Good Morning, Midnight; Good Night, Modernism

Jean Rhys is one of the greatest novelists of alienation. Because much of her work has an obviously autobiographical base and because she was relatively obscure during her writing life, she has been treated out of her historical context as an individual and pathological voice, the voice of a female victim. The alienation of her characters has alienated some of her critics who wish to exclude themselves from the experiences about which she writes, although they applaud her artistic skill, particularly her purity of style.1 Her great theme, however, resists this exclusion. She does not treat alienation as an existential fact but as the specific historical result of social polarizations about sex, class, and morality. Her heroes are women alienated from others and themselves because they are female, poor, and sexually active. They are also misdefined by a language and literary heritage that belong primarily to propertied