Yes, it can be sad, the sun in the afternoon: Kristevan Depression in Jean Rhyss Good Morning, Midnight

Kristin Czarnecki
Georgetown College

This essay applies Julia Kristevas Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1987) to Jean Rhyss fourth novel, Good Morning, Midnight (1939). Kristeva maintains in Black Sun that the root of womens depression lies in their thwarted mourning for the lost maternal their refusal to separate from the mother and enter into language and society. Most people separate from Kristeva says negate the mother and subsequently recover her in signs, in language. Depressives, however, disavow the negation: they cancel it out, suspend it, and nostalgically fall back on the real object (the Thing) of their loss, which is just what they do not manage to lose, to which they remain painfully riveted (Kristeva, BS 43). Denying the negation blocks normative language and social development. Black Sun, then, yields significant insights into the heroine of Rhyss novel, Sasha Jansen, whose seemingly aberrant behavior and nonsensical language may now be understood as symptoms of Kristevan depression. Keywords: Jean Rhys / Julia Kristeva / depression / semiotic / chora

he heroines of Jean Rhyss four modernist novels have fascinated and disturbed readers for decades. With their ruined families, rootlessness, (pseudo-) prostitution and deep unhappiness, these troubled and troubling women draw us into their lives even while at times we can hardly bear to read of them. Particular controversy surrounds Sasha Jansen of Good Morning, Midnight (1939), whose problematic language and actions render her perhaps the greatest conundrum among Rhyss women. Julia Kristevas Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1987) allows for a fuller understanding of Sasha, as Rhys and Kristeva highlight throughout their work the paradoxes of human behavior, the experiences of women trying and often failing to forge and articulate an identity. Exploring the manifold interconnections among language, womanhood and psyches under pressure, Kristeva provides fresh insights into Rhyss female avant-garde. In Black Sun, Kristeva maintains that the root of womens depression lies in thwarted mourning for the lost maternal, a clinging to the maternal and the semiotic chora, the space

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of the womb where identity and threats to identity do not yet exist. Refusing to relinquish the maternal prohibits full emergence into the symbolic into language, culture and society. Reading Good Morning, Midnight alongside Black Sun, we see Sashas silences and expressiveness, her self-destructiveness and moments of hope not as irrational vacillations but as symptoms of Kristevan depression. From its opening page, Good Morning, Midnight promises a heroine not unlike her predecessors in Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), and Voyage in the Dark (1934), although she differs from them in maintaining a running conversation with a knowing and satirical inner-self. Quite like old times, she imagines her hotel room saying to her as she confronts its dismal dcor, so like the rooms of her past. Above all, her inner voice warns her never to get her hopes up, never to expect anything better than her demoralizing life. But careful, careful! Dont get excited, says the voice upon her arrival in Paris, where she has come at a friends suggestion for a two-week reprieve from her desolate life in London. Sashas sojourn is meant to be a new beginning, a transformation carefully planned. And yet: You know what happens when you get excited and exalted, dont you? ... Yes ... And then, you know how you collapse like a pricked balloon, dont you? Having no staying power ... Yes, exactly, Sasha responds in a catechism repeated at intervals in the novel (GMM 351, original ellipses).1 She cries often, sleeps half the day, drinks to excess and hides when feeling threatened. Sasha suffers from depression, her condition brought on by her denial of the negation of maternal loss. In Black Sun, Kristeva explains that melancholia can stem from one thing or many things together, [a]n infinite number of misfortunes [that] weigh us down every day and awaken echoes of old traumas, to which I realize I have never been able to resign myself (Black Sun 45). With extreme poverty, an absconded husband and the death of her baby in her past, Sasha harbors her share of traumas and continually replays them in her mind. While most people eventually move beyond their suffering, the depressive does not because of the distinct origin of her melancholia: the impossible mourning for the maternal object (BS 9, original emphasis). According to Kristeva, the child must sever its bond with its mother, must effect a rupture from the maternal object, which will enable the childs entrance into language and society. Without negating the mother, without committing matricide, the child cannot emerge from the semiotic chora, the space inhabited by it and its mother largely but not wholly free of language.2 Entering into the symbolic, writes Kristeva, appears to depend upon going through mourning for an archaic and indispensable object (BS 40), the mother. Such mourning is crucial, for the child who once directed all drives toward its mother now perceives the mother as object, as separate, thereby initiating its own subjectivity. Feelings formerly directed to the mother may now be transferred on an imaginary or symbolic level (BS 40). In other words, we recover the lost mother in language, in signs, and those signs negate the loss of her. Negation is therefore positive, displaying an understanding that entering into language and society necessitates the loss of the mother and accepting the Law of the Father.

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Depressives, however, disavow the negation: they cancel it out, suspend it, and nostalgically fall back on the real object (the Thing) of their loss, which is just what they do not manage to lose, to which they remain painfully riveted (Kristeva, BS 43). Denying the negation blocks normative language and social development, as incomplete mourning burdens words with affects, echoes of the semiotic chora, rendering the words unrecognizable. Rather, signs become ambiguous, repetitive or simply alliterative, musical or sometimes nonsensical (BS 42). An overabundance of affect produce[s] new languages strange concatenations, idiolects, poetics, Kristeva explains. Until the weight of the primal Thing prevails, and all translatability become impossible. Melancholia results in asymbolia (BS 42), an absence of symbolic language holding the depressive woman in stasis. In addition, the depressive who denies the negation of maternal loss does not repress traumatic memories but keeps them at the surface of her consciousness a detrimental state of being since repression is psychologically healthy: negating something suppresses it, but suppressions find their way into consciousness through language. Therefore, says Kristeva, negativity [is] coextensive with the speaking beings psychic activity (BS 45). Without negativity and repression, that evocation, that representation of the repressed does not lead to the loss symbolic elaboration, for signs are unable to pick up the intrapsychic primary inscriptions of the loss and to dispose of it through that very elaboration (BS 46, original emphasis): symbolic language. Instead, signs become trapped; there is an information breakdown wherein loss cannot find release in signs but replays itself repeatedly, helplessly within the psyche (BS 46). Hindered matricidal drive leads to an inversion on the self; the maternal object having been introjected, the depressive or melancholic putting to death of the self is what follows, instead of matricide (BS 28). The depressive woman refuses matricide to avoid the tremendous guilt that would accompany it, but in her refusal, she harms herself. Instead of directing toward her mother the hatred and rage necessary to effect separation from her, she harbors the hatred within. This internalized hatred manifests as an implosive mood that walls itself and kills [her] secretly, very slowly, through permanent bitterness, bouts of sadness, of even lethal sleeping pills that [she] take[s] in smaller or greater quantities ... (Kristeva, BS 29). Bitter, immersed in her own sorrow and dependent upon the luminal and whiskey on her nightstand for sleep, Sasha Jansen exhibits characteristics of the depressed narcissist (BS 13). Because she cannot perceive the mother as an other, as separate from her, she mourns not an Object but the Thing, as Kristeva explains about the depressive (BS 13). Moreover, she mourns an imagined Thing because the mother-child semiotic relationship no longer exists. Knowingly disinherited of the Thing, the depressed person wanders in pursuit of continuously disappointing adventures and loves; or else retreats, disconsolate and aphasic, alone with the unnamed Thing. ... an imagined sun, bright and black at the same time (BS 13). Drifting into disappointment, backtracking into stasis such is Sashas path through life. Regardless of where she is, All rooms are the same to Sasha. A room is a place where you hide from the wolves outside and thats all any room is, she states

