Birth-giving, the Body, and the Racialized Other in Jean Rhys

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Philological Quarterly 94.3 (2015)

Birth Giving, the Body, and the Racialized Other in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark

and Good Morning, Midnight

Erin M. Kingsley

In D. H. Lawrence’s 1920 novel Women in Love, amidst the louder narrative of heterosexual pairings and homosocial yearnings, a strange image appears. The male characters, congregating in Julius Halliday’s

flat, an otherwise “ordinary London sitting‑room,” confront a jarring representation of a racialized or “othered” body: “several Negro statues, wood‑carvings from West Africa, strange and disturbing.”1 One statue in particular depicts a woman giving birth and “looking tortured,” her black, slick body appearing “almost like the foetus of a human being,” her “strange, transfixed, rudimentary face [. . .] conveying the suggestion of the extreme of physical sensation, beyond the limits of mental consciousness.”2

Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin are torn when they consider this statue. Gerald asks if the statue is “obscene” (to which Halliday responds he has never “defined the obscene”), while Birkin remembers it much later in the novel, musing that it has become “one of his soul’s intimates,” the grotesque body representing “thousands of years of purely sensual, purely unspiritual knowledge.”3 The tortured female body of this statue exists in the novel as a cipher. Bearing more meaning than it can bear (while also bearing a child in the mix), the statue is laden with subsumed narratives of cultural, heteronormative, religious, racial, and sexual tension, all of which exist subterraneously in the novel and surface in the guise of the black, othered, female birth‑giving body.

I begin with this textual moment in Lawrence because it is a succinct representation of the primary argument of this article: that many tradi‑tionally Euro‑modernist texts appearing between the years 1890 and 1950, including those by Jean Rhys, are highly engaged in issues of reproductive power(lessness) at the intersection of race, class, and cultural belonging or displacement. I seek to illustrate the significance of reproduction in

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the Euro‑modernist movement and to suggest that reproduction itself be reconsidered as a fundamental tenet of the movement. In his book Modernism, Technology, and the Body, for example, Tim Armstrong argues that “[i]n the modern period, the body is re‑energized, re‑formed, subject to new modes of production, representation, and commodification.”4 Arm‑strong explains how early twentieth‑century scientific and technological forays into the sexualized and reproducing body—including sex‑change operations and attempts to construct artificial wombs—speak to the mod‑ernist desire to mechanize, control, and commodify the body and its off‑spring, to “make it new” as texts were being made new.

A further claim of this article is that to be a foreigner or a racial “other” in many modernist novels fundamentally echoes the condition of pregnancy. While I do not intend to make large generalizations, I do want to empha‑size the importance of the motif occurring in Euro‑modernist texts: to be pregnant is also to be an outsider, and this outsider often contains deep inflections of othered racial and economic statuses.5 For example, in Olive Moore’s novel Spleen (1930), the condition of pregnancy is fraught with the condition of exile and outsiderness as pregnant and middle‑class Ruth struggles to find her place in her husband’s restrictive upper‑class family estate. And in We Have Been Warned (1935) by Naomi Mitchison, the main character finds herself pregnant while simultaneously alienated in a dizzy‑ing political landscape imbued with socioeconomic fissures, both condi‑tions collapsing on each other in a deluge of decentering.

To succinctly illustrate my claim that pregnancy and the outsider status resonate with each other and that they resonate with the traditional tenets of the modernist movement as well, I will focus my argument here on only two novels by Jean Rhys—Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). In these works, the conditions of otherness and of preg‑nancy are virtually synonymous with each other, as both yield extreme changeability, dismantling of self, ostracization, fragmentation, and outsid‑erness. Such feminine, highly racial birth (the two categories dovetail, as I will explain below) is also often truncated, monstrous, messy, composite, or inbetween—grotesque, like Lawrence’s statue. This “messiness” or inability to be one thing or another is palimpsestically linked to the consistent un‑mooring of the female body in Rhys. Her heroines often travel or wander, feebly engage with dominant narratives, and search for any alternative to the hegemonic labeling and fixing of the female body that empire and patriarchal power systems systematically seek to erect. While these power systems are not similar in every way and should not be conflated, it remains important to understand how similarly they function in Rhys’s novels. I

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seek to illustrate how the confinement and containment of women in pa‑triarchal, gender, and colonial power systems are layered upon the backs of Rhys’s gestating heroines, while making the further claim that Rhys’s protagonists are purposely pregnant because this physical condition is the ultimate embodiment of being othered, exotic, and lesser‑than.

Artistic representations of “exotic” cultures in British modernism border on caricatures, aping what the writers and painters saw as a beneficial tonic to ameliorate the ills of stifling British society. Predicated on “ambivalent primitivism,” the body of the dark other represents an alternate state at once desirable to achieve yet impossible for the civilized man or woman to access completely.6 For women, the situation surrounding the racial other was even more complex. Early twentieth‑century British hegemonic culture spun a dominant narrative that linked women to the dark races, arguing that both were biologically less developed than white men. As Lucy Bland explains: “Women, ‘lower races’ and children” were thought to share a “lack of willpower, emotionality, dependence, imitativeness, and little capacity for abstract thought.”7 Darwin’s groundbreaking discoveries in The Origin of the Species (1859) justified the watchful eye of the white British man under the auspices of empire, for civilization, defined as “white, masculine and adult,” needed protection from “its antithesis”—the “primitive, female and child‑like.”8 Laura Doyle explains that an alternative term for Darwin’s scientific racism is paedomorphism, which “aligned all women with the ‘lower races’ by suggesting that both embodied the childhood of humanity,” evolutionary‑speaking.9 In this view, woman simply represented a base model of humanity.

In Jean Rhys’s novels, the bodily condition of identifying as the female gender, the cultural position of the colonized, and the racial condition of the other are entwined, even “impacted” (to borrow from a term from Peter Hulme), with the pregnant condition of Rhys’s heroines inhabiting the heart of the narrative and signifying the ultimate embodiment of racial and cul‑tural otherness.10 As Helen Sterk so aptly puts it, all women—but especially birthing women—exist on a “continuum of colonization”; Sterk’s argument in turn draws upon numerous narratives in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that employed the trope of slavery to discuss the plight of wom‑en.11 To be feminine or to be “other” was to be treated as a lesser‑than citizen of the British Empire, one marked by decreased mobility, increased surveil‑lance, and, quite often, a resulting individual displacement occurring on a physical, cultural, and psychological level.

