Jean Rhys

[Mirabell]

One of my very favorite writers. My favorite novel is probably Good Morning Midnight.

Good Morning Midnight connects with me on a very deep level in every single sentence. I once considered learning it by heart and stop talking.



***

'BUt what are you afraid of? How do you mean afraid?'
She said, 'I mean afraid like when you want to swallow and you can't.'
'All the time?'
'Nearly all the time.'
'My dear, really. You are an idiot.'
'Yes, I know.'
Not about this, she thought, not about this.

Thus begins a story in my newly acquired volume of collected short stories of Jean Rhys.



****



I found this to be an excellent description

I've been meaning for while to formulate my thoughts on her writing on how she reminds me so much of Beckett. or of how she is past her modernists contemporaries in a sense; she doesn't aim to point out that there is a "heart of darkness" or a nothing at the center of everything: that, throughout Rhys is a given...all the other modernists were just coming to terms with that idea and Rhys and her characters, acutely aware, go about their lives, window shopping, drinking, allowing themselves to be worn out by the illusory nature of day-to-day life yet knowing that it is illusory but continuing, never jumping in the water, never pulling the trigger. Her books scream a palpable and hyper and beautiful exhaustion. Her characters go into the shallows aware of the depths. sometimes it's much easier that way, isn't it?

[lionel]

Oh yes, Mirabell. What a writer. I could have pasted a few pages on Rhys that I've written, but it included aspects of existentialism, and, er, Arthur Phelps in Hunger and Love. As this should be Britton-free, here are a just few paragraphs instead:

Rhys was not just an outsider because she was a woman, and moreover a woman from a foreign country. It is impossible to judge to what extent either of these two distancing factors influenced a third source of alienation, but Rhys suffered from another form of colonization: an incapacitating shyness in which the self feels invaded by others. Angier (her biographer) notes the two occasions when Rosamond Lehmann saw Rhys; the first time was when Rhys visited Lehmann, her sister, and Lehmann’s friend Violet Hammersley for tea, although such was Rhys’s shyness that the three women had great difficulty communicating with her; on the second occasion, Lehmann was invited to Rhys’s house, although Rhys was so drunk that she did not recognize her. In Good Morning, Midnight in particular, Rhys gives a vivid account of the problem.It is only possible for Sasha to speak fluent French, for instance, when she has had a drink or when she knows and likes a person. In one episode, just as Sasha is being dismissed from employment by Mr Blank, the language used and the mood shown are startling. These are thoughts in retrospect:

‘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. […] Let’s say that you have this mystical right to cut my legs off. But the right to ridicule me afterwards because I am 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. […] Did I say all this? Of course I didn’t. I didn’t even think it.’

On the first page of Good Morning, Midnight, Sasha describes the street where she lives as ending in a flight of steps: ‘What they call an impasse.’ Sasha, like Rhys herself, has arrived at an impasse. With Rhys’s female characters, there is a hiatus between the interior and the exterior worlds. Her novels are full of the meaningless of existence, reaching a kind of zenith of absurdity with Good Morning, Midnight, and it was almost three decades before she would publish another book.

[Max Cairnduff]

I just finished Good Morning, Midnight myself recently. Tremendous novel, a brilliant evocation of the nature of depression, of alienation and of the judgements society can place on women who don't quite fit.

For the curious, I wrote it up over at my blog as I do everything I read, but in short I second Mirabell's recommendation. It's a short but intense novel, well worth the reading.

[Braille]

I see this is a massive bump but I very much need help.

I've read three novels by Jean Rhys (WSS, GMM and VITD) and I'm writing an essay on them. I found a great quote on the internet, saying: "I often want to cry. That is the only advantage women have over men – at least they can cry."

I wanted to use it in the title, only to realise that I don't know from which novel it is. It does ring a bell, but it may as well be from a completely different novel.

Huge thanks to anyone who could help me find an answer. I really need the context to this quote.

Thank you in advance,

new member, Braille

[Liam]

Originally Posted by Braille

"I often want to cry. That is the only advantage women have over men – at least they can cry."

It's from Good Morning, Midnight; around page 94 in this edition.



L.

[Braille]

Thanks a bunch! I've got a different edition but found it soon enough.

[Clarissa]

In the same vein Djuna Barnes. Also well worth the time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Djuna_Barnes