Alienation and Fragmentation in Modernist Literature Essay example --

With Sasha Jansen, Jean Rhys created in Good Morning, Midnight a female character who does non encounter a get off in the world. Sasha walks the streets of Paris, commenting, reflecting, remembering. Her few grapple-mechanisms show how deeply she is already modify from the world, even from herself. As a reader you get this fed slit by bit, in fragments, jumping between the actual narration, memories and inner monologues.As a woman in Paris in the late thirties Sasha Jansen is far ahead of her time. In her book about Jean Rhys, Elaine blue says about Sasha She lives in the 1930s, when women were supposed to gain social standing through marriage to a man (preferably of means), or, if they remained single, to hold onto respectability even in hard times. (p68) Sasha is on her own, her former husband left her at many point in the past, she lives in rented rooms, has very little m whizzy and is unimpeachably having a hard time as she is very aware of and does not feel well with h er own ageing. Instead of holding on to respectability she drinks. Sometimes she cries in public. She takes men back to her hotel room and has random sex. Her drinking habits seem to be old, it seems that she has been drinking for a long time, regularly. Drinking is one of her main coping mechanisms. Every time she finds herself in an emotionally challenging situation, she longs for a vigorous drink to soothe herself, to feel less of the pain that is her life. After she started strident in the house of an artist-fri destination she says I have an irresistible longing for a long, tough drink to make me forget that once again I have given damnable human beings the right to pity me and laugh at me. (p. 78)While she lived in capital of the United Kingdom, she tried to drink herself to death an... ...ally it wouldnt be in like manner bad to be happy, to be in a better egress within herself or just in a lighter, nicer room. But the end of the book is so shockingly bleak that it take s away all hope. She agrees to the one man on her floor she loathes and fears, she invites him in, into her bed, into her body Then I put my weaponry around him and pull him down on the bed, saying Yes yes yes (p. 159) She finally reaches this place of indifference where nothing matters, where she does not care if she lives or dies, as the curious in the dressing-gown could just easily kill her. Works CitedRhys, Jean. 2000. Good Morning, Midnight. London Penguin BooksSavory, Elaine. 2009. The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys. Cambridge Cambridge University Press.A. L. Kennedy. 2000. Introduction. In Rhys, Jean. 2000. Good Morning, Midnight. London Penguin Books