Finally, my discussion of the centrality of pregnancy and childbirth in Rhys builds on three crucial theoretic concepts stemming from critics Hel‑en Sterk et al., Carol H. Poston, and Christina Mazzoni. First, the birthing


woman is always treated like a colonized person, “childlike, passive, in need of protection, and [. . .] desiring the domination of the colonizer.”12 Second, the birthing woman is the ultimate foreigner and outsider, belonging to “a different country.”13 And third, the birthing woman speaks a different language, or does not have access to the phallogocentricism inherent in the patriarchal system of language. As Christina Mazzoni explains, the birth‑ing woman’s “experiences don’t make sense because the language she must use cannot adequately convey them.”14 With this final concept of what I call the “linguistic maternal,” I draw on diverse critics ranging from the French feminist school to more recent birth and body theory by Tess Cosslett, Marika Siegel, Rosemary Betterton, Clare Hanson, and others.15 Indeed, the majority of theory surrounding the birthing body deals with language in some form, frequently concluding that the current phallocentric system of language is insufficient to describe the bodily permutations of pregnancy and birth, and advising that feminists and women coin new words to at‑tempt to access their corporeal experiences in reproduction.16

Reproducing the Other

Jean Rhys is a fascinating character, both in her biographical life and in the afterlife of her novels, for as she moves to the center of the confluence of postcolonial, Caribbean, modernist, postmodernist, and feminist writing, she also continues to haunt the periphery due to the reader’s inability to pin her down in a single category. As Mary Lou Emery explains, Rhys’s fic‑tion inhabits the “intersections of significant literary traditions” but is still always marginal.17 Currently, a critical resurgence around Rhys is occurring due in part to the transnational turn in the New Modernist Studies. For example, The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (2012) prominently features Jean Rhys in two articles, more than any other modernist writer in the book. Furthermore, two new volumes of critical articles on Rhys have recently been published, the first such volumes produced in over twenty years.18 Despite this critical resurgence, however, analyses tend to fall into one of three camps: they discuss some aspect of psychoanalysis, trauma, or failure in Rhys’s characters; they consider Rhys in light of postcolonialism, transnationalism, or imperialism; or they analyze her work through the spectrum of her identity as a Caribbean, Creole, or West Indian woman writer.19 The recent critical exception to this rule is the 2013 article by Abigail Palko in which Palko details the reproductive concerns of marginal subjects of the British Empire. Similar to the argument in this article, Palko claims that maternity is a “crucial (albeit untraditional and overlooked)


subcategory of sexuality” stemming from “the anxiety for the Empire’s se‑curity that dominated public consciousness, finding expression as concerns about reproductive and mothering practices at the height of modernism.”20 While I agree with Palko, I argue further that the embodied state of preg‑nancy operates as a crucial marker of the traditional colonial condition in many Euro‑modernist texts generally and in Rhys’s texts specifically, a marker that calls for much more critical engagement.

Pregnancy in Rhys is rarely discussed outright by critics, and when it is mentioned, it is often brief and in the service of a larger theoretical explora‑tion. For example, Mary Lou Emery explains that childbirth for Anna in Voyage in the Dark fails because motherhood would “only oppress her” by requiring her submission to patriarchal society.21 Instead, Emery claims, Anna embraces the alternate potential for renewal and regeneration found in the carnival, a dizzying space where she can “envision new life.”22 Urmila Seshagiri argues that pregnancy is the only nonambiguous element of Voy-age, as it is bound up with nationhood: “Pregnancy intensifies the cultural ambivalence that history has thrust upon Anna, and the baby’s uncertain paternity furthers the mysteries and erasures of Anna’s already‑fractured lineage.”23 Nagihan Haliloglu reads the pregnant body in Rhys as mon‑strous, “an anti‑body that enters the social flow of conventional gender relations and upsets them.”24 Patricia Moran claims that “childbirth and motherhood” are not important in Rhys, as Rhys is much more interested in “[e]rotic domination” and therefore fully rejects maternity.25 Pregnancy in Rhys is consistently read as just one more example of the heroine’s fall, an interchangeable facet of her disastrous condition as an outsider, of the abuse she has suffered at the hands of patriarchy, or even as a final sign that she has truly let herself go: she “seems to have abandoned all care for her well‑being” and thus displays “sexual recklessness.”26

I am interested in reconsidering pregnancy in Rhys as a fundamental and integral mode of being for her colonial characters. Pregnancy for Anna and Sasha is not simply a means to an end but an end in its own right, and a primary marker of the modality of traditional tenets of femininity—vulner‑ability, lack of rights, fragmentation of subjectivity, and social and cultural ostracization—the racial other experiences in the metropole. Pregnancy and childbirth in Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight function not only as the heroine’s physical embodiment of modernist form (to be dis‑cussed shortly), but as the primary example of the bodily displacement, lack of control, and hybridity that the colonized and/or racialized subject experi‑ences. In short, pregnancy and childbirth are the ultimate embodiment of the heroine’s fractured racial condition under the omnipresent imperial system.


The triple effect of pregnancy for the Rhysian racial other—cultural ostracization, linguistic impasse, and reduction to mere flesh—is perfectly illustrated in Rhys’s short story, “Learning to Be a Mother,” published in The Left Bank and Other Stories in 1927. In the story, which is essentially a birth‑giving narrative detailing a woman’s experience in an abject French birthing hospital, the nonnative first‑person narrator struggles with the physical and linguistic fissure that childbirth creates in her being. She describes her inability to remember foreign French words as “the giant halo of pain takes [her] up and squeezes [her] tighter, tighter, tighter.”27 The bodily pain, which is directly related to the amount of money a woman can or cannot pay, effaces any emotional connection with the narrator’s son, whom she admits she “did not like” because she “had been too much hurt.”28 Indeed, the amount of physical pain she experiences seems to erase the parturition itself, for the birth happens in fractures and gaps. The narrative stutters, then fractures, and then the baby appears. The disillusioned and exhausted new mother concludes: “What lies people tell about maternity! Sacred Motherhood! La Femme Sacrée!”29 Here the transition to motherhood is not an introduction to the safe space of “racially proper motherhood” but is instead yet another instance of traumatic fragmentation and decentering, one that reminds the unnamed narrator that she has no name, no place, and no country.30

