Good Morning, Midnight: Narrative Representation of a Narrating Mind

Abstract

This thesis discusses the narrative representation of mind in Jean Rhys' Good Morning, Midnight (1939). The most important theoretical foundation is David Herman's re-formulation of "the inward turn" of modernism, where he discards the underlying Cartesian dualistic view of the human mind in favor of newer models with a monist perspective, derived in large part from the cognitive sciences as well as other "post-Cartesian" understandings of the mind; among others Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological view of perception and its reciprocal relationship with the world. These are frameworks that foreground the mind's interdependent relationship with its "social and material environment." Such a position questions Dorrit Cohn's postulation of written fiction's exceptional ability to make a mind or "I-originarity" accessible to a second person. The thesis further explores the consequences of such a shift by contrasting Sylvie Maurel's reading of the novel, which has a strong emphasis on intertextuality and narrative distance reliant on a Cartesian understanding of the mind, with Alan Palmer's intratextual approach that negates the premise of a homogenous mind. The thesis will also discuss the role of self-narration as something intrinsic to the construction and maintaining of an identity. Based around these three main points I give my own reading of Rhys' novel to suggest a possible impact of incorporating more current views of the mind in the analysis of fictional minds in first person present tense narration.