Good Morning, Midnight

The title of Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Good Morning, Midnight is taken from the 1939 Jean Rhys novel of the same name. Brooks-Dalton’s epigraph, “I heave myself out of the darkness slowly, painfully. And there I am, and there he is,” also comes from Rhys’s novel (Rhys, Jean. Good Morning, Midnight. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2020). Of this allusion and her inspiration, Brooks-Dalton says that the 1939 novel influenced her exploration of Human and Environmental Connection: “Rhys’s novel digs into isolation and connection in such important and artful ways, which are the bedrock of the story I wanted to tell also. […] I think it was the gut-wrenching way that Rhys writes about loneliness that really caught hold of me” (Brooks-Dalton, Lily. Interview with Sara Cutaia. “‘Good Morning, Midnight’ Imagines the World Gone Dark.” Chicago Review of Books, 17 Aug. 2016).

Rhys, a British novelist who spent her childhood in Dominica, is particularly known for her novels Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Wide Sargasso Sea (1996), the latter of which chronicles Rhys’s interpretation of the life of Bertha Mason (or Antoinette Cosway, in Rhys’s telling)—the “mad” wife of Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Like much of Rhys’s work, Wide Sargasso Sea represents the effects of patriarchal society on women. Good Morning, Midnight, Rhys’s last novel before a long break from writing, is a Modernist story about Sasha Jensen, a woman returning to Paris in the hopes of rebuilding her life. Despite her friend’s financial help and her attempts at rebuilding a routine, she falls back into depression and drinking as she recalls her failed marriage and the death of her infant son.

A major theme of Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight is the intermingling of past and present in personal experience. Like Augie and Sully, Rhys’s Sasha is haunted by her past. Leslie Jamison writes in her introduction to the 2020 edition that “part of the project of the book is to illuminate the ways consciousness lives in the past as much as it dwells in the current moment. It’s all continuous. It’s all present” (Rhys, Jean. Good Morning, Midnight. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2020). Sasha describes her hotel room as “saturated with the past [...] It’s all the rooms I’ve ever slept in, all the streets I’ve ever walked in,” and when she drinks, she regularly falls into reverie, recalling past experience and at times forgetting which timeline is her present (Rhys, Jean. Good Morning, Midnight. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2020). Brooks-Dalton’s epigraph itself concerns a moment in which Sasha returns to the present after her conversation with a gigolo reminds her of her fears and her past.

Brooks-Dalton similarly collapses the past and present to explore the effects of memory, loneliness, and regret on individuals. The plot of Good Morning, Midnight is primarily emotional, following the journeys of Augie and Sully from isolation to connection, and this conflict is driven primarily by memory and its impact on their present situations. Augie’s imagination conjures Iris and memories of his past to help him both face his shame regarding his choices and learn to care for someone other than himself. Sully grapples with memories of her supposed failure as a wife and mother—a direct echo of Rhys’s work—and her current reality as one of the best in her field and an astronaut on the first mission to Jupiter: “The long months of retrospection and grief, thoughts of people she’d left, people she’d lost, were too heavy for her to carry anymore” (201). Unlike Rhys’s Sasha, however, Brooks-Dalton’s main characters eventually create their own redemption, learning to accept and connect with others rather than succumbing to the darkness of memory and regret.