Like many authors writing in the modernist period, then, Rhys employed gestation and parturition in a specifically modernist way, emphasizing the fracturing of the gestational process. For example, in traditional British modernism, the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti writes of robotic birth‑giving in Marfarka the Futurist (1910) as a process predicated on desperate artistic ingenuity, one that decenters and alienates the birth‑giver due to the inherent physical and mental demands of the process. And in Virginia Woolf ’s highly satiric Orlando (1928), the pregnancy and birth scene capitalizes on Orlando as hybrid male‑female outsider by echoing content with form: the brief, halting, interrupted nature of the birth scene is truncated, unstable, and messy, blurring boundaries between interior and exterior and transmuting the birth into a truly modernist (read: fractured) moment. And, indeed, the first forty years of the twentieth century, corre‑sponding roughly with the European modernist movement, pair perfectly with a discussion of pregnancy and childbirth. The historical time frame was bursting with new innovations in the monitoring, care, and cultural construction of pregnancy and with burgeoning rights for women—to give only two notable examples, maternity clothes arrived on the scene in 1910 and The National Insurance Act of 1911 provided maternity benefits


including a 30 shilling bonus paid directly to the mother.31 What is more, the traditional hallmarks of the Euro‑modernist movement—including ellipses, an inability to say what one means, highlighting the broken func‑tion of words, linguistic innovation, the lost individual, border crossings, displacement, and violent shifts in subjectivity—clearly correspond to conventional markers of the pregnant condition. Much like traditional definitions of European modernism, then, the physical state of pregnancy and childbirth in these modernist novels yield modernist results: a slippage of language, a loss of self that leads to displacement, a wandering or border crossing inside oneself, upheaval of the old to make way for the new. Es‑sentially, the modernist condition is, in many ways, the pregnant condition (and the displaced condition of the exile).32

Voyage in the Dark was chronologically Rhys’s first novel, composed from her exercise books and journals but published belatedly as her third novel. Voyage is the story of Anna Morgan, a young expatriate from Dominica who falls from chorus girl to kept woman to “amateur” or pseudo‑prosti‑tute, drifting from man to man after she is abandoned by her lover, Walter Jeffries.33 The original ending—Anna’s death from a botched abortion—was famously deemed too depressing by Rhys’s publisher; Rhys was therefore forced to amend her original ending to a vague reference to “starting all over again, all over again . . .”34 Corresponding to the primary mood and action of the novel, this second ending records Anna’s fate in hazy and inde‑terminate language, and critical consensus is divided over whether she re‑covers or whether she dies in the end.35 The significance of the ending seems to lie in the certainty that, either way, Anna will continue to experience a doomed repetition, “starting all over” towards continued racial and cultural displacement, split identity, and emotional and psychological bankruptcy.

One of the most prevalent aspects of the novel is the overt agency of the past. In an oft‑cited passage, Rhys writes in a personal letter that the “big idea” of the novel is:

Something to do with time being an illusion I think. I mean that the past exists—side by side with the present, not behind it; that what was—is.

I tried to do it by making the past (the West Indies) very vivid—the present dreamlike (down‑ward career of a girl)—starting of course piano and ending fortissimo.

Perhaps I was simply trying to describe a girl going potty.36

Anna’s memories of her childhood in the West Indies continually resurface and shred her narrative, which emerges in halting gasps and ellipses that showcase the unspoken while simultaneously foreshadowing the loss of


the self in her gestation and parturition experience. For this loss of self is the most notable marker of the pregnant condition for a social and racial outcast like Anna. In becoming pregnant outside of wedlock, Anna com‑pletes the cycle of ostracism that began when she was born. As a white colonial Creole who looks and sounds ethnically ambiguous, she is placed “outside of western European modernity” and codified as “radically other,” an individual who “cannot be fully interpellated and typed.”37 She is there‑fore “both the representative and the victim” of increased national anxiety prompted by war, falling birth rates, and the influx of “others.”38 Anna’s pregnant presence in London is a significant affront to the whitewashed racial and domestic order that bolsters the British Empire.39

It could be argued that physical reproduction is the most critical aspect of Voyage, for reproduction is nothing if not the agency of the past. Voyage is framed by two births: the first line of the novel, which compares moving to England to “almost like being born again,” and the end, the previously‑mentioned botched birth.40 The narrative is rooted in both metaphorical or spiritual and physical births, as both enact a violent upheaval in Anna that in many ways lends the only action to the narrative. The heroine is at the mercy of the permutations of her body as she is at the mercy of society’s judgment of her and of her non‑place as a Creole, shuttling between the ever‑present “now” of England and “then” of Dominica. Judith L. Raiskin explains this shuttling as a primary example of the othered condition: Rhys’s characters have the double burden of being misplaced, she claims, and of feeling “inauthentic” both “at home” and in England.41 They are forced to constantly “shift” back and forth within realities (here versus there), and because “[s]eeing one image necessarily excludes the other,” the character must expend an enormous amount of “mental energy to retain the existence of both simultaneously.”42

This shuttling is a prime example of Anna’s pregnant condition as well. As Julia Kristeva so famously argues in “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini,” the maternal body “is the place of a splitting” which manifests itself in diverse ways—moving between the exterior projection and the interior turmoil, or being hyperaware of one’s outside physical appearance versus one’s inside hidden reality.43 Anna is fixated on the existence of a fissure at the innermost level of her being. As Veronica Gregg explains, the Rhysian heroine is at once “split by the pressure of difference and exclusion based on binary oppositions: black and white; the West Indies and England; insider and outsider; sanity and insanity; resistance and conformity to the domi‑nant social codes.”44 In Voyage, such a split between exterior and interior is most exemplified in Anna’s always longing, always needing the right hat,


the right coat, the right shade of dyed hair to contradict her interior decay. “Why don’t you cut your hair? You ought; it would suit you. [. . .] And false eyelashes, my dear, sticking out yards—you should see them. They know what’s what, I tell you.”45 Passages such as this are obviously moments of Rhys’s dark humor and biting social commentary and critique, but they also remind the reader that appearances, no matter how contrived or well planned, always seem to fail Anna, who falls back on the consistency of her unstable bodily condition. No matter what, Rhys seems to be saying, Anna is her body; she is her racially ambiguous self, and no assertion of will or twist of fate can remove her from the path of the outcast that has been inscribed in her flesh and that manifests itself through the unmistakable physical reality of pregnancy.

