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A Moveable Feast? Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight and Paris
Authors: Neha Yadav
Number of views: 327
In the 20th century modernist literature, the expatriate experience of the metropolis ─ particularly Paris ─ is usually associated with the towering figures of Hemingway, Crane, Pound, and later, Henry Miller and Anais Nin. Amidst post-war desolation, Paris retained its reputation as a bohemian paradise, a liberal, permissive, fashionable world where all that was avant-garde could thrive. Raymond Williams, in The Politics of Modernism, described this milieu as the “modernist universals” and attempted to dismantle their ideological hegemony by emphasising that their work actually accounted for only a small portion of all contemporary artistic production. Though Williams pointed towards “deprived hinterlands” and “the poor world” as the site where variations within the movement might be found, this paper attempts to recuperate them from Jean Rhys’s 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight which chronicles the twilight years of Sasha Jensen, an English woman adrift in Paris. By studying the text through the prism of gender and class, I attempt to show how despite superficial similarities with the canonical figures, Rhys’ own marginal position, as a Creole woman of uncertain means, necessarily complicates her engagement with, and subsequent representation of, the dominant modernist ethos.
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