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(GMM 366). In Paris, she haunts cafs whose patrons she believes are scornful and suspicious of her and whose ubiquitous mirrors serve as cruel reminders of her age. Viewing each day as a relentless cycle of empty hours, Sasha transforms freedom into the terror of a loss of control or an unforeseen incursion from the outside, writes Rachel Bowlby. The plan [to effect a transformation] is a defence and it is all there is (41). While an unexpected inheritance and money from her friend somewhat ease her financial anxieties, they alienate Sasha further from her relatives, who wash their hands of her once and for all. Recalling one trip to London after five years away, Sasha senses once again her familys unconcealed disgust. We consider you as dead, they had said. Why didnt you make a hole in the water? Why didnt you drown yourself in the Seine? (GMM 368) If the status quo prevailed, depressed women would sink to the bottom of a river. Like Julia Martin in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Sasha has a short-lived marriage in her past, a highly disappointing adventure and love (BS 14), an old trauma she refreshes and replays in her mind. In her essay on Kristevan melancholia and Jane Austens Emma, Frances Restuccia addresses how the depressive womans ill-fated relationships stem from hindered matricide, saying, a woman abandoned by her mother, especially if that mother neglected or subjected her (making her subjectivity a function of her attachment to the mother), may be vulnerable to cathecting her libido onto an abusive erotic object choice: having encrypted her mother, the daughter thus plays out the usual matricide against herself (468). We do not know whether Sashas mother abandoned her; we do know her relatives in London despise her, indicating deep familial ruptures. As a bored and lonely young woman, then, Sasha entrusts herself to a man ill-equipped to relieve her grief. Her fragile identity crumbles altogether with the paternalistic Enno, a feckless husband whose lack of worldly success has made him all the more lordly in his assumptions about womens place (Hochstadt 5). Not love but hatred of her musty rooms in London prompts Sasha to elope. Once married, she finds herself living a lie that further pressures her and her husbands tenuous bond. He seemed very prosperous when I met him in London, she recalls the main reason she married him but now no money nix (GMM 413). Like Stephan Zelli, Maryas husband in Quartet, Enno acquires money on the sly in various European cities, forbidding Sasha to go out alone or even speak, telling her to shut up and ignoring her questions. Sasha torments herself by recalling her marital and sexual disgraces, such as the day Enno scorns her passive, lazy lovemaking and storms from their room, leaving her alone for three days without money, pregnant and hungry. Bearing money on his return but no explanation for it or his absence, Enno orders Sasha to peel an orange and feed him. Now is the time to say, Peel it yourself , Sasha thinks; now is the time to say Go to hell, now is the time to say I wont be treated like this. But much too strong the room, the street, the thing in myself, oh, much too strong ... I peel the orange, put it on a plate and give it to him (GMM 423). She does as she is told, she fails to speak out, as what Kristeva would identity as the Thing in herself hinders symbolic language and binds her more tightly to Enno.

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The despair binding depressives in its grip is an abyss of sorrow, Kristeva writes, a noncommunicable grief that at times, and often on a long-term basis, lays claims upon us to the extent of having us lose all interest in words, actions, and even life itself (BS 3). In addition, lifes lack of meaning is not tragic it appears obvious [. . .] glaring and inescapable to the depressive (BS 3). Sasha accepts without question the indignities and sorrows of her life. Only I would have landed here, she says of her room in Paris; only I would stay here ... (GMM 364). On another occasion, after being stood up, she says, Bon, bien, thats what you get for being exalted, my girl. But the protective armour is functioning all right I dont mind at all (GMM 406). Once, she says, when she wandered out for a walk in the interval between my afternoon sleep and my night sleep (GMM 397), a man approached her, took her to a bar and after many drinks steered her outside to take her somewhere to have sex. Sasha tells how she began to giggle, explaining to the man that she had not eaten in three weeks only a slight exaggeration. He reacts in horror. She giggles more loudly. When a taxi arrives, Without a word he gets into it, bangs the door and drives off, leaving me standing there on the pavement. And did I mind? Not at all, not all, Sasha says. If you think I minded, then youve never lived like that, plunged in a dream (GMM 399). Yet throughout Good Morning, Midnight, Sasha cries or tells of past crying jags alone in her room in the middle of the night, in her marriage, in caf lavatories and at her intermittent jobs. When two Russian migrs approach her in the streets of Paris, their first question is, Pourquoi tes-vous si triste? Why are you so sad? (GMM 371). Sadness is the fundamental mood of depression, Kristeva finds (BS 21). Sashas sadness is evident from the start in Good Morning, Midnight as she recounts one of her first nights in Paris, a catastrophe, for she had cried while having a drink in a bar, mortifying the woman at the table next to hers, who admonishes her never to reveal her feelings so nakedly. She cannot stop crying, however, and wonders why while standing in front of the lavatory mirror. She recalls her good fortune, having been [s]aved, rescued, fished-up, half-drowned, out of the deep, dark river, dry clothes, hair shampooed and set. Nobody would know I had ever been in it. Except, of course, that there always remains something. Yes, there always remains something (GMM 348): the affect, the behavior stemming from her thwarted maternal mourning. Unbelieving in language, writes Kristeva, the depressive persons are affectionate, wounded to be sure, but prisoners of affect. The affect is their thing (BS 14), resulting in the mental blankness of depression, a nothingness that is neither repression nor simply the mark of the affect but condenses into a black hole like invisible, crushing, cosmic antimatter the sensory, sexual, fantasy-provoking ill-being of abandonments and disappointments (BS 87, original emphasis). The description fits Sasha well. In times of stress, she says, you must make your mind vacant, neutral, then your face also becomes vacant, neutral you are invisible (GMM 353). She cannot remain neutral, of course, and can never be invisible, as is clear in her paranoia and experiences with men. Young and old, shabby and dapper,

