Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, is a novel that follows the “movements and… memories of Sasha Jensen during a two-week stay in Paris, the city where she lived many years earlier” (Johnson p. 15). Central to Sasha Jensen’s revisiting of the city is her attempt to find a new sense of anonymity while unconsciously being bombarded by traumatic memories of her past. The nature of Sasha’s past memories is suggested to have been founded on “shame and humiliation,” memories Sasha does not want to relive. Johnson (p. 15) emphasises that due to “the most powerful effects of shame is precisely its preservation of experience and knowledge”, Sasha’s past memories come back to haunt when revisiting the Parisian metropolis. Historical context Raymond Williams once made the argument that “there are important connections to be made between the social and cultural developments in the modern city and those of narrative form in the modernist period” (Zimmerman p. 78). Changes that …show more content…
The uncanny within the novel is utilised as a tool to read the “architectural spaces of modernity,” spaces that are particularly “neither entirely private nor public”, in other words spaces that may appear as both ‘familiar’ as well as ‘unfamiliar’ (Zimmerman p. 75). Another element of the uncanny attributed to the modern space is merging of something that ought to have remained supressed. Freud defines the uncanny as essentially “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (Peel p. 410). With the uncanny operating “in the spaces of modernity,” the uncanny spaces are particularly spaces that “are inhabited by individuals who have nowhere else to belong” (Zimmerman p. 75-76). The dislocation of the marginal subject from both its psyche as well as from its ‘familiar’ environment contributes to the uncanniness attributed to modern spaces within the