiting for her to fill in the ellipses. She may still determine this fate and may even script it in accordance with the fulfillment of friendship that now makes her so happy.

Sasha’s happiness is short-lived, however. The possibilities for romantic friendship and community promised by her moment with Serge ends when he does not show for their next date. Delmar meets with her instead and bores her with long monologues about the glories of monarchy. Aware that Sasha prefers his friend, Delmar begins to criticize Serge, accusing him of madness and stating, “I’ve had enough of these people of the extreme Left. They have bad manners. Moi, je suis monarchiste . . .” (Midnight, p. 103). Sasha’s return to protective cynicism following this disappointment has as much to do with the political implications of the scene as with her psychological state. With the Left, represented through Delmar by Serge, in retreat and the Right, in the figure and voice of Delmar, opposed and on the offensive, Sasha no longer sees a “way out” of the systems of “the fathers”; she is thrust back into the impasse of her dream. The painting she eventually does purchase of the sad-eyed banjo player, “double-headed and with four arms,” no longer seems an invitation to happiness; rather it mocks her.

The modernist despair now elicited by the painted banjo player’s mockery builds in the ensuing scenes with the gigolo René, as Sasha heads reluctantly, then willingly, toward the exhibition. The impasse Sasha inhabits once again is portrayed in the text through dramatic metaphors that frequently shift to comments on fictional technique. The text’s countering of romantic expectations in the failure of Sasha’s friendship with Serge seems necessitated by political contingencies, social conflicts that become increasingly related to artistic form and style.

When Sasha meets René, the two “actors” become so aware of their respective performances that he refers to their “comedy”: these fictional characters play the parts of theatrical actors who are playing various roles. Sasha’s roles include that of a ghost-writer. In this way, René leads Sasha toward a kind of madness associated with theatrical subversions of “reality” and with the question of literary value.31 They become the producers and directors of their “play,” splitting Sasha’s role into two parts with two voices, “I” and “she.”

In her scenes with René, Sasha attempts to replay the friendly, potentially romantic part that failed with Serge. Even though or perhaps because René announces that he is a “mauvais garçon,” Sasha feels sympathy for him; with him she feels “natural and happy, just as if I were young—but really young. I’ve never been young . . . I’ve never played . . .” (Midnight, p. 155). Of course, she has always “played” in the theatrical sense of the term, and its meaning becomes all the more complex as acting and the theater become metaphors for writing. René persists in discussing his style and the technique of his “métier” while Sasha recalls a time when she landed a job dictating fairy stories for a wealthy woman from Montparnasse. The woman’s publisher complained of Sasha’s style—too many words of one syllable:

Sitting at a large desk, a white sheet of paper in front of me and outside the sun and the blue Mediterranean. Monte Carlo, Monte Carlo, but the Med-it-er-rany-an sea-ee, Monte Carlo, Monte Carlo, where the boy of my heart waits for me-ee. . . . Persian garden. Long words. Chiaroscuro? Translucent? . . . I bet he’d like cataclysmal action and centrifugal flux, but the point is how can I get them into a Persian garden? . . . A blank piece of paper . . . (Midnight, p. 167)

Thus, Sasha the fictional character becomes Sasha the actress with many masks, one of which is a writer of corrupt fictions. Evidently one of the problems with her ghost-writing is not so much the length of the words but their kind. The opposition between imaginary Persian gardens and words like “cataclysmal action” suggests the modernist artist’s problem in the face of twentieth-century technology: how to make it new, how to avoid both clichés of the past and the subordination of art to technical instrumentality. The exhibition’s overriding emphasis on “techniques appliqués” promises the triumph of technology; Delmar’s political diatribe has effectively silenced the influence of Serge’s tears for Van Gogh, and all Sasha can now imagine is a blank piece of paper.

In the meantime, the other “player,” René, discusses the importance of technique. And in the passages recounting Sasha’s memories of her marriage and its demise, she reminds herself of narrative requirements: “This happened and that happened. . . . Not all at once, of course. First this happened, and then that happened . . .” (Midnight, pp. 142–143). With these injunctions on narrative, Sasha attempts to censor what she calls her “film mind,” the impulse to reel out memories on the same plane with the present, to juxtapose scenes rather than connect them through the linear logic of chronological time or to distinguish between imagined and actual incidents.