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of various nationalities, men on the streets of Montparnasse take it for granted that Sasha can be bought or perhaps seeks to purchase one of them. Oh Lord, is that what I look like? she thinks, with her fur coat and stylish new hat, alone on the streets, unoccupied and unemployed (GMM 389). Yet she often goes along with such men, as our deep psychic drives lead us not only toward pleasure but also toward pain and destruction.3 Because the childs loss of the mother is the primary and greatest loss of all, heterosexual women do not seek or marry men who remind them of their fathers. Rather, they look for their mothers in their lovers and husbands, Kristeva maintains, revising the Freudian and Lacanian Oedipus complex into a maternal one. For the depressive woman, the dynamic differs slightly. Her favorite partner or her husband is a fulfilling although unfaithful mother, Kristeva writes. The desperate woman can then be dramatically, painfully, attached to her Don Juan (BS 84). Characters in Rhyss novels gravitate toward men who might serve as mothers or mother replacements for them men who generally mistreat and abandon women and fail to speak to them in any meaningful way. The mens infidelities in particular satisfy [the womens] own erotomania and provide [them] with an antidepressive, a feverish excitement beyond pain (BS 84). Such a construct provides insights into Sashas choices in men, which assuage psychic anguish and divert harmful self-directed feelings outward. The relationships are harmful and end miserably, however, and Sasha reverts again to her affect, her Thing. As Sasha and Ennos marriage falls apart, she slides into passivity and heavy drinking, repeating a pattern that has played out for years and will continue to do so for years to come. Scorned by her family in London long ago, she tells us, she had headed to a room off the Grays Inn Road ... I crept in and hid. The lid of the coffin shut down with a bang. Now I no longer wish to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful. [...] It was then that I had the bright idea of drinking myself to death (GMM 369). In lean times, she says, I got so that I could sleep fifteen hours out of the twenty-four (GMM 397). Expressing her worries to Enno and being told not to talk, she agrees with him and says to herself, You mustnt talk, you mustnt think, you must stop thinking. Of course, it is like that. You must let go of everything else, stop thinking (GMM 414). In Paris, she views the paintings of another Russian migr in his flat. Looking at the pictures, I go off into a vague dream, she says, in which she eats pat and drinks wine in a room containing only a bed and a looking glass (GMM 405) a space in which she gazes at herself and lies waiting for the door that will open, the thing that is bound to happen (GMM 405) the arrival, perhaps, of someone who will disturb her peace and unsettle her affect. There is little self-pity in Sashas tale, for she expects to be miserable and meets disappointment with resignation and even aplomb. Kristeva explains that the depressives absence of grief is not control, indifference, or hysterical repression of sadness and desire (BS 89). When one of her analysands attempted to piece together such states, she would speak of anesthetized wounds, numbed sorrow, or a blotting out that holds everything in check (BS 87). On many occasions, Sasha sleeps, drinks or otherwise anesthetizes herself, immobilized by perceived

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and actual threats to her wellbeing. Such is the psychomotor retardation of the depressive.4 A child with/in language can verbally respond to that which threatens her; she need not resort to withdrawal into inactivity or playing dead, Kristeva states (BS 36). With a solid implication in the symbolic and imaginary code (BS 34, original emphasis), she can protect or comfort herself through and in language. Children without language, however, find themselves back at the dead-end of a helplessness leading to inaction and death (BS 36). Depressives also experience language retardation. Their speech delivery is slow, silences are long and frequent, rhythms slacken, intonations become monotonous, and the very syntactic structures [...] are often characterized by nonrecoverable elisions (objects or verbs that are omitted and cannot be restored on the basis of the context) (BS 34). Sashas psychomotor retardation infuriates those around her, who construe such behavior as laziness, apathy or stupidity. God knows Im used to fools, says one of her male employers; but this complete imbecility ... This woman is the biggest fool Ive ever met in my life. She seems to be half-witted (GMM 359), he says, after she fails to complete a task and cannot explain why. Silence and passivity can also wield power, however. Patricia Laurence posits the silences and narrative gaps in modern womens writing as an active restructuring of language and literature, resulting in a theory of mind more revelatory of human nature than spoken dialogue (60). Gerry Smyth finds silence the most effective as well as the most widely disseminated form of resistance to institutionally organized power (54). In the same vein, Kristeva discerns the self-protective aspects of depression and melancholia, saying, the sadness that overwhelms us, the retardation that paralyzes us are also a shield sometimes the last one against madness (BS 42), which proves the case for Sasha in at least one instance during her marriage. Not content to degrade her on his own, Enno conspires with another woman to do so, returning to his flat with his friend Paulette one evening with a steak for the pregnant Sasha. When Sasha finishes eating, Paulette tells her it was horse-steak, gleefully anticipating her revulsion. Kristeva points out, however, that despair is not to be confused with revulsion, for the latter implies a deliberate turning away from something recognized as potentially attractive. A sense of lack and desire sparks our interest and draws us to an object we then deem repulsive.5 Because she senses no lack and desires nothing, Sasha feels no revulsion at having eaten horse; she expects only such grotesqueries. When she fails to become hysterical, when she simply says, Oh, was it? [...] their mouths, that were wide open to laugh, went small again (GMM 427). Devoid of emotion, her response staves off further insult and even garners Paulettes respect. After that I think Paulette knew I wasnt one of the comfortable ones and never had been, Sasha says, and hadnt had such a grand time as all that. Afterwards she liked me better (GMM 427). Along with the silent slowing down of the depressive exists concomitant, seemingly contradictory behavior, for while depressives lack full engagement with the symbolic, they appear normal at times and reasonably well-integrated into society. Kristeva locates depression precisely in a womans chronic and frequent alternations between melancholia and the so-called manic phase of exaltation

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(BS 9). Living an unbearable life save for those moments when I pull myself together and face up to the disaster (BS 4), the depressive appears to function with energy, humor and sophisticated language yet remains ready at any moment for a plunge into death (BS 4).6 Twice Sasha resolves to kill herself, once by drink and once, after a week of hunger, by the usual whiff of chloroform (GMM 397). Yet, she says, Next week, or next month, or next year Ill kill myself. But I might as well last out my months rent, which has been paid up, and my credit for breakfasts in the morning (GMM 397). Sasha pragmatically declines to commit suicide, and at times, she holds her own in conversations on art, culture and human emotions. She is surprised to find herself attracted to and intrigued by Ren, the young gigolo she meets in Paris, while remaining careful not to get her hopes up or play the fool. Even as a desperately unhappy young woman, even while married to Enno, she had held decent jobs, albeit short-lived. Kristeva explains the fluctuations of the depressive:
A rather unusual intelligence and secondary identification with paternal or symbolic agency [contribute] to [the depressives] stability. Consequently, the depressed are lucid observers, watching day and night over their misfortunes and discomforts, and such an inspective obsession leaves them perpetually dissociated from their affective life during the normal times between bouts of melancholia. (BS 54)