As Anna realizes she is pregnant, she focuses on four things: the dead‑end of her embodied thoughts (or, an inability to think outside the “circle” of her body); the problem of money; the pressing need to get rid of the fetus and solve the dilemma of maternity out of wedlock; and the fear of birthing a monstrous child:

And all the time thinking round and round in a circle that it is there inside me, and about all the things I had taken so that if I had it, it would be a monster. The Abbé Sebastian’s Pills, primrose label, one guinea a box, daffodil lable [sic], two guineas, orange label, three guineas. No eyes, perhaps. . . . No arms, perhaps. . . . Pull yourself together.46

Anna’s fear of her monstrous fetus is rooted in what the fetus will be lack‑ing—vision, or the ability to navigate, and arms, or the ability to seize, grasp, and manipulate one’s surroundings. The resulting feeble, dependent, and deformed child will not fit in, will be marked as other, will live as an outcast, is not supposed to exist in the “natural” order of things at all—all symp‑toms of the monstrous. Nagihan Haliloglu argues that Anna’s perceived monstrosity of the fetus is linked to her bond “with England: incomplete, a monster.”47 Indeed, it is often theorized that the immigrant or racially‑other individual living in a society dominated by another race will fear the mon‑strosity of his or her offspring. As Urmila Seshagiri explains, Anna’s likely mixed‑race child will be racially “unassimilable” due to its highly “am‑biguous lineage”; it will inherit the Caribbean “crisis of filiation” of Anna’s family and the “detotalizing experience of metropolitan modernity” of the absent father.48 However, it is importantly Anna herself who has caused this perceived monstrosity in her fetus due to her repeated and failed abortion attempts. Her actions literally rend the fetus into “unassimilable” body parts (eye, arms) while she, in the midst of this fracturing, attempts to knit herself together. Her troubling bodily reality, existing in tandem with the troubling reality of the fetus, overtakes her mind. Her body exerts the ultimate agency.


Returning to the quoted passage above, Anna thinks “round and round in a circle” through her pregnant condition, her thoughts unable to escape the corporeal confinement of her body. In a way, her thoughts take on her fleshly permutations: they are bodily (confined to the body and focusing on bodily issues), leading to Anna’s sinking even further into the mire of her physical state. And even as Anna becomes more body, more somatic flesh, she enacts an abject Kristevian splitting, for the fetus inside her represents another set of rending boundaries and shattering borders, effecting yet an‑other instance of displacement and unhomeliness at the core of her being. Her pregnancy is a physical manifestation of the symbolic, a function of her colonial condition mapped in flesh and blood. While it removes her from her body through the process of abstraction, it simultaneously roots her in the space of the flesh, in what Nagihan Haliloglu deems the monstrous zombie or vampire: a staggering, corporeal body, all reeking flesh, wreaking havoc on the very building blocks of the empire—the family unit.49 Un‑able to link the space of the mind to that of the corporeal, Anna inhabits a space of disjunction, overcome by the overwhelming effects of pregnancy, her body generating “what is new, surprising, unpredictable” and reaching “beyond the[] domains of control.”50

Through pregnancy, then, Rhys illustrates the impossible agony of the co‑lonial situation as experienced by many modernist writers. Pregnant Anna experiences a deeper level of colonial displacement, the constant reenact‑ment of existing in no‑place, and always, her extreme physicality, her body marking her as other and in need of containment and control. The unstable status of her transgressive colonial body is consistently highlighted: she waits to feel ill again and again, like the never‑ending waves in her dream; she drinks when she should not, knowing it will lead to more sickness. Rhys illustrates the horror of the reproducing colonial by increasing Anna’s shame in becoming the manifestation of the suspicions of middle‑class English citizens like Vincent. As Vincent meets with Anna to discuss money for the abortion, “the look in his eyes was like a high, smooth, unclimbable wall,” and he repeats that he just “can’t understand” her fall into pseudo‑prostitution.51 Vincent seems to have his suspicions confirmed that she is that kind of girl. The presence of the “high, smooth, unclimbable wall” further enacts an insurmountable divide between colonized Anna and colo‑nizers like Vincent, further isolating her in her own body space, unable to escape or connect to others: “No communication possible.”52

In the final scene of the novel, Anna lies bleeding in her flat after suffering an illegal abortion. Her landlady, Mrs. Polo, frets to Anna’s friend, Laurie: “‘She told me it come on at two o’clock and it’s nearly eight now. . . . It ought


to be stopped.”53 This abortive scene of bleeding out which replaces any anticipated birth scene transforms the primary bodily condition for Anna into the torrents of blood she loses.54 Sue Thomas links this profuse bleed‑ing to Anna’s infecting and diseased status as an amateur, a “transmitter of corrupt and corrupting blood, which destabilizes boundaries between human and animal, the living and the dead, health and disease.”55 I read bleeding as a physical manifestation of Anna’s repeated daydreams of the sea—for example, as she sings a song she heard in a music hall, “And drift, drift / Legions away from despair,” she muses that rather than “legions,” the proper word must be “Oceans,” which leads her to the conclusion: “it’s the sea . . . [t]he Caribbean Sea.”56 This sea for Anna is a liminal space between home and England: a messy, uncontrollable, and seeping liquidity that un‑dermines the personhood of those within it due to its boundary effacement. To leak is to lose the boundaries of one’s Cartesian self, to transform into an “uncontrollable, seeping liquid; as formless flow; as viscosity, entrap‑ping, secreting; as lacking [. . .] self‑containment [. . .] a formlessness that engulfs all form, a disorder that threatens all order.”57 To leak is also to seep into another’s space: to leave your space and invade another’s in an abject crossing of boundaries that “disturbs identity, system, order” and “does not respect borders, positions, rules.”58 The uncontrollable bleeding signifies the appropriate place for Anna’s muddled bloodline as a non‑English indi‑vidual whose racial heritage is suspect: not tidily poured into another flesh and blood citizen of the empire, but emptied into the gutter, spilled on the floor. It is waste and refuse incarnate, symbolic of her larger bodily status. She, like her aborted fetus, has been and will continue to be thrown away by hegemonic British society.