The crimes of parricide, incest, and infanticide with which sacrificial victims are generally charged are those that abolish distinctions essential to the growth of civilized order. The modernist dissolution of distinctions between present and past, public and private, outer and inner experience appears guilty then of degeneration; in its challenge to hierarchy and paternity, modernism is indeed degenerate art. And in modern urban society, women become the perceived focus of this degeneration; their ambiguous presence in the streets and public places and the lack of normative codes of sexual conduct create conflict that requires either their constraint or sacrifice. As in Sasha’s scene with Mr. Blank, they may be unable to speak the language in power; their own words may be bound in silence: “Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights. Since I was born, hasn’t every word I’ve said, every thought I’ve thought, everything I’ve done been tied up, weighted, chained?” (Midnight, p. 106).

However, Sasha’s ritualistic transformations give her the chance to change, through stylistic innovation, the mechanical directions of the steel fingers in her dream and to possibly rewrite the commands (“This Way to the Exhibition”) of their signs. Sasha clings to her illusions and longs to piece them together in new and fanciful ways. Yet of the gigolo’s concentration on technique, she thinks, “—it sounds quite meaningless. It probably is meaningless. He’s just trying to shock me or excite me or something . . .” (Midnight, p. 157). Sasha is terrified of the cost of such play. She fears that, at bottom, the improvisations and innovations of style—including her attempts at renewal—will be exposed as mere tricks, artificial and deceptive. As Girard has stated, “The very essence of modern society might be said to be its ability to sustain the possibility for new discoveries in the midst of an ever-worsening sacrificial crisis—not, to be sure, without many signs of anxiety and stress.”32

The paradox of style that troubles Sasha—its power to effect new discoveries in the midst of crisis and the threat it presents of empty but controlling mechanical form—is inscribed in the formal strategies of the text in ways that help to explain the ambiguity and unease created by its conclusion. Two narrative methods continually vie with one another to create a complex and contradictory style; they also parallel the dual aspects of ritual that engage Sasha. Through one strategy, Rhys presents Sasha in varying degrees of split consciousness. Isolating and fracturing Sasha’s perceptions, this strategy begins with abrupt shifts from first-person narration to direct interior monologues and back again. In the following passage, for example, we plunge directly into an interior monologue associating Sasha’s memories of washrooms; just as suddenly, we switch to the present and first-person narration:

The lavabo in Florence and the very pretty, fantastically-dressed girl who rushed in, hugged and kissed the old dame tenderly and fed her with cakes out of a paper bag. The dancer-daughter? . . . That cosy little Paris lavabo, where the attendant peddled drugs—something to heal a wounded heart.

When I got upstairs the American and his friend had gone. “It was something I remembered,” I told the waiter, and he looked at me blankly, not even bothering to laugh at me. (Midnight, p. 11)

The narrative fracturing of time and voice portrays Sasha at her most desperate moments, in this case humiliated in a public bar where she breaks into tears. The abrupt shifts from present to past portray her struggles to revive, through memory, an identity now violently disordered.

The second formal strategy, which perhaps builds on this fragmentation but also competes with it, is that of a poetic logic that combines, condenses, and potentially transforms Sasha’s fragmented perceptions into newly unified acts and symbols. The most potentially renewing images resulting from this strategy appear in the visions she experiences in Serge’s studio. The peaceful, empty room with its opening door is transformed by its connection to the Caribbean Sea, Sasha’s first and only, though imaginary, successful attempt at changing her room. In Part I, frightened by her dream and threatened by her ghostly neighbor, she hopes to change everything by changing her room. She decides she must have number 219—“Who says you can’t escape from your fate? I’ll escape from mine, into room number 219. Just try me, just give me a chance” (Midnight, p. 37). However, the hotel receptionist will not cooperate with her request, and she returns to her old room:

A room? . . . But never tell the truth about this business of rooms, because it would bust the roof off everything and undermine the whole social system. All rooms are the same. . . .

