IV—
Good morning, Midnight!
I'm coming home,
Day got tired of me—
How could I of him?
Sunshine was a sweet place,
I liked to stay—
But Morn didn't want me—now—
So good night, Day![45]
(Emily Dickinson)
Impasse. 1 A position from which there is no escape, a deadlock. 2 A road etc. without an outlet, a blind alley.
(O.E.D. )
Good Morning, Midnight (1938) raises many of the issues we have seen in Shelley and in Kant, but with one crucial difference, for the story is told from the point of view of the monster or sacrificial victim and not from that of the enhanced and reconstructed (male) self. The poem by Dickinson that gives the novel its title addresses one of Kant's central concerns, that of the mind's "super-sensible vocation," but in this case the protagonist is a woman whose destination is exile. Just as the poem's speaker longs for a masculine Day who no longer wants her and seems eager to return to Midnight as to her proper place, so the heroine's voyage ends in an impasse that culminates a long series of failures. Sasha Jansen is, as Mary Lou Emery has pointed out, an outsider to women's traditional domestic sphere and an intruder on masculine public territory; she lives on the edges of respectability, sanity, and dignity, and the "home" to which she returns does not offer a refuge from rejection but is rather the site of its repetition.[46] If in the Kantian sublime the mind turns inward and discovers itself afresh in an attitude of awe, the feminine protagonist's moments of self-reflexivity are marked by self-abuse and abjection, revealing that she has learned to do to herself what others have done to her and to find in auto-mutilation her sole creative enterprise.
The novel concerns a woman who, like Kant's imagination, is at an impasse. It takes place in late October 1937 and begins with a description
of the large, dark room at the top of a cheap Paris hotel in which the protagonist has been staying for five days:
There are two beds, a big one for madame and a smaller one on the opposite side for monsieur. The wash-basin is shut off by a curtain. It is a large room, the smell of cheap hotels is faint, almost imperceptible. The street outside is narrow, cobble-stoned, going sharply uphill and ending in a flight of steps. What they call an impasse. (9)
From the very first sentences Rhys foregrounds the issue of boundaries. Without any intervening building in between, the room expands into the street and, as the reader will shortly learn, the "flight of steps" that ends in an impasse is also within, for the steps both duplicate the staircase that leads to Sasha's room and dramatize her position inside of it. "Flight" is precisely what's impossible: she waits in a room at the top of the stairs that overlooks an impasse with nowhere to go. The impasse is both without and within, and what is at stake in the novel is the complexity of the difference between them.
The meaning of the impasse, particularly the fact of its social construction, is amplified by Rhys's treatment of the room as a surrogate for the protagonist herself. Sasha's continuing meditation upon and relation to rooms—what they are, do, and have not done for her—illustrates not only the extent to which her fate is already determined; when placed within the context of Rhys's literary inheritance it may be read both as an ironic commentary upon Virginia Woolf's somewhat idealistic view of the role of private property in ensuring feminine happiness and as a demonstration that the identity of authors as well as the fictional characters they construct may be produced by and inextricably bound up with a monstrous attack upon an imaginary or unknown other.
In the essay "Women and Fiction" and the brilliant A Room of One's Own , both written in 1929, Woolf emphasizes that economic independence is the condition for the development of autonomous female authorship. She concludes "Women and Fiction" by looking forward to "that golden, that perhaps fabulous, age when women will have what has so long been denied them—leisure, and money, and a room to themselves."[47] In A Room of One's Own , Woolf's narrator illustrates this point by describing the difference an aunt's legacy of five hundred pounds a year has made. The gift has not only changed her life: "Indeed my aunt's legacy
unveiled the sky to me"; it has brought about a shift in her attitude toward the male sex as well:
It is remarkable, remembering the bitterness of those days, what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about. No force in the world could take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house and clothing are mine for ever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me. So imperceptibly I found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race.[48]
Woolf quite rightly emphasizes the importance of economic factors in creating the very possibility of human happiness. But in Good Morning , Midnight a room of one's own does not quite provide the benefits Woolf believed would follow automatically, and Rhys implies that Woolf's views have been shaped by assumptions about class and privilege of which she herself was unaware. Like Woolf's narrator, Sasha is also preoccupied with "leisure, and money, and a room to oneself," but she lives in a world very different from that depicted by Woolf, one that opposes and undercuts the most cherished values of the upper-class milieu to which Woolf belonged. Although she too has inherited a small legacy from a distant aunt (£2 105 every Tuesday, the capital not to be touched), which allows her minimal financial security and a small room in London, far from empowering her, the room becomes the site of absolute withdrawal. Economic independence offers a place in which to bury herself: "Well, that was the end of me, the real end. Two-pound-ten every Tuesday and a room off the Gray's Inn Road. Saved, rescued and with my place to hide in—what more did I want? I crept in and hid. The lid of the coffin shut down with a bang" (42). Rather than unveil the sky, Sasha's room is the place in which she seeks refuge from it. She sets out to drink herself to death, and has almost accomplished it when Sidonie, an English acquaintance whose name contains the French word for gift (don ), "swooped down" (12) upon her, insists that she needs a change, lends her the money for a fortnight in Paris (where Sasha used to live), and promises to find her a hotel room when she visits Paris the following week.