According to Black Sun, periods of stability signify depression, their closure brought on by the depressives retreat toward the imagined object of maternal loss. A principal cause of the depressives swift reversion to her affect is that the power of the events that create [ones] depression is often out of proportion to the disaster that suddenly overwhelms her (BS 4). Thus Sasha suffers paroxysms of agony over buying a hat, ordering a drink, or engaging in similarly unremarkable tasks. In one instance, she acknowledges her overreaction to an occurrence in a caf, when she sees two women enter, speak to the proprietor, turn to look at her, and exclaim, Et quest-ce quelle fout ici, maintenant? And what the devil is she doing here now? (GMM 374). Everyone stares disapprovingly at Sasha, or so she believes, until she pays her bill and leaves. Reflecting on the incident, she realizes, All that happened was this [...] why get in a state about it? (GMM 376) Yet she does get in a state, and the incident reminds her of another one years ago in London involving a sickly kitten. Disgusting, says the Englishwoman who owns the kitten. She ought to be put away, that cat (GMM 377). Why didnt you make a hole in the water? She ought to be put away phrases damning the unwanted, those who cannot ask for help. Sasha herself shoos the kitten away, unable to bear the sight of its misery. Dashing out of the room, it gets run over by a car, a merciful end, perhaps, yet ghastly as well. Sasha holds the traumatic memory near the surface of her mind, her ejection from the caf calling up the incident and evoking her guilt at mistreating a kindred troubled creature. Another incident points more fully to the depressives alternations between normalcy and fragmentation. My necessary Thing is also and absolutely my enemy, my foil, the delightful focus of my hatred, Kristeva writes (BS 15), highlighting

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the simultaneity and ambivalence key to Kristevan theory. Emerging from the cinema in Paris, Sasha remembers having once worked at a nearby store, calling up another scene of disgrace involving language breakdown. In the mid-twenties, she had worked for three weeks as a sales assistant in an upscale boutique, one of those dress-houses still with a certain prestige anyhow among the French, she says (GMM 353). She comes undone one day when the owner of the franchise, Mr. Blank, visits the shop and asks to speak with her along with her immediate supervisor, Mr. Salvatini. When Blank asks Sasha simple questions, she speaks idiotically (GMM 354), tongue-tied when faced with imperious male authority, especially as Blank had been led to believe that Sasha spoke German and French fluently. The situation devolves when Blank hands Sasha an envelope with instructions to deliver it to the kise (GMM 357). Kise? Sasha does not know the word, cannot fathom where he wants her to go. He is Blank, his language is a blank to her, and she lacks the wherewithal to ask him or Salvatini to explain.7 Her Kafkaesque journey through the shops basement, with myriad hallways leading to locked doors and unlocked doors leading nowhere, parallels her burrowing back toward despair, the Thing that provides no comfort but from which she cannot separate. The closer she comes to her Thing, the more words elude her. Kise kise. ... It doesnt mean a thing to me. Hes got me into such a state that I cant imagine what it can mean (GMM 358). Finally going back to his office to tell him she does not know where to go, she learns the word was caisse cashier, properly pronounced by Salvatini, yet Blank admits no mistake, does not acknowledge his poor French as the source of Sashas confusion. Just a hopeless, helpless little fool, arent you? he says. Jovial? Bantering? On the surface, yes, Sasha muses. Underneath? No, I dont think so. Well, arent you? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Oh, yes. I burst into tears. [...] I cry for a long time (GMM 359). As before, the repeated yesses of the depressive signify not assurance and resolution but emptiness. There is nothing more to fear because only a blank remains. If we heed Kristevas suggestions about how to grasp the language of the depressive, however, we see Sasha maintaining a particular inner language throughout the ordeal. When Blank first addresses her, she suspects he wants her to demonstrate her German:
All the little German I know flies out of my head. Jesus, help me! Ja, ja, nein, was kostet es, Wien ist eine sehr schne Stadt, Buda-Pest auch ist sehr schne, ist schn, mein Herr, ich habe meinen Blumen vergessen ... homo homini lupus (Ive got that one, anyway), aus meinen grossen Schmerzen homo hominid oh re mi fah soh la ti doh ... (GMM 357)

Read with symbolic language constructs in mind, Sashas words seem like gibberish, fragments out of a German primer and sounds run together in a meaningless strand.8 Elizabeth Abel considers Sashas language here a sign of schizophrenia, a panicked flight of verbal play in various languages (165). Similarly, Deborah Kelly Kloepfer deems Good Morning, Midnight Rhyss most schizophrenic [novel], associating Sashas understandable language with madness (83), yet she also finds

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more at stake in Sashas words and views her linguistic descent [as] neither random nor without referent (84).9 With Kristevan theory in mind, we may recognize Sashas language as reminiscent of sounds shared with the mother in the womb, the meaningful language of emotions and musicalities of the chora, that rapturous place of babbling interplay between mother and infant that excites a feeling of restored unity with the original self, as Emily Hinnov explains (176, 177, 182). In such a manner, Kloepfer finds, Rhys suggests that there are ways of soliciting maternal presence even in the face of maternal loss (70). For the depressive who has not acknowledged loss, manifestations of choran language are less euphoric but nevertheless help build a network between symbolic and semiotic processes. Claiming to forget her German, Sasha utters German phrases, and she crystallizes her association of threats to her wellbeing with wolves ready to pounce, noting such crystallization as an achievement. Since fully reverting to the semiotic is impossible, the language of the chora will come to light both as evidence of a persons struggle against the symbolic abdication that is germane to depression, and as a range of means likely to enrich interpretative discourse, Kristeva writes (BS 40). Acknowledging Sashas speech as meaningful language prompts a reevaluation of the symbolic, just as Rhyss narratives call for a reevaluation of social systems preying upon women and the poor. If we can interpret and discuss the depressives vocal inscriptions, giving meaning to affects that were kept secret, we are opening up a channel for [the affect] at the level of words and secondary processes of the symbolic (BS 57). If the depressive finds her own babbling recognized by another as language, she herself may come to view it as language and understand lack, and lack prompts desire, which leads to language. Coming to language, the depressive will negate maternal loss. The experience with Blank drives Sasha to tears, a long crying spell hidden away in a dressing room. Emerging, she must face his ridicule once again. Reflecting upon the episode, Sasha marshals language of another sort and (belatedly) directs a forceful speech at Blank stemming from a keen awareness of patriarchal power dynamics. We cant all be happy, we cant all be rich, we cant all be lucky and it would be so much less fun if we were. Isnt it so, Mr Blank? she says in her mind (GMM 360). Lets 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 havent got. And thats the right you hold most dearly, isnt it? (GMM 360) Sashas initial speech to Blank, with its half-articulations and rhythmic cadences, clears a space in which she finds a stronger voice that addresses him on a more equal footing, representative of semanalysis, Kristevas theory that language is a process, not a stable system, and that signification is always heterogeneous, made up of both semiotic material rejection and symbolic stability (Oliver 94). Sasha similarly finds herself in-process when leaving the caf where the women had turned to stare. I would give all thats left of my life to be able to put out my tongue and say: One word to you, as I pass that girls table, she thinks. As it is, I cant speak to her, I cant even look at her. I just walk out (GMM 375). Seconds later, though, she musters up a brutal indictment of the girl and anyone else who would malign her:

