ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1939) is set in 1937 Paris, a time of international tension, proliferating xenophobia, and rising fascism. Diverting from critiques that examine the flânerie and shopping of the novel’s heroine, Sasha Jansen, in relation to her schizophrenia, this paper focuses on Sasha’s hybrid identity. Good Morning, Midnight depicts the experiences of a negative flâneuse who neither liberates herself from nor actively blends into the anonymous crowd. Seeking to avoid the othering gaze of a xenophobic society, Sasha attempts to masquerade as “les autres.” Her traumatic response is closely related to her family’s constant rejection of her as a foreign woman who they regard as a racially and ethnically “disapproved” being. After revealing Sasha’s hybrid identity by carefully reconstructing her fragmented narrative, this paper contends that the othering gaze is associated with the familial, societal, and national disapproval in Sasha’s consciousness. Her self-effacing desire fuels her mental and physical efforts to fit into the world of cliché, which has no space for difference or the foreign. As Sasha’s struggle to assimilate goes against the homogenizing force of the era, her desire to censor herself elicits inner conflict. Highlighting the link between rigid intolerance of difference and xenophobia, this study positions Sasha’s fragmented consciousness within the cultural context of early twentieth-century Europe, where nationalism was exploited to justify imperial expansion in the aftermath of WWI.

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