The Impasse of Pregnancy

In Good Morning, Midnight, Rhys’s heroine Sasha similarly suffers from her corporeal condition as manifested both in her pregnancy and in her status as a colonial other, although her foray into reproduction culminates in a live birth rather than an abortion. The birth, however, proves ultimately unsuc‑cessful, as it yields a “pale” and “silent” infant whom Sasha is unable to nur‑ture or feed.59 Many critics have emphasized Sasha’s inability to accept the promises of the mother‑child dyad due to her deep‑seated maternal trau‑ma.60 What is also important, however, is the specifically linguistic space of Sasha’s gestation, a space that signifies her displaced status as a nonna‑tive speaker of the language (Sasha hails from a vaguely tropical “othered” country while the novel is set in Paris). Similar to Anna’s linguistic situation in Voyage, Sasha’s uncomfortable relationship with language is highlighted


throughout Good Morning—and indeed, language in Rhys is an expansive area of critical inquiry.61 The displaced other haunting the streets of the metropole is often at a linguistic loss, mired in a mental “impasse” that oc‑curs precisely because the other lacks the ability to say what he means, the ability to adequately employ the colonial language of the ruling classes.62

Language is deficient; it breaks down just when one needs it most. Language is thus a crucial marker of both the colonial condition and the pregnant condition in Good Morning. It gestures towards the inefficiency of the system for both modalities, forever displaying what one experiences but cannot translate into words. Language misdirects, describing the body in insufficient or even pernicious ways; language has a “disembodied quality” which “invites forgetting the body” and “stands apart from the body, yet has power over it.”63 Language is a barrier in pregnancy, for the pregnant subject is unable to adequately describe the experience that she is going through: “Motherhood undermines conventional discourse, threatens its collapse.”64 And, very similarly, the colonized or nonnative speaker is also disbarred from the linguistic system. She cannot access the body of cultural wealth that language enacts and symbolizes. She does not fully understand, cannot translate, or forever lives with the ghostly image of the other word, the other linguistic system hiding behind the new language she is forced to speak. Sasha repeatedly finds herself at the mercy of hegemonic male linguistic and rhetorical norms: it is due to Mr. Blank’s mispronunciation of “la caisse” that she loses her job, and she consistently cites confusion when trying to decipher masculine modes of communication. “I can’t make out whether his smile is malicious [. . .] or apologetic [. . .] or only professional,” she laments; and later, in response to René’s remark, “Elle n’est pas si bête que ça,” she admits, “Well, that might mean anything.”65

Sasha’s indeterminate status in relation to language is further highlighted when, during parturition, she is inducted by her midwife, or sage femme, into a solely feminine space for the first and last time in the novel, a space where a different linguistic code rules: “She speaks to me in a language that is no language. But I understand it.”66 The tension that has built in Sasha due to living under the harsh phallogocentric order of patriarchy dissi‑pates as communication occurs between women in a refreshing exchange that is not rife with unknowable (and therefore dangerous) meaning and, consequently, is not obsessively questioned by Sasha. Further proof of the stabilizing effect of the sage femme and her maternal language is found when Sasha, much later in the novel, again remembers the sage femme and how “when she looks at you the world stops rocking about. The clouds are clouds, trees are trees, people are people, and that’s that. Don’t mix them up again. No, I won’t.”67


The sage femme’s “old, old language of words that are not words” instinc‑tively understood by Sasha hints at the possibility of Sasha’s induction into the timeless annals of motherhood, a feminine promised land that serves to validate the woman’s role in giving birth, sanction the sacrifice of her pre‑gestational body, and empower her by granting her access to new depths of creativity and creation.68 Looking at Sasha’s pregnancy through such tradi‑tional lenses, one would expect to see the “resilience and activity of material body” that the pregnant belly signifies and construct a reading of pregnancy

as a new form of corporeality, fluid and cohering, where the gestating body expands, devel‑ops, encompasses and expels another entity without fragmentation or fracture; where subjec‑tivity is drawn in and changed by embodied experience; where processes of change enhance subjectivity rather than destroy it.69

Yet, for Sasha, such a rejuvenation of subjectivity through access to the maternal is never realized. The feminine community symbolized by the language of the midwife is only ever promised and never realized—“at every turn, maternal contact is subverted.”70 Sasha’s inner monologue of “What, then? This. Always? Yes, always” acts not only as a positive link to the an‑cient and primeval act of birthing but as a decidedly negative assertion that “[t]his,” the pain and confusion of the rending maternal body, has come and will now always be.71 Through the death of Sasha’s son, Rhys bars Sasha from achieving any empowerment through motherhood. Sasha’s transformative experience with the sage femme instead leads nowhere, another dead‑end passage foreshadowed by Sasha’s opening description of her room, “[w]hat they call an impasse,” and the “nightmare” she experiences when she is disbarred from Mr. Blank’s masculine community: “I walk up stairs, past doors, along passages—all different, all exactly alike. There is some‑thing very urgent I must do. But I don’t meet a soul and all the doors are shut.”72 The promised community of women and mothers eventually mani‑fests itself as nothing more than a hunch that Sasha has that other mothers “can’t [sleep] either. Worrying about the same thing.”73 Sasha remains iso‑lated and alone, only guessing at the experiences of “the others,” comparing “other babies” to hers in a nerve‑wracking cycle of suspicion and isolation.74

Sasha’s narrative in Good Morning, Midnight is, in the words of Elaine Savory, a story of one woman’s continual experience of “hopeless, suffer‑ing space,” a “construction of the world [] as hell.”75 As part of this “hell,” Sasha herself is zombified, acting as mere flesh, an “automaton” who stares in at windows full of “artificial limbs.”76 The zombie motif is a popular and recurring feature of traditional Caribbean literature and folk stories, linked to rumors of cannibals, sirens, and other highly unnatural and deviant enti‑ties that threatened the Cartesian and European conquerors with possible


contamination.77 Yet it is also a marker of complete loss of control and lack of agency, for as Nagihan Haliloglu explains, it is Sasha’s linguistic impasse that turns her into this “zombified colonial,” “possessed by forces beyond his/her control” and doomed to operate as only flesh, “unreflexively, engag‑ing little with the world outside and acting merely reactively.”78

Sasha’s parturient glimpse of an alternate maternal linguistic register, therefore, signifies that she is on the threshold of entering another system, switching codes and shifting body space into something more solid and more necessary to dominant white European society, more subdued and controllable, circulating in the right ways and in the right spaces (for ex‑ample, tucked away with her baby in a secure domestic space rather than wandering the streets alone). But the inability to fully access this system means that hers is not the space of achieved motherhood but the space of pregnancy, a space she continually returns to in the overt agency of the past. It is a grotesque space of uncomfortable, even painful, growth and change; a space of uncertainty; a space of an undermined and splitting subjectivity; the space of being a passive receptacle of an unknown entity rather than an active sculptor of young lives and thus the future.79 To be pregnant, to be living with the consequences of a past indiscretion, is to be forever at the mercy of the past. Sasha lives under the sign of the past, not the agency of the future.