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One day, quite suddenly, when youre not expecting it, Ill take a hammer from the folds of my dark cloak and crack your little skull like an egg-shell. Crack it will go, the egg-shell; out they will stream, the blood, the brains. One day, one day. ... One day the fierce wolf that walks by my side will spring on you and rip your abominable guts out. One day, one day. ... Now, now, gently, quietly, quietly. (GMM 375)

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Moments earlier in the caf, she had compared two lovers feeding each other to birds, and as noted, she often casts her antagonists men, the monied as wolves. The images coalesce in her mental attack on the girl, whom she envisions dispatching with a weapon drawn from clothing she usually laments. Jane Gallops discussion of Kristeva illuminates Sashas movement in and out of silence and social critique. To avoid the paralysis of an infantile, oceanic passivity one must exercise, Gallop states. But to avoid the opposite paralysis of a rigid identity one must criticize. And the process cannot, must not stop. There must be a permanent alternation: never one without the other, she continues, quoting from Kristevas About Chinese Women (Daughters Seduction 121). As when recalling her experience with Blank, Sasha has powerful symbolic language at her disposal; although usually unwilling to speak aloud, she draws upon it for moments of psycholinguistic strength. Language assumes another unique dimension in Sashas life. For several months during her marriage, she gives English lessons to try to help ends meet. One of her students is a young Russian who already speaks English well but who is intent on perfecting his accent, for he plans to join his relatives in London and wants to speak properly. Would you tell me, please, if I have the th correctly? he asks. The, this, that, these, those all correct, Sasha reflects (GMM 42425). Explaining Kristevas theory of language and maternal loss, Kelly Oliver points out the importance of demonstratives in childrens language acquisition. Kristeva argues that childrens use of demonstratives, especially to designate places, is related to the mother, Oliver writes (36). For the child, every space is the place of the mother. [...] That and this refer to the mother (36). A childs early use of demonstratives points to a move from the space of semiotic and need to the space of Symbolic and desire (36). Learning a new language out of personal desire, the Russian must break with the old his mother tongue whose particular sounds have not prepared him for certain others. Sasha tutors the Russian while pregnant. On a winter afternoon, she lies in bed with snow falling outside. There is the reflection of snow in the room, she says. The light makes everything seem strange. The mound of my stomach is hidden under the bedclothes. So calm I feel, watching myself in the glass opposite. ... I am very well and very happy. I never think of what it will be like to have this baby (GMM 428). She and Enno are poor; he comes and goes as he pleases, sometimes providing for her, sometimes not. To contemplate the life awaiting her baby is painful, so she slides into the mental evasiveness of the depressive. Into this scene steps the Russian for what Sasha tells him will be the last lesson. Sasha lies in bed, pregnant, gaze locked on herself in the mirror unwilling to think, to separate, to

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break the gaze and recognize another. The Russian reads aloud from Oscar Wilde and practices his ths. Together, he and Sasha inhabit the semiotic chora, the womb, a warm space tinged with mellow shadows where particular sounds link them with each other. Yet the connection cannot last, its breaking apart imminent due to the impending birth of Sashas baby and the Russians contempt for Sasha. The corners of his mouth go down when he says femme. (Hatred or fear?) Les femmes he doesnt trust them, they are capable of anything, she thinks, after seeing his look of disgust upon finding her in bed (GMM 429). He reviles Sasha, the woman enabling and prohibiting his language acquisition, and so: The, this, that, these, and those are all correct, she repeats (GMM 429). Unfortunately, tutoring the Russian while pregnant is the closest Sasha comes to a cohesive maternal experience. Enno is nowhere to be found when she goes into labor, portending the demise of both marriage and child in a pitiable sequence of events. After a long and difficult labor, Sashas baby boy lies pale and silent for several weeks and then dies. In Black Sun, Kristeva proposes that a woman comes to know her own mother through giving birth. Oliver reiterates, A mothers love is her reunion with her own mother (65). In fact, Sasha remembers a woman in labor near her in the ward calling out for her mother. Mother-regulated drives in the semiotic chora manifest themselves after birth in the mothers giving or withholding of the breast, for instance. Such experiences enable a woman to achieve a greater understanding of her mother as separate, as her own person, paving the way for negating maternal loss. As Oliver explains, the childs relation to its mothers breast is already operating according to a logic of negation (4). But Sasha yields no breast milk; neither she nor her son experiences her regulating power. I cant feed this unfortunate baby, she says (GMM 380). Instead he subsists on formula. Language constitutes another failed mother-child connection for Sasha and her baby. Before it enters the symbolic and speaks the language of the Father, of society, the infant makes music as a direct release of drive, writes Oliver. It expels sounds in order to release tension, either pain or pleasure, in order to survive (35). Sashas baby makes no sound, which she finds deeply disturbing, telling her midwife, he hardly cries at all. Is it a bad sign, that he doesnt cry? (GMM 380) In fact, it is no sign at all. Sasha holds her newborn and dares to enjoy doing so, but feels uneasy, uneasy. ... Ought a baby to be as pretty as this, as pale as this, as silent as this? The other babies yell from morning to night. Uneasy ... (GMM 381). During the weeks her son is alive, Sashas deepest connection is with her midwife, who soothes her while she is in labor and speaks to her in a language that is no language. But I understand it. [...] Speaking her old, old language of words that are not words (GMM 37980) the distinctly female sounds of the semiotic chora. After her baby dies, Sasha gazes at him lying with a ticket tied round his wrist because he died in a hospital. And there I am looking down at him, without one line, without one wrinkle, without one crease (GMM 381), thanks to the midwife, who swathed her in tight bandages so that after a week, after she is unwrapped, there is no trace that she even gave birth. Waging a losing battle against the