Woolf assumes what Rhys does not: a protagonist who has remained unmarked despite oppressive social circumstances. But unlike Woolf's, Rhys's characters have been shaped by living in an environment in which they are outsiders by virtue of class as well as gender, and their experiences
of self-mutilation are, as Judith Kegan Gardiner points out, "the specific historical result of social polarizations about sex, class, and morality. Her heroes are women alienated from others and themselves because they are female, poor, and sexually active. They are also misdefined by a language and literary heritage that belongs principally to propertied men."[49] Sasha Jansen, the oldest of Rhys's heroines and her quintessential "lady in the dark," might be understood to typify Alice Walker's notion of the "suspended woman," women whose "life choices are so severely limited that they cannot move in any direction."[50] Sasha's history of friendlessness, poverty, and dispossession have made her too knowing to attempt to belong in a world she despises, but also too wounded to contest a society she cannot accept.
From her perspective there is indeed a certain truth "about this business of rooms" (38), but it contradicts Woolf's assumption that rooms are synonymous with creativity and self-containment. For Sasha, rooms are good for only one thing: they provide a place in which to hide.
All rooms are the same. All rooms have four walls, a door, a window or two, a bed, a chair and perhaps a bidet. A room is a place where you hide from the wolves and that's all any room is. (38)
The rooms' four walls are supposed to provide a barrier that will keep the oppressive wolves at bay and protect the person inside from what is without. But Good Morning, Midnight demonstrates that a room of one s own cannot be counted upon to perform even this modest goal because the wolves that appear to be only external are, like the impasse, also within. A fierce wolf lives inside Sasha's head and "walks by [her] side" (52), but before discussing the ways in which Sasha's very self-construction depends upon her relation to a persecutory other, let us note the extent of the interplay between wolves and rooms, for Sasha's wolf is perhaps also Rhys's Woolf
In Orlando (1928), written the year after A Room of One's Own , Woolf gives the name Sasha to a character who barks and behaves like a wolf Before becoming a woman, the young Elizabethan courtier Orlando falls in love with a visiting Russian princess whom he affectionately calls Sasha because "it was the name of a white Russian fox he had had as a boy—a creature soft as snow, but with teeth of steel, which bit him so savagely that his father had it killed."[51] But Sasha barks like a wolf, not a fox: "Seldom would she talk about her past life, but now she told him how,
in winter in Russia, she would listen to the wolves howling across the steppes, and thrice, to show him, she barked like a wolf"[52] Sasha also acts as wolves are said to act: she deserts Orlando the day they are to elope, and he never loves again.
Sasha perhaps names both Woolf's and Rhys's wolf-woman, but what is particularly intriguing is the persecutory relay-system her name appears to set off. For if Rhys's protagonist is attacked by wolves, so in her pointed recasting of some of Woolf's major themes does Rhys attack Woolf she is the influential literary predecessor in whose terms Rhys must define herself and from whom she must distinguish herself in order to establish a separate authorial identity. Just as Sasha's sense of self is constituted in part by internal persecution as she does to herself what society has done to her, so a persecuting and persecutory relationship with Woolf is perhaps one condition of Rhys's literary identity. In each case, self-definition is achieved through the scapegoating of a feminine figure. As Sasha ironically remarks, "Sacrifices are necessary . . . "(29).