The room welcomes me back. (Midnight, pp. 38, 39)

Through the recollection of particular rooms, Sasha attempts to construct her memories. Part III of the novel consists entirely of these memories; the passages begin typically with lines like “. . . The room at the Steens’” (Midnight, p. 113) or “. . . The room in the hotel in Amsterdam that night” (Midnight, p. 116)—solitary, introductory lines each marked by italics as if presenting a playwright’s stage instructions. These rooms introduce Sasha and the reader to her past and, as memories, become the connecting scenes in her search for an identity more solid and consistent than the scattered and improvised roles she now invents. But in each one of these rooms she meets barriers she must circumvent: desperate poverty, her pregnancy and the death of her child, Enno’s faithlessness, and, finally, his abandonment, leaving her once again in a room: “A room? A nice room? A beautiful room with a bath? Swing high, swing low, swing to and fro . . . This happened and that happened . . .” (Midnight, p. 142). Unable to consolidate her self by placing it in rooms of the past, Sasha turns back to the narrative requirements of realist chronology. She also relies on irony, typical of the social criticism and self-criticism expressed in Anna’s “voices” in Voyage in the Dark. In both novels, this voice indicates a resistant yet despairing effort to sustain multivocality in the absence or failure of carnival satire. Only in the community that she finds with Serge and Delmar and through the opening Serge gives her into another place and time can she fulfill her “self” and successfully change her room. The new room she envisions within the new room of Serge’s studio and the exhibition he and Delmar set up provides the only possible exit from the Exhibition Internationale.

René, however, proves a poor understudy for Serge. He wants Sasha’s money; he wants to use her sexually. As he begins to turn against her, the two formal strategies vie intensely with one another. Toward the novel’s conclusion, Sasha parodies her own efforts at scriptwriting: “Thinking how funny a book would be, called ‘Just a Cérébrale or You Can’t Stop Me From Dreaming.’ Only, of course, to be accepted as authentic, to carry any conviction, it would have to be written by a man” (Midnight, p. 161). She recognizes, with modernist female irony, that in this time and place, only a man’s text, even dream text, appears authentic. The paradox of style is gender-coded, and in the misogynist Europe preceding World War II, her dreams of renewal through style will be dismissed as false.

Convinced by René that she is, “in fact, a monster,” Sasha is ready to visit the exhibition. Here she finds “what I imagined,” the Star of Peace. The place is “cold, empty, beautiful,” and Sasha feels content, as if in the aftermath of another sacrificial transformation. One description of the 1937 exhibition in Paris refers to this emblem of peace:

Even without looking beyond the exhibition itself, those who visited the international sector at the foot of the Trocadero hill must have been gravely perturbed at the great pavilions of Germany and Russia, challenging one another for dominance of the scene just as the nations themselves were soon to challenge one another for dominance of the world, while the slim symbol of Peace, standing at the back of the hill, seemed to be virtually crowded out of the picture.33

The symbol could only have presented to Sasha another false promise. But false or not, “This is what I wanted—the cold fountains, the cold rainbow lights on the water . . .” (Midnight, p. 164). Sasha’s willing acceptance of the exhibition’s cold, empty beauty and its false peace indicates her now willing sacrifice.

The gigolo accuses Sasha, this time of the crime committed by them both: “You love playing a comedy, don’t you?” Only her part in the crime as a woman, however, makes her guilty and punishable. It is as if the power exercised by Mr. Blank has not been sufficient to silence Sasha’s critical and parodic plays with style and language. Now sexual violence erupts to forcefully purge her of such multivocality. In the struggle that follows, René pins Sasha to the bed, threatening her with stories about gang rapes “‘for women like you, who pretend and lie and play an idiotic comedy all the time . . . Je te ferai mal, he says. ‘It’s your fault’” (Midnight, p. 182).