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wrinkles in her face, Sasha would have welcomed the stretch marks of childbirth to remind her of an actual, visceral experience the lack of inscription on her body further erasing her brief contact with her son. Similarly, Julia Martin in After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie tells a man about a melancholy day she once spent pull[ing] out all the photographs I had, and letters and things. And my marriage-book and my passport. And the papers about my baby who died and was buried in Hamburg. But it had all gone, as if it had never been (ALMM 265). When trauma is gone as if it had never been, lack and loss have not been acknowledged and therefore cannot be negated and surpassed. Ruptured motherhood pulses throughout Jean Rhyss works. Anna Morgan of Voyage in the Dark loses her mother as a child and must later contend with a cold, spiteful stepmother and landladies who scrutinize and judge her. Julia Martins tortured relationship with her mother ends with her watching her mother sicken and slowly die. In Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Antoinette Cosway suffers recurring maternal loss in emotional abandonment, madness and death. While focusing on the childs loss of the mother, Rhys also explores women denied the experience of their own maternity. Anna Morgan has an abortion. Sasha and Julia have babies who live for just a few weeks. Clinging to an incomplete mourning for her mother, Sasha also suffers an incomplete mourning for her baby and her own lost maternity. With dried-up breasts and a silent child, she knows neither the physical, psychological nor linguistic pleasures of motherhood. Her infant does not communicate with her outside the womb and dies well before separating from her to achieve identity and language. Her own subjectivity becomes difficult to achieve, then, because it is never sensed and responded to as it should be by her child. Jane Gallop and Susan Rubin Suleiman call into question the emphasis in psychoanalytic feminist criticism on the childs matricide, on its loss of the mother, rather than on the mothers subjectivity or her need to be perceived as a subject. Gallop cites one example of the bias against maternal alterity in the horrified responses faced by a mother who deigns to reflect her own mood or the rigidity of her own defenses, rather than her childs (Reading 325).10 Indeed, writes Suleiman, the conflict between the mothers desire for self-realization a self-realization that has nothing to do with her being a mother and the childs need for her selflessness seems never to have entered the psychoanalysts mind (35556). Rhys demonstrates selfrealization as even more problematic for women whose infants die. In their article Confronting the Abject: Women and Dead Babies in Modern English Fiction, Sally Minogue and Andrew Palmer address abortion in four novels, including Rhyss Voyage in the Dark, citing abortion as one of several thentaboo topics taken up by modern writers to explore the range of human experience. Given the title of Minogue and Palmers article, I immediately thought of Julia Martin and Sasha Jansen and was surprised to read an essay not about infant death but about abortion, albeit a fascinating and important essay. With characters such as Rhyss, we ought to turn our attention not only to abortion as part of a womans experience, but also to the death of a child she carries to term, a baby who dies due to circumstances beyond her control. Kloepfer addresses the subject in The

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Unspeakable Mother, yet her sections on Rhys focus primarily on the daughters loss of the mother.11 In Black Sun, Kristeva describes a depressive woman with a baby over whom she obsessed and exerted total control, believing she was shelving her own needs in order to do so. For this reason, the depressive mothers selflessness is not without a modicum of paranoid smugness, Kristeva finds (BS 89), citing the mothers total ascendancy over her babys body (BS 90). She asks, How long can this last, this delightful, smug imprisonment by the sadness of being alone, the sorrow of not being due to the sacrifices she believes she makes for her child? With some women, it lasts until the child no longer needs her, has sufficiently grown up, leaves her (BS 91, original emphasis). What of a woman who has no control over her baby, whose baby is taken out of her arms to be fed by someone else? Kristeva would surely recognize Sashas experience as trauma reanimated due to thwarted maternal mourning, but her discussion of maternity in Black Sun does not consider motherhood cut off by infant death. Nevertheless, the discussion bears relevance to Sasha, for it suggests that childless women cannot love a point of controversy in Kristevan studies. As Oliver explains, the child may be the mothers first experience of an other. After all, in our culture, woman is the Other, and if there is no Other of the Other, then woman has no Other. Kristeva argues that this [having a baby] is a womans only access to the Other and, therefore, to love (67). Unable to separate from her mother, Sasha is also unable to love or fully mourn her baby. Enno leaves the room to avoid her grief, for instance, and eventually leaves for good. Having no one to whom she can articulate her feelings, she holds them within her psyche close to the surface, where they turn over helplessly. At times, however, Sasha longs to love and be loved, even while her depression ensures that it never happens. Her likeliest chance lies in Ren, who zeroes in on her because he thinks she has money. The two gradually warm toward each other, yet ultimately Sasha drives him away. Pinned beneath him in the novels penultimate scene, she vacillates between desire and fear until finally offering him money if he leaves her alone. Duly insulted, he goes; moments later she removes her clothing and lies in bed willing him to return. He does not, and she subsequently takes into her bed the traveling salesman or commis voyageur from the room next door, a man who has terrorized her with insults, leers and a physical confrontation since her arrival at the hotel. He doesnt say anything, Sasha says after hearing her door open and close, the enactment of her earlier vision of lying in a bed, waiting for the door to open, for the thing bound to happen. She can never be wholly free of the outside world, evident to her now in the commis standing over her. I look straight into his eyes, she says, and despise another poor devil of a human being for the last time. [...] Then I put my arms round him and pull him down on to the bed, saying: Yes yes yes ... (GMM 462) her last instance of dubious yessing. Critics are divided regarding Sashas actions, for while we laud modernist literary texts for their ambiguity and open-endedness, deemed representative of human and narrative complexity, the impulse persists to find closure. Many believe that by embracing the commis, Sasha finally allows herself a life-affirming expression of

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love toward another of societys misfits. Abel says she achieves a kind of psychic triumph, and her final Yes yes yes ... [is] both an ironic parody of Molly Blooms affirmation and a sign that she has achieved a portion of Mollys wholeness and simplicity (167). Sashas voice declares the power of the last word, says Judith Kegan Gardiner, and challenges a capitalist patriarchy disdainful of womens speech (249). Pearl Hochstadt feels that perhaps the hideousness she embraces is less important than her willingness to embrace, rendering the novel a gallant salute to the coming of darkness which nonetheless refuses to deny the joys of daylight (56). Kloepfer also compares Sasha to Molly Bloom and says, even if the encounter is disturbing, ... [Sasha] has not lost all reference; her language operates within the paradigm of the midwife and the mothers body (86, my ellipses). For Katharine Streip, It is as if critics want an upbeat ending here to confirm the old saw that all a depressed woman really needs to set her straight is sex (125). Conversely, Barbara Claire Freeman argues that accepting the commis is not a choice; rather it demonstrates the fictionality of the notion of choice. [...] To endorse such a view of individual choice is both to deny the extent to which the self is socially shaped and constrained and to ignore the extent of the misogyny Rhys so meticulously depicts (101). Bianca Tarozzi concurs and reminds us that Sasha calls the man the commis voyageur to try to lessen her anxiety over his presence, to place the nightmarish figure within safe bounds. Her conclusion is drawn solely from the careful attention he seems to pay to his worn-out shoes, neatly placed outside his room for polishing (3). She does not know who or what he is, only that he frightens her, peering out his door and hissing insults. Considering Jean Rhyss oeuvre, Kloepfer, for one, highlights the force of ambiguity and modernist literary technique. When the death in these novels is stripped of victimization and read instead as narrative strategy, Kloepfer writes, it becomes clear that Rhys is in control of these texts in a way that the women in the novels are not in control of their lives (78). Streip puts it more baldly, saying Rhys refuses to grant her readers the satisfaction of an explicit conclusion beyond [Sashas] three yesses. We are left with an unanswered question, an about-to-happen violation accompanied by relentless hints of finality (135). Before reading Good Morning, Midnight alongside Black Sun, I believed Sashas final act was one of utter nihilism. Kristevas work, however, illuminates the ambiguity, ambivalence and paradoxes of human identity, and so I turn to Jane Gallops perception of strength in her book, The Daughters Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Explaining her method of alternating the writers viewpoint and the narrative voice in her book, she states, strength is defined not in the polemic sense of ability to stand ones ground, but in the psychoanalytic sense of capacity for change, flexibility, ability to learn, to be touched and moved by contact with others (xi). She further explains her study of feminist theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis:
The repeated gesture of the book is to set up what appears to be an opposition between two thinkers or terms, and then to move beyond the belligerence of opposition to an exchange between the terms. The most stubborn opposition is the continual

