“A Doormat in a World of Boots”: Jean Rhys and the Masochistic Aesthetic

Abstract

Near the end of Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, the protagonist, Sasha Jansen, very drunk and alone in her room with a gigolo, struggles against his advances, only to find herself pinned beneath him, her dress torn, tears trickling down her face, speechless in the face of his taunts and threats of violence and gang rape (“[I]n Morocco it’s much easier. You get four comrades to help you, and then it’s very easy. They each take their turn. It’s nice like that” [182]). Yet instead of reacting with anger or fear, Sasha somewhat disturbingly proclaims her resurrection as a subject and human being: noting the concrete fact of René’s “hard knee between my knees,” Sasha submits, thinking, “My mouth hurts, my breasts hurt, because it hurts, when you have been dead, to come alive… ” (182). Even when Sasha finally rouses herself enough to fend off the gigolo’s attack, this disturbing definition of rebirth persists: the novel ends as Sasha welcomes into her bed a traveling salesman who has denigrated her as a “sale vache” or dirty cow, a man to whom she has earlier responded with fear and repulsion, calling him “the ghost of the landing” and “the priest of some obscene, half-understood religion” (35).