ABSTRACT
After the movements that seemed to be occurring in Virginia Woolf’s writing, Jean Rhys appears, during the same period between the wars, to be situating her women in social and psychical places that are oppressively constant and claustrophobic. In a phrase that occurs in Good Morning, Midnight at the confluence of personal nightmare and public urban directive, there is simply no ‘way out’ from something whose difficulty cannot even begin to be named. Rhys’s novels seem to give the lie, to mock as mere drawingroom fantasy, the bright hopes of new women’s stories, or even the bright hopes of stories of progress at all. Her heroines drift around the cities of Europe in states of melancholy from which they seem unable to escape. They revolve in a mental universe where nothing seems to change, all times are the same, and their social world, a repeated succession of failed jobs, failed love and failing feminine appearance, seems perfectly fitted to reflect or to have produced this psychic predicament.