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constitution of opposite sexes which blocks the possibility of a relation between them. [...] the goal and the method of this book is to alter that relation from unyielding opposition into a contact between their specific differences a contact that might yield some real change. (xi-xii)

I quote Gallop at length because her views resonate with the behavior of women depressives and particularly with Sashas final act, which brings oppositions into contact. Chapter Four in Black Sun, Beauty: The Depressives Other Realm, offers further insights into how oppositions might be drawn together to promote psychologically and linguistically healthy change. Kristeva notes that people relieve their depression in recognizing or creating art, for art seems to point to a few devices that bypass complacency and [...] secure for the artist and the connoisseur a sublimatory hold over the lost Thing (BS 97). Sasha enjoys fine clothes and delicacies. She purchases one of the Russians paintings. Above all, she considers dying several times but does not go through with it. In such instances, she strays from the lost maternal by finding worth in an artifice, an ideal, a beyond that my psyche produces in order to take up a position outside itself (BS 99). As we imbue beauty and art with meaning, they become representative of symbolic language; they become allegory, with its potential for ambiguity, and through the unsettled meaning it sets down beyond its aim to give a signified to silence and to mute things (BS 102). Thus allegory alleviates depression, endow[ing] the lost signifier with a signifying pleasure [...] by asserting itself as coextensive with the subjective experience of a named melancholia of melancholy jouissance (BS 102). For example, Venus becomes the allegory of Christian love, Kristeva says, drawing upon Western cultural paradigms to illustrate her theories (BS 102). The depressive recognizes in art what she cannot put into language, achieving a middle ground between the semiotic and the symbolic. A strange and fascinating experience of Sashas illustrates allegorys potential to relieve depression. At one point during her marriage, she tells Ren, she lived with a woman in Antibes for several weeks, working for her as a ghostwriter. Early each morning, the woman would come into Sashas room and awaken her. As with the Russian, Sasha assists the woman with language and words while in bed; language compels her awakening, her arousal from her psychomotor retardation. Are you awake, Mrs. Jansen, she would say. Ive just thought of a story. You can take it down in shorthand, cant you? (GMM 446). Sasha would then write down the womans ideas. This story, she would say, looking anxious, is an allegory, Sasha recalls. Could you make it a Persian garden? the woman would ask, trying to work out the details (GMM 446). What sounds like simple dictation is more complex, however, for one day the woman tells Sasha, Samuel didnt like the last story you wrote [...] What he actually said was that, considering the cost of these stories, he thinks it strange that you should write them in words of one syllable. He says it gets monotonous and has asked that Sasha use longer words from now on (GMM 446). Sasha, then, does not merely transcribe what is dictated; she writes stories in

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phrases of her own making. Listen again for a few moments to depressive speech, Kristeva says, repetitive, monotonous, or empty of meaning, inaudible even for the speaker before he or she sinks into mutism (BS 43). Worried about losing her job, Sasha sits before blank white paper trying to come up with an acceptable story for Samuel:
Monte Carlo, Monte Carlo, by the Med-it-er-rany-an sea-ee, Monte Carlo, Monte Carlo, where the boy of my heart waits for me-ee. ... Persian garden. Long words. Chiaroscuro? Translucent?. ... I bet hed like cataclysmal action and centrifugal flux, but the point is how can I get them into a Persian garden?. ... Well, I might. Stranger things have happened. ... A blank sheet of paper. ... Once upon a time, once upon a time there lived a lass who tended swine. ... Persian gardens. Satraps surely they were called satraps. ... Its so lovely outside, and music has started somewhere. ... Grinding it out, oh God, with all the long words possible. And the music outside playing Valencia. ... (GMM 447)

By a window facing the sea, Sasha faces a blank similar to the other Blank: male authority threatening to cut off her pay if she fails to speak properly. Trying to make the language within herself acceptable to the mainstream, she produces rhymes and notes the rhythms of nature and music instead. The next moment, she ponders the minds of the wealthy, which she has heard likened to watertight compartments, a metaphor she rejects. Their snobbery, sense of entitlement and condescension Its all washing about, like the bilge in the hold of a ship, she says, all washing around in the same hold no watertight compartments (GMM 447). Envisioning the psyches of her antagonists as a confusion of dirty fluid, she establishes her own metaphor, an image representative of narrative and symbolic language. Moreover, she implies that she does compartmentalize, or establish boundaries in her mind, and therefore bears the potential for psychic health.12 Improbably, Ren also knows the woman in Antibes and proves it by describing the layout of her house. When did all this happen, and what is his story? Sasha wonders. Did he stay in France for a time, get into trouble over here and then join the Legion? Is that the story? Well, anyway, whats it matter to me what his story is? I expect he has a different one every day (GMM 448). Although she fails to render her own story acceptable to others and is unable to grasp Rens fully, Sasha seeks to access the last refuge of the depressive. Sashas interlude in Antibes casts additional light on her embrace of the commis. Assessing the novels conclusion, Arnold Davidson believes Sasha transcends all her previous defeats at this point and also refutes the death of human values that she earlier proclaims in a dream (362): Venus is dead; Apollo is dead; even Jesus is dead (GMM 460). A dream she recounts previously serves as a counterpoint, however, one in which she finds herself lost in a subway while a bleeding man who says he is her father shouts murder several times. At first Sasha stares at him helplessly, silently, but when he cries out, she finds her own voice and screams aloud as well. The man in the dream wears a long white night-shirt, she says (GMM 350); the woman in Antibes enters her room in her dressing gown (GMM 446);