Sasha’s impasse of pregnancy, her inability to move forward into the space of active motherhood, is also indicative of her position on the wrong side of the eugenics argument that was raging in the early years of the century. Re‑ports from the 1930s offer conflicting and ambivalent views of poor women and children, suggesting “that as well as saving mothers, the state might wish to prioritise [sic] those most fit to contribute to the nation’s ‘stock.’”80 This debate in turn spawned the idea of forced sterilization which was di‑rectly linked to the rise of Fascism, Hitler, and an emphasis on “efficiency,” which demanded “the selection of the most productive and the shedding of the ineffectual.”81 Far from celebrating the societal contribution of a new life that would positively interact with the dynamic modern state, Sasha can only feebly hint at the child inside of her as “the thing in myself.”82 Her pregnancy is relayed as a problem that must quickly and quietly be taken care of: “I never think of what it will be like to have this baby [. . .] As soon as it starts, I am to get into a taxi and go off to the sage femme. My room is booked—it’s all arranged.”83 The comparative ease of dealing with the problem of childbirth indicates the modern profusion of childbirth itself: “Well, come on Z, you’ve got to go and be born. Come on, hurry up, hurry up. . . . There’s one every minute. Or is it every second?”84 By switching the


lenses through which the reader views childbirth, alternating from Sasha’s solo narrative to the profusion of prams in the park, Rhys brings the reader full circle from a consideration of the singular experience of parturition to the larger cultural picture and potential problem: babies everywhere. Rhys also emphasizes the other mothers’ ability to access the stability of the het‑erosexual family unit, symbolized by the sturdy pram, while Sasha herself remains outside this unit, a eugenically suspect individual who will repro‑duce nothing but the problem of the colonial and of the other.

For Rhys, then, the colonial condition—that of outcast, wanderer, mis‑understood, ill‑treated, forgotten by the greater society, never at home—is an apt illustration of the pregnant condition. The breaks and shifts of the pregnant body echo the permutations of the colonized individual’s psychic landscape and the landscape of so many modernist texts that seek to dis‑rupt, fragment, and splinter. The modernist story of pregnancy that Rhys tells, in the end, is a story of submission to the demands of an outside world, a fleshly narrative of exhaustion and of succumbing to one’s physical state. There is no hope for these characters, doomed to repeat their mistakes and rewalk the same streets. These bodies are coded as characteristically feminine: helpless, needing protection, weak, birthing out of improper ma‑terial conditions and not out of any interior strength. Given “neither light nor warmth,” Rhys’s characters inhabit “the world of the Other, of lack, the world of the feminine.”85 For Rhys, pregnancy is an inherently feminine and colonized space of being locked in one’s own flesh, one’s movements and choices dictated by an outsider system beyond the comprehension or grasp of the female character. This portrait of modernity in tandem with the parturitative experience is all female, all outsider, and all colonial other—tantamount to nothing but suffering.

King University

NOTES

1 D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (New York: Signet Classic, 1995), 82.

2 Ibid., 83.

3 Ibid., 83, 288.

4 Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge U. Press, 1998), 2.


5 Note that while I am focusing on a colonial British writer here, I do see the larger trend of pregnancy and parturition equating a modernist and/or othered decentering in alternate Euro‑modernisms as well. See Mina Loy’s poem “Parturition” (1914); Charlotte Haldane’s Man’s World (1926); Olive Moore’s Spleen (1930) and Fugue (1932); Enid Bagnold’s Squire (1938); and Naomi Mitchison’s We Have Been Warned (1935) for notable examples of the trope.

6 Mary Lou Emery, Jean Rhys at “World’s End”: Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile (U. of Texas Press, 1990), 286.

7 Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: Sexuality and the Early Feminists (New York: The New York Press, 1995), 74.

8 Ibid., 74.

9 Laura Doyle, Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (Oxford U. Press, 1994), 65.

10 Peter Hulme, Remnants of Conquest: The Island Caribs and Their Visitors, 1877–1998 (Oxford U. Press, 2000).

11 Helen Sterk, Carla H. Hay, Alice Beck Kehoe, Krista Ratcliffe, and Leona VandeVusse, Who’s Having This Baby?: Perspectives on Birthing (Michigan State U. Press, 2002), 6; Jane Marcus, Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race (Rutgers U. Press, 2004), 27–28.

12 Sterk et al., Who’s Having This Baby?, 4.

13 Carol H. Poston, “Childbirth in Literature,” Feminist Studies 4.2 (June 1978): 28.

14 Christina Mazzoni, Maternal Impressions: Pregnancy and Childbirth in Literature and Theory (Cornell U. Press, 2002), 175.

15 Tess Cosslett, Women Writing Childbirth: Modern Discourses of Motherhood (Manchester U. Press, 1994); Marika Seigel, The Rhetoric of Pregnancy (U. of Chicago Press, 2014); Rosemary Betterton, Maternal Bodies in the Visual Arts (Manchester U. Press, 2014); Clare Hanson, “The Maternal Body,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge U. Press, 2015), 87–100. See also recent texts by Lisa Baraitser, Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (London and New York: Routledge, 2009); and Parley Ann Boswell, Pregnancy in Literature and Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2014). My thanks to Clare Hanson for her generous help with these sources.

16 For example, see Julia Kristeva, The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Co‑lumbia U. Press, 1997), who in “Stabat Mater” argues that motherhood remains “without a discourse” (332). Also see Michelle Boulous‑Walker, Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading Silence (New York: Routledge, 1998), I, who asserts mothers cannot adequately speak in the masculine philosophic tradition; Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1.4 (summer 1976): 875–93, who encour‑ages women to write the things about the body that only they can discern (875); and Robbie Pfeufer Kahn, Bearing Meaning: The Language of Birth (U. of Illinois Press, 1995), who posits that there is “no language of birth” and who coins the neologism “maialogical” to represent “a process of linguistic interaction built upon the maternal body” (118, 92).


