40 pages • 1 hour read
Jean RhysGood Morning, Midnight
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1939A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Rooms and Streets
Sasha’s world consists of a series of temporary rooms and fleeting streets that shield her from society and distract her from the overpowering emotions she avoids confronting. The novel begins and ends in the same room, while Part 3 follows Sasha from room to room as she journeys to Paris for the first time. The rooms Sasha inhabits come intact with a social system of staff and fellow boarders representative of the greater social system that Sasha attempts to escape. Many of her interactions with those around her occur in the rooms and streets that populate her life. Unable to act fully independently away from the watchful gaze of these social systems, Sasha suffers under her exaggerated paranoia. Her inability to feel completely safe in these temporary places of refuge reflects Sasha’s greater struggle to find relief. Sasha will continue to feel unsafe in and vulnerable to the world around her so long as she is unable to find a place or sense of identity all her own.
Mirrors
Mirrors offer the opportunity for reflection both in the physical sense and in the emotional. Physically, a mirror provides a perspective opposite of that seen by the human eye; it provides the ability to see one’s self through the world’s eyes. As a result of this varied perspective, emotionally, a mirror offers the opportunity to reconcile the individual perspective with that of the world. Typically, amid emotional turmoil, Sasha seeks refuge in various lavatories and obsessively observes her own reflection. She chronicles her past selves through each reflection and compares each new reflection to the reality of her current self. She refers to the accumulation of these reflections as ghosts and echoes that continue throughout time. Unmoored from a linear sense of time, Sasha relies on the repetitive nature of these reflections to ground her. She confronts, in each reflection, her struggle to maintain a sense of composure over her emotions. She parallels this obsessive self-reflection in her overthinking as she contemplates the impact of each act.
The Neighbor
Throughout Sasha’s life, men serve as belligerent forces of control and aggression. From the disapproval of her father to the lectures of Nicolas Delmar to the abandonment of Enno and the sexual aggression of René, Sasha struggles to break free from the powerful domination of male forces over her life. The male figure of her mocking neighbor haunts Sasha throughout the novel, as do the symbols of his existence, which include his blue or white nightshirt and his shoes placed carefully outside his door. Sasha avoids the neighbor’s leers and stares while openly and angrily complaining of his noxious presence in her life. He skulks on the landing outside of Sasha’s room, and she describes him as a ghostly figure. His signature white nightshirt appears in Sasha’s early dream of a male figure, seemingly her father, who violently cries “murder”; this connection and his presence in the final moments of the novel suggest a connection to death. Sasha also mistakes René’s presence outside her room with that of the neighbor as she grows increasingly paranoid of his ever-lurking presence; thus, through this connection and Sasha’s interpretations of his vulgar intentions, he forms a connection to the sexual aggression of René, who later attempts to rape Sasha. Ultimately, it is the neighbor who enters through Sasha’s open door at the end of the novel as a symbolic force of both death and sexual aggression.
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By Jean Rhys
