Beauty, Money and Sasha Jensen; Women as Victims in Good Morning, Midnight

There are countless books written in many languages and many time periods about the struggles of women and how they are affected by their culture and time. One of these many books, Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys is no exception. Sasha Jensen has found herself sad and lonely, in unfortunate circumstances; mostly as the result of the way her society and culture value her.

In "Character and Themes in the Novels of Jean Rhys", Elgin Mellown argues that all of Rhys' central female characters are the relatively the same, in each book they are in different life stages. The characters experience "the spiritual progress of a woman from the joy of childhood into the ordeal of adolescent love and sexual experience, through a resulting bitterness, grief, and selfish isolation, toward a position which will allow her to develop a compassionate understanding of the human situation" (author 462). Rhys writes these women as victims (463) who can never escape their sadness; their "last state is always worse than her last." (463) Rhys' experiences undoubtedly influenced her work. Mellown says that the characters are autobiographical projections, with "qualities [that Rhys] would not actually have possessed" (463). For most of Good Morning, Midnight, Sasha is a "long-for-death dipsomaniac, who has deliberately frozen over the wellsprings of love to live only through her memory of the past, to develop into an adult by going beyond her adolescent hate-fear of other human beings."(467) While Sasha has her share of issues, and her turning point happens late in the novel, I disagree with this description of Sasha Jensen. Sasha is indeed a victim of how other people treat her. She is a poor, older, unattractive woman, and because of this, society does not even want to see her, much less do they hold her has having any sort of value. "The propertied and men own language: they keep women and the poor out. They collapse categories so that all choice is theirs, and no other choices are available." (239 Gardiner) Her methods of self expression and communication have been removed from her. Sasha did not deliberately close herself off from others. It was done to her.

One of the people in Sasha's life that renders her opinion as unimportant is Sidonie. Sasha is in Paris because her friend Sidonie told her "I think you need a change. Why don't you go back to Paris for a bit? . . . . You could get yourself some new clothes- you certainly need them [...] I had not seen this woman for months and then she swooped won on me. . . . Well, here I am. When you've been made very cold and very sane you've also been made very passive."(11-12 Rhys). "Other people look into the mirror of her [Sasha] face and tell her how she feels", what she needs and what she should do. (Gardiner 237). Sasha thinks that Sidonie perceives her as old and a drunk (11 Rhys). Sidonie