Because of this tendency to cry, she’s well acquainted with the many bar bathrooms of Paris, where she escapes to weep while staring at herself in the mirror.

Good Morning, Midnight: Masks and Consequences | The Artifice Good Morning, Midnight: Masks and Consequences | The Artifice

A modernist work, Good Morning, Midnight follows Sasha’s mind as she meanders through her traumatic past and harsh present. Now everything is in my arms on this dark landing—love, youth, spring, happiness, everything I thought I’d lost.The city is hostile, people ‘fling themselves’ at Sasha, voices are like ‘uniforms’ and ‘weapons’ and she needs to wear ‘armour’ to protect herself (42-4). Good Morning, Midnight illustrates how money can be both powerful and utterly meaningless in a person’s life.

Good Morning, Midnight An Exhibition of Blind Spots in Good Morning, Midnight

Williams was ostracized for her Caribbean heritage and accent—she was eventually taken out of school because her instructors deemed her unable to rid herself of the West Indies accent that would prevent her from gaining significant stage roles. Page references are to the 2004 Continuum edition and subsequent references to this text are given with the abbreviation DR. He and Sasha got married in London and then traveled through Europe with the intention of settling in Paris. Paris was the centre of Rhys's world in the 1920s and the ‘centre’ of the art world of which she was a new member; it was her European surrogate home and the birthplace of her artistic identity. The image of masks adorning studio walls (which could be a description of an art gallery) and the word ‘merde’ (shit) evoke the ‘ Entartete Kunst’ exhibition.Der Ewige Jude’ aimed to show with scientific accuracy the essential 'otherness' of Jews, purporting to reveal a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy, the self-interested and decadent characters of Jews and their tendency to live in squalid conditions. Sasha’s refusal to see the Exhibition is an almost laying bare of the identity-centered function of the third element, the model of recognition which ‘remains sovereign and defines the orientation of the philosophical analysis of what it means to think’ (DR: 171).

Jean Rhys | Books | The Guardian Where to start with: Jean Rhys | Books | The Guardian

Sasha lies distraught on the bed for several moments before getting up to see if René left her any money. It is a refutation of the capitalist, imperialist ethic of mastery that he embodies and throughout the novel Sasha’s act of thinking is contrasted to established and fascist forms of thought. Organized by each room they rented along their journey, Part 3 takes Sasha through her memories of her time in The Hague, Amsterdam, Brussels, Calais, and finally Paris.

Less defined is the tendency of French politics in this period towards reactionary views, and the causes of the significant anti-Semitic backlash which resulted from the Jewish Léon Blum’s accession to power in 1936. Likewise, Sasha’s relationship with her husband, Enno, the only man for whom she wears no mask, ends with him leaving her.