René demands that Sasha give “the ritual answer” to his commands and that she change her voice, “I don’t like it . . . that voice.” Sasha tells him where she hides her money and begs him to leave a little. When he finally departs, Sasha’s voice does change. The narrative strategy of fragmentation takes over as she splits into another kind of monster—a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with two voices, first-person “I” and third-person “she”:

Who is this crying? The same one who laughed on the landing, kissed him and was happy. This is me, this is myself, who is crying. The other one—how do I know who the other is? She isn’t me.

Her voice in my head: “Well, well, well, just think of that now. What an amusing ten days! Positively packed with thrills. The last performance of What’s-her-name And Her Boys or It Was All Due To An Old Fur Coat.” (Midnight, p. 184)

“She” continues a sarcastic commentary alongside Sasha’s “own” voice. It seems this real self is only alive in pain—“My mouth hurts, my breasts hurt, because it hurts, when you have been dead, to come alive . . .” (Midnight, p. 182). Sasha believes that the voice who says “I” resembles most the Sasha who was happy with Serge and who felt for a moment that youthful romance was still possible with the gigolo; the second voice speaks for the Sasha who continually rewrites her script as a cynical parody. That the second voice has become “Other” to the “I” who speaks suggests perhaps that Sasha may have identified her “real self.” However, the discovery exacts the price of pain and the death of her playful, parodic voice. Its greatest sacrifice is that of the multivocality that has rendered Sasha’s consciousness so vital and critically perceptive.

Girard argues that the victim in ritual sacrifice becomes a “monstrous double,” a doubling characterized by the individual’s capacity to partake of “all possible differences within the community, particularly the difference between within and without . . .”34 This doubling now severs Sasha in two. “She” departs, leaving Sasha with a mutilated, one-dimensional “I.”

Then suddenly a new image appears, one that combines and condenses, creating formally the possibility of unity. The image expresses the results of her isolation and fragmentation, and it also portrays the artificiality and deception that Sasha has feared to discover and that René claims to have exposed in her gestures of style:

All that is left in the world is an enormous machine, made of white steel. It has innumerable flexible arms, made of steel. Long, thin arms. At the end of each arm is an eye, the eyelashes stiff with mascara. When I look more closely I see that only some of the arms have these eyes—others have lights. The arms that carry the eyes and the arms that carry the lights are all extraordinarily flexible and very beautiful. But the grey sky, which is the background, terrifies me. . . . And the arms wave to an accompaniment of music and of song. Like this: “Hotcha—hotcha—hotcha. . . .” And I know the music; I can sing the song. (Midnight, p. 187)

While the image itself expresses a futurist vision of mechanical fragmentation, the formal process of dream logic and metaphor creates this vision through a movement of condensation and unification.

The machine in Sasha’s vision gains its meaning from associations with artificial limbs she has glimpsed in a shop window, the makeup she wears, the steel hand in her dream that points the way to the exhibition, and the stage lights that expose the crudity of a song that she knows well. In an earlier passage, Sasha has quoted a line from a poem in Heinrich Heine’s “Lyrical Intermezzo”: “aus meinen grossen Schmerzen mach ich die kleinen Lieder” (out of my great pains I make the little songs). The vision now exposes her songs as the dance-hall rhythms of mass culture, not the poetry she might have hoped for.

Here she recognizes herself as part of a feminized mass culture that she dreads for its mechanical artificiality. Yet its beauty attracts. Describing the great European exhibitions, Walter Benjamin wrote: “The world exhibitions glorify the exchange value of commodities. They create a framework in which commodities’ intrinsic value is eclipsed. They open up a phantasmagoria that people enter to be amused. The entertainment industry facilitates this by elevating people to the level of commodities. They submit to being manipulated while enjoying their alienation from themselves and others.”35 Benjamin and Rhys, I would argue, see such deceitful and inauthentic pleasure in mass culture, not because of an elitest philosophy of individualism, but because of the totalitarian ideologies swaying masses of people during the 1930s. Associations among “the masses,” “the primitive” or “the savage,” and “the feminine” take a new turn in this era as masses of Europeans acquire more truly savage characteristics in paradoxically ordered and orderly ways. Rhys’s novels are also, as we have seen, particularly sensitive to the commodification of women that mass culture makes so visible, and in Good Morning, Midnight Sasha fears the ordered sane existence that makes her “a bit of an automaton.”

