Good Morning, Midnight Revisited
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Jean Rhys’s inter-war European novels, set in contemporary London and Paris, evince thematic regularity. They engage critically with the narrative of prostitution, or commodification of a female body, exposing its workings at various levels within a framework of the modern capitalist city. Good Morning, Midnight of 1939, replaying and summing up its predecessors, brings her work full circle. It sustains this particular theme and yet reworks the major concerns of her earlier fictions with an ironic twist. In this novel, women’s involvement with commodity culture emerges as more intricate and problematic. The heroine Sasha Jansen represents a commodity-cum-consumer in the marketplace of sex, which complicates the relevant issues, adding a further dimension to the discourse of sexuality, commerce and power. The mutable status between the consuming subject and the object implies dynamic power politics in operation in the arena of consumption and exchange, in which the relationship between hegemonic and non-hegemonic parties is subject to a constant revision by the interconnected variables of money, gender and class. Yet Sasha’s final transferring to a position of the object seems to reflect the tension and anxiety that Rhys would have felt in constructing a woman as a consumer of a sexualised male body. In conclusion, Good Morning, Midnight indicates that women’s involvement with the world of commodity is complex and open-ended rather than monolithic and one-dimensional.
Abstract
Jean Rhys’s inter-war European novels, set in contemporary London and Paris, evince thematic regularity. They engage critically with the narrative of prostitution, or commodification of a female body, exposing its workings at various levels within a framework of the modern capitalist city. Good Morning, Midnight of 1939, replaying and summing up its predecessors, brings her work full circle. It sustains this particular theme and yet reworks the major concerns of her earlier fictions with an ironic twist. In this novel, women’s involvement with commodity culture emerges as more intricate and problematic. The heroine Sasha Jansen represents a commodity-cum-consumer in the marketplace of sex, which complicates the relevant issues, adding a further dimension to the discourse of sexuality, commerce and power. The mutable status between the consuming subject and the object implies dynamic power politics in operation in the arena of consumption and exchange, in which the relationship between hegemonic and non-hegemonic parties is subject to a constant revision by the interconnected variables of money, gender and class. Yet Sasha’s final transferring to a position of the object seems to reflect the tension and anxiety that Rhys would have felt in constructing a woman as a consumer of a sexualised male body. In conclusion, Good Morning, Midnight indicates that women’s involvement with the world of commodity is complex and open-ended rather than monolithic and one-dimensional.
참고문헌 (16)
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