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and the commis wears a dressing gown whenever he skulks in the hallway and when he enters Sashas room. In each instance, a similarly dressed figure elicits Sashas powerful language when she would remain silent. Although only she hears her language, it enables her to stay alive and carry on. Sashas embrace of the commis is no epiphany akin to those in high modernist texts. It is death-like, manifest in the commiss pale shroud and her stiff limbs as she lies there as if I were dead (GMM 461). Yet she does not die (as if I were dead) but instead externalizes self-destructive impulses. Perhaps the vehicle for such externalization was the thing bound to happen, the thing she has awaited in her lowest moments to relieve her of her affect. One may question a life like Sashas, as Rhys questions Anna Morgans in Voyage in the Dark. When Anna hemorrhages at the novels end after a botched abortion, it is unclear whether she lives or dies. Rhys suggests the latter option may be best. This girl is an innocent, she writes in a letter of 1963. Really without guile or slyness. Why should she live and be done in over and over again? (Letters 237). In the novels original ending, Anna dies. Fearing such a depressing work would hurt sales, Rhyss husband and publisher convinced her to change the conclusion. (Perhaps these imperceptive male readers were the prototype for Samuel.) Under duress, Rhys made the suggested change, yet the revised ending could be considered more fatalistic.13 Similarly, we might lament Sashas survival if it means drawing closer to what she fears and despises, particularly without language, for neither she nor the commis speaks. Does she resort to her affect or recognize beauty in accepting him into her bed? In terms of Black Sun, she does both. Its ambiguity intact, and crucial, Good Morning, Midnight highlights the paradoxes of Kristevan depression, for as Sasha says, it can be sad, the sun in the afternoon, sad and frightening (GMM 433). Notes
1. Good Morning, Midnight and Black Sun contain numerous ellipses; when I use ellipses of my own in a quotation from either I enclose them in brackets. 2. Miglena Nikolchinas Matricide in Language: Writing Theory in Kristeva and Woolf addresses the necessity of matricide for the woman writer. 3. In Black Sun, Kristeva discusses and adapts Freudian theories of the death drive and the pleasure principle (BS 17). 4. Black Sun provides a detailed explanation of psychomotor retardation, including the learned helplessness of the depressive: when all escape routes are blocked, animals as well as men learn to withdraw rather than flee or fight. The retardation or inactivity, which one might call depressive, would thus constitute a learned defense reaction to a dead-end situation and unavoidable shocks (BS 34) aptly describing Sashas hiding herself away. 5. See Black Sun 3. 6. Twice Sasha says I pull myself together, once before heading off with a mother and daughter during her one-day stint as a tour guide, and once after vomiting in a lavatory early in her pregnancy (GMM 361, 417). 7. Kloepfer also explores the scene at length (8485).

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8. Sashas words resonate with those of a beggar woman encountered by several characters in Virginia Woolf s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). ee um fah um so / foo swee too eem oo, she sings, the voice of no age or sex, the voice an ancient spring spouting from the earth; which issued [. . .] from a tall quivering shape, like a funnel, like a rusty pump, like a wind-beaten tree for ever barren of leaves which lets the wind run up and down its branches singing ee um fah um so / foo swee too eem oo and rocks and creaks and moans in the eternal breeze (Woolf 8081). 9. Kloepfer illuminates Sashas language here, saying she: frames her nonsense within the polarized economy of Mr. Blank ... She then reproduces the geographical polarity of all of Rhyss novels, European capitals contrasted, elliptically, with her native land in a passage reminiscent of the scene in Voyage in the Dark where Anna Morgan tries unsuccessfully to recall the names of her island flowers. I have forgotten my flowers, Sasha says, like Anna because of an intense Schmerzen ache, grief. Then, out of this sorrow and loss appears a little song, associated through the layered meanings of kleinen with children childhood songs ... Sashas flight, then, passing back through the male frame of Latin-Rome, the church, Romulus and Remus, in homo homini lupus (man is a wolf to man) disintegrates into notes and scales, textually reenacting the itinerary of the semiotic, the return from discourse to song. (85) In addition, Sasha conceives of the world outside as wolves on many occasions, further solidifying the wolf reference in the scene with Blank. 10. See Gallop 325 for further details. 11. Annas abortion in Voyage in the Dark is certainly problematic, for poverty, isolation and emotional fragility drive her to this choice. Minogue and Palmer nevertheless view Annas abortion and her delirium throughout as a means of defiance and as Rhyss challenge [to] an official culture that attaches shame to unsanctioned motherhood and forces women to make desperate choices (105). 12. Kristeva addresses psychic boundaries at length in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980). 13. Carole Angier reprints both concluding paragraphs in her biography of Rhys. The last paragraph of the original ending had been: And the concertina music stopped it was so still and lovely and it stopped and there was the ray of light along the floor like the last thrust of remembering before everything is blotted out and blackness comes ... Instead Jean now wrote: When their voices stopped the ray of light came in again under the door like the last thrust of remembering before everything is blotted out. I lay and watched it and thought about starting all over again. And about being new and fresh. And about mornings, and misty days, when anything might happen. And about starting all over again, all over again ... Angier finds the second ending superior to the first. Had Anna died, she believes, Voyage in the Dark would have been a more clichd and sentimental novel (295).

Works Cited
Abel, Elizabeth. Women and Schizophrenia: The Fiction of Jean Rhys. Contemporary Literature 20.2 (1979): 15577. Angier, Carole. Jean Rhys: Life and Work. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1990. Athill, Diana, ed. Jean Rhys: The Complete Novels. New York: Norton, 1985. Bowlby, Rachel. Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing, and Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Davidson, Arnold E. The Dark is Light Enough: Affirmation from Despair in Jean Rhyss Good Morning, Midnight. Contemporary Literature 24.3 (1983): 34964.

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Freeman, Barbara Claire. The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Womens Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. Gallop, Jane. The Daughters Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982. . Reading the Mother Tongue: Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism. Critical Inquiry 13.2 (1987): 31429. Gardiner, Judith Kegan. Good Morning, Midnight: Good Night, Modernism. Boundary 2 10.1 (1982): 23351. Hinnov, Emily. Shufflings of Kristeva: The Choran Moment in Virginia Woolf. Woolf Studies Annual 8 (2002): 17598. Hochstadt, Pearl. From Vulnerability to Selfhood: The Pain-Filled Affirmation of Jean Rhys. Jean Rhys Review 2.1 (1987): 26. Kloepfer, Deborah Kelly. The Unspeakable Mother: Forbidden Discourse in Jean Rhys and H.D. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989. Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. 1987. New York: Columbia, 1992. . About Chinese Women. London: Marion Boyars, 1977. Laurence, Patricia. The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf and the English Tradition. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 1991. Minogue, Sally, and Andrew Palmer. Confronting the Abject: Women and Dead Babies in Modern English Fiction. Journal of Modern Literature 29.3 (2006): 10325. Nikolchina, Miglena. Matricide in Language: Writing Theory in Kristeva and Woolf. New York: Other Press, 2004. Oliver, Kelly. Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Rhys, Jean. After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. 1931. Athill. 235344. . Good Morning, Midnight. 1939. Athill. 345462. . The Letters of Jean Rhys. Eds. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly. New York: Viking, 1984. . Quartet. 1929. Athill. 117234. . Voyage in the Dark. 1934. Athill. 1116. . Wide Sargasso Sea. 1966. Athill. 463574. Restuccia, Frances. A Black Morning: Kristevan Melancholia in Jane Austens Emma. American Imago 51.4 (1994): 44769. Smyth, Gerry. The Politics of Hybridity: Some Problems With Crossing the Border. Comparing Postcolonial Literatures: Dislocations. Eds. Ashok Bery and Patricia Murray. New York: St. Martins Press, 2000. 4358. Streip, Katharine. Just a Cerebrale: Jean Rhys, Womens Humor, and Ressentiment. Representations 45 (1994): 11744. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Writing and Motherhood. The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation. Eds. Shirley Nelson Garner, Clair Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnethen. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 35277. Tarozzi, Bianca. The Turning Point: Themes in Good Morning, Midnight. Jean Rhys Review 3.2 (1989): 212. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. New York: Harvest, 1990.