Yet in creating the machine vision, Sasha potentially transforms the fragmentation that has compelled her to improvise and borrow identities through commodified gestures into something whole. When she then begins to will the gigolo back into her room and finds that the man who does enter is wearing the white dressing gown of her nightmare, again the metaphorical process combines and condenses fragments of her consciousness; it must be the white nightgown because only that gown will crystallize the process, only then can she make a gesture that, as most readers believe, indicates triumph, union, rebirth: “I think: ‘Is it the blue dressing-gown, or the white one? That’s very important. I must find that out—it’s very important.’ I take my arm away from my eyes. It is the white dressing-gown” (Midnight, p. 190). The recurrence of the white dressing-gown—on the wounded figure in Sasha’s dream who claims to be her father and screams “murder!”; on the priestlike commis whom Sasha compares to a skeleton and a ghost, who haunts the hallway of her rooming house and once tries to push his way into her room; and, finally, on the figure who enters her room in the concluding passage, “his mean eyes flickering”—becomes a symbol of all that Sasha has feared, of death itself. But the formal process that gives the image its power combines into the final, intense moment all of the previously fragmented elements of that image.

If this conclusion does indicate a way out of Sasha’s “impasse,” the sense of potential comes from the formal ambiguity of the passage. The ambiguity operates on several levels to become intensely disturbing to readers. First, the dream logic that creates these final metaphors vies with the narrative portrayals of fragmentation and mutilation that culminate in the split into first- and third-person voices. Second, the constitution of the symbol formally opposes its thematic associations; this conflict generates an ambivalence that leads our readings in two directions at once: toward suggestions of death in the elements combined (“skeleton,” “ghost,” “damned,” “priest,” “wounded,” “Murder!”) and, conversely, toward the unifying implications of the formal process that lead us to sense the possibility of new meaning and perhaps a renewed “self.”

Third, even within the formal logic of condensation resides an ambiguity that gives the process of metaphor its power. Sasha’s “yes” welcomes a moment in which she has stripped herself of the artificial qualities of style (she rises purposefully to undress) and has created through her own will and active knowledge an image that does subvert the oppressive and chaotic clichés of conventional consciousness. By calling for the white nightgown, she creates her own fate and emphasizes the one element that will formally combine, condense, and unify the fragments of her life. She overrides René’s exposure and her resulting split consciousness by making René, with his wounds, only one element in the formal process that associates those wounds with the father figure who wore the white dressing gown in her dream. In this scene, we might view Sasha as “acting” but no longer in the sense of bringing to her performance an interpretation. Rather, the passage bears the full ambiguity of an original act. Her act creates a metaphor for sexual oppression that gives formal order to her experience. By shaping the symbol, she undermines the image of the marginal victim it creates.

He doesn’t say anything. Thank God, he doesn’t say anything. I look straight into his eyes and despise another poor devil of a human being for the last time. For the last time. . . . Then I put my arms around him and pull him down on to the bed, saying: “Yes—yes—yes.” (Midnight, p. 190)

Sasha imagined the gigolo’s return, knowing the commis was present, knowing it was he who entered her door. As if following her earlier vision in Serge’s studio, she deliberately left the door open, got up a second time to undress before lying down again to wait “as still as if I were dead” (Midnight, p. 190). Yet Sasha believes her real self waits for him: “Now I am simple and not afraid; now I am myself. He can look at me if he wants to” (Midnight, p. 189).

Metaphor, like ritual, contains a liminal phase, that point in between the meaning of an old identity and the creation of a new one, the moment of emptiness that transformation requires. Hence the title of the novel greets the midnight hour, between morning and night and between systems of explanation. Sasha’s actions in this scene create a ritual moment of suspension that parallels the formal liminal moment of metaphor: is it enough to suggest renewal or is it, like René’s technique, “possibly quite meaningless”? This is the question posed, in terms of sexual relations, by the novel—a challenge posed to the modernism that it participates in and contributes to yet, through the perceptions of a marginalized woman, also writes against.