For further reading, see Christina Mazzoni, Tess Cosslett, Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976); Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (U. of California Press, 1993); and Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (Cornell U. Press, 1985).

17 Mary Lou Emery, “The Poetics of Labor in Jean Rhys’s Global Modernism,” PQ 90 (2011): 167.

18 See Mary Wilson and Kerry L. Johnson, eds., Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Erica Johnson and Patricia Moran, eds., Jean Rhys: Twenty-First Century Approaches (Edinburgh U. Press, 2015).

19 For notable recent sources on trauma or failure in Rhys, see Anne Cunningham, “‘Get On or Get Out’: Failure and Negative Femininity in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark,” Modern Fiction Studies 59.2 (summer 2013): 373–394; Maren Linett, “‘New Words, New Everything’: Fragmentation and Trauma in Jean Rhys,” Twentieth-Century Literature 51.4 (winter 2005): 437–66; Anne B. Simpson, Territories of the Psyche: The Fiction of Jean Rhys (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); and Patricia Moran, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). For recent sources on (post)colonialism, see Carine M. Mardorossian, Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism (U. of Virginia Press, 2005); and Carol Dell’Amico, Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys (New York: Routledge, 2005). For Rhys as Caribbean writer and the centrality of her Creole identity, see Judith L. Raiskin, Snow on the Cane Fields: Women’s Writing and Creole Subjectivity (U. of Minnesota Press, 1996); and Nagihan Haliloglu, Narrating from the Margins: Self-Representation of Female and Colonial Subjectivities in Jean Rhys’s Novels (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011).

20 Abigail Palko, “Colonial Modernism’s Thwarted Maternity: Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris and Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark,” Textual Practice 27.1 (2013): 91.

21 Emery, Jean Rhys at “World’s End,” 80.

22 Ibid., 81.

23 Urmila Seshagiri, “Modernist Ashes, Postcolonial Phoenix: Jean Rhys and the Evolution of the English Novel in the Twentieth Century,” Modernism/Modernity 13.3 (2006): 498.

24 Haliloglu, Narrating from the Margins, 35.

25 Moran, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and the Aesthetics of Trauma, 108, 112.


27 Jean Rhys, “Learning to Be a Mother,” The Collected Short Stories (New York: Norton, 1987): 55.

28 Ibid., 57–58.

29 Ibid., 58.

30 Doyle, Bordering on the Body, 10. With the idea of women having “no country,” I am


referencing both Virginia Woolf ’s famous claim in Three Guineas that “as a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world,” and Sasha’s lament in Good Morning, Midnight: “I have no pride—no pride, no name, no face, no country. I don’t belong anywhere.” Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1938), 129; Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 44.

31 Clare Hanson, A Cultural History of Pregnancy: Pregnancy, Medicine and Culture, 1750–2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 99. For more details about the scientific, biological, and medical innovations in the modernist era, see Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body. For more information on the advances in women’s rights, see Jane Garrity’s Step-Daughters of England (Manchester U. Press, 2003). Garrity claims the legal reforms of the interwar period (including the right to divorce due to adultery and raising the age of consent from 12 to 16) furthered women’s rights but also reinforced motherhood as the only role available to women (56).

32 Susan Squier, Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology (Rutgers U. Press, 1994), explicitly links parturition, modern science, and modernism, arguing that both modernism and science “have been defined in and through the repres‑sion of the birthing woman’s body” (117). Both modernism and science are interesting in defining and unveiling the female body, Squier claims, and both are “grounded in male envy of female procreative power” (117). For the idea of modernism being directly linked to that of exile, see Terry Eagleton, Exiles and Émigrés: Studies in Modern Literature (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970), who claims modernism was largely an outsider’s club, a movement of exiles.

33 Sue Thomas, The Worlding of Jean Rhys (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 4, ex‑plains that “amateur” was never clearly defined but meant, in part, women who engaged in sex outside of wedlock in exchange for new clothes and evenings out. Panic about this figure swirled around the rise of venereal disease during WWI and the joint falling birth rate and crisis of motherhood in the 1920s (67). For more information, see chap. 4 in Thomas, “Telling of the ‘Amateur,’” and see Haliloglu, Narrating from the Margins.

34 Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (New York: Norton, 1982), 188; ellipses in original. For the complete original ending of Voyage, see Bonnie Kime Scott, ed., The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Indiana U. Press, 1990). For a wonderful analysis of the significance of the different versions of the ending, see Palko, “Colonial Modernism’s Thwarted Maternity.”

35 The critical conversation around this issue is vast, but for one example, see Nancy R. Har‑rison, Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text (U. of North Carolina Press, 1988), who argues that Anna dies through language and gives up trying to be heard and understood (107), versus Emery, Jean Rhys at “World’s End,” who claims that the ending is empower‑ing for Anna because she chooses an “indecent” return to the Caribbean and the space of the carnival (65–66).

36 Rhys, Letters, 24.

37 Amy Clukey, “No country really now”: Modernist Cosmopolitanisms and Jean Rhys’s Quartet,” Twentieth Century Literature 56.4 (winter 2010): 451.

38 Anna Snaith, “‘A Savage from the Cannibal Islands’: Jean Rhys and London,” Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 76–85, 79.


39 For more on the noxious presence of the colonial outsider in the white streets of London, see Jane Garrity, Step-Daughters of England. Garrity explains that white writers like Mina Loy and Naomi Mitchison associate Englishness with whiteness and experience English space as one of freedom and possibility, while colonial “outsiders” like Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys, and Jamaican writer Una Marson experience “confinement” and “claustro‑phobia” due to the homogeneity of the London streets (26). Garrity’s book is an excellent explanation of how the Englishwoman was crucially linked to whiteness at the turn of the century, and therefore the British nation held an unconscious belief in the supremacy of the English race (58–59). See also Anna Snaith, Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890–1945 (Cambridge U. Press, 2014), who explains that female bodies “and their social roles, were at the heart of expressions of anti‑colonialism, as well as central to anxiety about the maintenance of the health of the British Empire” (12).

40 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 7.

41 Raiskin, Snow on the Cane Fields, 147.

42 Ibid.

43 Kristeva, The Portable Kristeva, 304.

44 Veronica Marie Gregg, Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole (U. of North Carolina Press, 1995), 197.

45 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 117.