We might, returning to Wilson Harris’s concern with overcoming the stasis of victim/victimizer that guided our interpretation of Antoinette’s dream text in Wide Sargasso Sea, argue that such a transcendence occurs with Sasha’s concluding “Yes—yes—yes.” After all, in the dream that this scene realizes, the identity of victim and victimizer blurred when Sasha’s screams of “Murder!” joined those of the wounded father. In this light, we could view the formal process of the final visionary scene in Good Morning, Midnight not as empty or meaningless, but as a moment leading toward metamorphosis and the renewal of identity with other “poor devils.”36 However, we must also read the scene in the context of the Exhibition Internationale and the political conflict represented there as well as the social chaos in which it takes place. Considering again the confrontation of the Soviet and Nazi buildings, Italy’s monument to fascism and futurism, and the symbol of peace they nearly obscure, we have to recognize the impending social annihilation threatening Europe. The exhibition’s cold beauty and emptiness present the loss of community that Sasha experienced personally with the loss of Serge’s friendship. This is the crucial difference between the endings of the two novels: in Wide Sargasso Sea, the final dream text returns Antoinette to the community of Caribbean women through whom she multiplies and fulfills her identity; in Good Morning, Midnight, the same formal process has been emptied of such a possibility and requires instead the sacrifice of multivocality in an artificially contrived union. The false unity of the exhibition’s attempt at internationalism parallels I think what we must see as a false union between the commis and Sasha. Unable to join with other creative and marginalized individuals in acts of generosity, Sasha has joined instead with her accuser and tormentor. Her “yes—yes—yes” repeats the earlier moment of submission to the role of fool/victim in which the fascistic authority of Mr. Blank casts her:

“Just a hopeless, helpless little fool, aren’t you” . . .

“Well, aren’t you?”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes. Oh, yes.” (Midnight, p. 28)

Like the order promised by fascism, her submission demands pain and sacrifice. It convinces Sasha of her own guilt (“it’s your fault”) and makes her a willing victim of anonymous patriarchal forces in an act of literal self-sacrifice. If this final scene suggests birth, it is that of a machine with mascaraed eyes, an artificial woman like the shop dummies Sasha has cynically admired, and an automaton who dances to a debasing tune. Following the zombie logic of Rhys’s other novels, Good Morning, Midnight portrays in its final scene death-in-life and the political-psychological powers that work such evil magic.

In modern European society, the “self,” unified and consolidated, gains the status of the sacred. The selves of Rhys’s heroines, so tenuous and pluralized already, are sacrificeable. Though they stubbornly attempt to find, assert, and protect the voices of their multiplicitous selves, they are imbued with the violence of the society around them that, feeling itself threatened, requires victims. The victims appear to lose “self-respect,” a loss substituting perhaps for that which members of society who constitute themselves as autonomous individuals fear from “the Other”—the masses of mass culture, of women, and of “foreigners” or Jews. What Sasha loses, however, is, first, the carnival community experienced with the Jewish Serge that awakens a new vision of self, and, second, the voice, characterized as “she,” of irony and critical play that allows her to survive by analyzing her marginality. In light of Caribbean cultural pluralism and the concept of multiplicitous and fulfilled selves it makes possible, the goal of a stable and discrete identity appears as a delusion, yet one that governs.

The happy ending that might have closed this novel takes place in its middle, with a glimpse of “somewhere else” in a vision of the sea and an opening door. Sasha cannot reenact the scene later because it depended upon a spontaneous community of marginalized individuals, acting in carnivalesque concert. The terrifying grey background of Sasha’s vision, modern Europe on the verge of a war in which six million “marginal” individuals will be deliberately put to death, supercedes in the novel’s ending the possibilities offered by its middle. The epiphany of the middle section, however, suggests the Third World modernist concept of the individual that Rhys later develops in Wide Sargasso Sea; in this novel of the late 1930s it becomes a means to explore the social and political limitations governing the formalism of European modernism.