46 Ibid., 168 (ellipses in original).


48 Seshagiri, “Modernist Ashes,” 499.

49 Haliloglu explains that the zombie motif is popular in traditional Caribbean literature, and in Rhys, the zombie is “mere flesh without agency,” a “‘hollowing out’ […] achieved largely through colonial education as part of the colonial establishment” (56). Several other critics posit the behavior of the zombie as being indicative of the modern condition and/or the female condition. For example, consult Emery, Jean Rhys at “World’s End,” who sees the zombie behavior in Rhys’s After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie as symbolic of “the dissolution of female character” and of modernist experimentation (143). Raiskin, Snow on the Cane Fields, offers an extended reading of Rhys and the zombie motif, while Patricia Waugh, “The Woman Writer and the Continuities of Feminism,” in A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction, ed. James English (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2006), reads the zombie as a marker of the battle that patriarchy wages upon a woman’s body (196). For more on the zombie motif in Rhys, see Mardorossian, Reclaiming Difference; Derrilyn Morrison, “Reading the Zombi in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea,” MaComère: Journal of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars 6 (2004): 63–69; and Melanie Otto, “‘That Misty Zone Which Divides Life from Death’: The Concept of the Zombi in Jean Rhys’s Short Fiction,” in Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Mary Wilson and Kerry L. Johnson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 151–67.

50 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Indiana U. Press, 1994), xi.


51 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 172–73.

52 Ibid., 172.

53 Ibid., 183, 185 (ellipses in original).

54 For more on the function of abortion in modernism, see Christina Hauck, who illustrates how modernist poets “treat reproductive failure figuratively and thematically” (224). Christina Hauck, “Abortion and the Individual Talent,” ELH 70.1 (spring 2003): 223–66. For abortion as a trope outside of modernism, see Erin Soros, “Giving Death,” Differences 10.1 (1998): 1–29, who claims abortion “signifies a gender that gives death and a death that gives gender” (5), and argues that abortion is a “castration of the phallocentric order” (24).

55 Thomas, The Worlding of Jean Rhys, 69.

56 Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, 105 (ellipses in original).

57 Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 203.

58 Kristeva, The Portable Kristeva, 232.

59 Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (New York: Norton, 1986), 60.

60 For example, Anne B. Simpson, Territories of the Psyche, claims Good Morning, Midnight is filled with mother‑daughter dyads, but the mother opposes the daughter’s sexuality, while the daughter is abusive and cruel; the birth episode, therefore, “chiefly stresses how little a maternal figure will give to the vulnerable daughter” (104). Jessica Gildersleeve, “Muddy Death: Fate, Femininity, and Mourning in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight,” in Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women’s Writing, ed. Pauline Dodgeson‑Katiyo and Gina Wisker (Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 2010), 227–44, similarly argues that Sasha’s denial of her own mother leads to a denial of her own motherhood (241).

61 For more on language in Rhys, see specifically “White Female Colonial Idiom,” in chap. 6, “White Female Colonial Self‑Articulation,” in Haliloglu, Narrating from the Margins, 73–77. See also Delia Caparoso Konzett, Ethnic Modernisms: Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Dislocation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), and J. Dillon Brown, “Textual Entanglement: Jean Rhys’s Critical Discourse,” Modern Fiction Studies 56.3 (fall 2010): 568–91. Also see Harrison, Simpson, and Debo‑rah Kelly Kloepfer, The Unspeakable Mother: Forbidden Discourse in Jean Rhys and H.D. (Cornell U. Press, 1989).

62 Dell’Amico, Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys, 2; Chris GoGwilt, “The Interior: Benjaminian Arcades, Conradian Passages, and the ‘impasse’ of Jean Rhys,” in Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (London: Routledge, 2005), 68–69. For more on the “impasse” in Rhys, see Rachel Bowlby, Still Crazy after All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1992), especially chap. 2, “The Impasse: Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight.” Also see Ania Spyra, “Language and Belonging in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark,” in Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Mary Wilson and Kerry L. Johnson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 67–83.


63 Kahn, Bearing Meaning, 76.

64 Mazzoni, Maternal Impressions, 148.

65 Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 26–27, 52, 75.

66 Ibid., 58.

67 Ibid., 139.

68 Ibid., 58.

69 Jane Maree Maher, “Prone to Pregnancy: Orlando, Virginia Woolf and Sally Potter Rep‑resent the Gestating Body,” Journal of Medical Humanities 28 (January 2007): 29.

70 Deborah Kelly Kloepfer, “Voyage in the Dark: Jean Rhys’s Masquerade for the Mother,” Contemporary Literature 26.4 (winter 1985): 447.

71 Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 58.

72 Ibid., 9, 26.

73 Ibid., 59.

74 Ibid., 59–60.

75 Elaine Savory, Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature: Jean Rhys (Cam‑bridge U. Press, 1998), 126.

76 Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 10–11.

77 For more on the history of monstrosity in general and monstrosity in the Caribbean realm specifically, see Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle, eds., The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Surrey, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2013). See especially the chap. entitled “The Monstrous Caribbean” therein. For more on the zombie figure in Rhys scholarship, see note 49.


79 To distinguish so clearly between pregnant versus mothering space, I build upon Sara Ruddick, “Thinking Mothers / Conceiving Birth,” in Representations of Motherhood, ed. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan (Yale U. Press, 1994), 29–45. Ruddick claims that there is not enough “commonality” between “natal thinking” and “maternal thinking” to include them in a singular area of inquiry (40). However, keep in mind that this article by Ruddick was issued in response to charges of essentialism and ethnocentrism in her seminal text Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). Ruddick explains in “Thinking Mothers / Conceiving Birth” that she “unwittingly replicated misogynist divisions” between reason versus feeling and mind versus body when she left birth giving out of Maternal Thinking (38). She concludes that no matter your thoughts on natal or maternal thinking, both areas similarly promote a politics of hope and an aesthetics of peace (44).


80 Clare Hanson, “Save the Mothers? Representations of Pregnancy in the 1930s,” Literature and History 12.2 (November 2003): 54.

81 Ibid., 55, 59.

82 Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, 129.

83 Ibid., 137.

84 Ibid., 65 (ellipses in original).

85 Gildersleeve, “Muddy Death: Fate, Femininity, and Mourning in Jean Rhys’s Good Morn-ing, Midnight,” 232.

Birth-giving, the Body, and the Racialized Other in Jean Rhys

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