Throughout the novel feminine misogyny is particularly manifested by Sasha's self-scapegoating. Rhys gives us access to Sasha' s consciousness by depicting the two opposed voices that are in constant dialogue within her. As in the Kantian sublime, identity is generated through a process of victimization. (Trying to remember a few phrases of German, Sasha repeatedly comes up with the Latin saying homo homini lupus [man is a wolf to man]) (24). Sasha's impasse reproduces that of the imagination's just before its collapse: for both the only possible movement is that of self-sacrifice. But while in Kant the imagination's surrender was a necessary stage on the way to the achievement of a higher unity, here the impasse produces a different version of identity, one that is generated by self-victimization. Rhys records an internal dialogue between agencies that are remarkably similar to that of the imagination and the reason: there is a wishful, imaginative Sasha whose "film-mind" (176) can still imagine the possibility of happiness, and the voice of reason, a well-socialized voice Sasha calls "the other" (184) that criticizes her relentlessly. The plot turns upon the conflict between the Sasha who is still capable of desire and the critical "other" who believes her very survival depends upon no longer wanting:
But careful, careful! Don't get excited. You know what happens when you get excited and exalted, don't you? . . . Yes . . . And then you know how you collapse like a pricked balloon, don't you? (15)[53]
Rhys continually emphasizes the extent to which the self is socially constructed. "The other" that mocks from within replicates the world that taunts and condemns from without: Sasha's wolf-woman, a composite of external voices, mirrors that of society. A hyperconventional, middle-class Englishwoman who always knows best, she calls Sasha "dear" or "dearie," and speaks most frequently from within the security of parentheses: "(Let it pass, dearie, let it pass. What's it matter?)" (78). She mocks the wishful Sasha who is still capable of desire; knowing that for Sasha to feel is to fail, she tries to keep her from feeling.
The visit to Paris poses a particularly intense threat, for here Sasha begins to remember what "the other" would prefer her to forget: the brief moments of happiness ("the street, blazing hot, and eating peaches. The long, lovely, blue days, that lasted for ever, that still are. . . . [132]), and the miserable failures. The reasonable voice of "the other" especially wants Sasha to stay away from the streets, cafes, and restaurants that might intensify her memones ("'I told you not to come in here,' scolds the voice, 'I told you not to'" [50]). And she is full of advice. According to her, "The thing is to have a programme, not to leave anything to chance—no gaps (15). But Sasha can't live according to the plan. She wanders into the wrong places, buys a hat, has hen hair colored ash blond ("At it again, dearie, at it again!" [61]), goes to the Dôme in her old fur coat, and meets a young man who mistakes her for a wealthy woman of a certain age. It is the imaginative Sasha who remakes herself by having her hair colored, spends three hours selecting a new hat, and searches for just the right lighting to apply her makeup; and it is this Sasha who must be sacrificed. "The other," sensing danger, tries to avert Sasha's impending involvement and certain humiliation:
Her voice in my head: 'Well, well, well, just think of that now. What an amazing ten days. Positively packed with thrills. The last performance of What's-Her-Name And Her Boys or It Was All Due To An Old Fur Coat. Positively the last performance. . . . Go on cry, allez-y. Encore. Tirez, as they say here. . . .'(184–85)
The voice despises Sasha. Like an excessively critical, punitive mother, she can't forgive Sasha for being a victim and punishes her with bitter self-hatred.
When at the end of the novel Sasha finally silences the voice ("I have another drink. Damned voice in my head, I'll stop you talking. I am walk-
ing up and down the room. She has gone. I am alone" [187]), we discover that her attacks have had a self-preservative function. Just as her speeches, enclosed by parentheses, were securely divided from the text proper, so her oppression helped define Sasha; like a room's four walls, her presence separated inside from outside. Her persecution was necessary because it created borders that enhanced, or allowed, the identity of the persecuted: imitating the wolves outside helped keep them away. And Sasha's self is constructed from these self-inflicted wounds, for once "the other" is gone, all the boundaries collapse. Another wolf enters the room, who, like Shelley's Monster, represents the fantasy of a male, or phallic, mother.
From the outset, a white-robed, ghostly figure who reminds Sasha of "the priest of some obscene half-understood religion" (34) has haunted both her dreams and the landing outside her door. The novel even begins with a dream about a wounded man in a white nightshirt who insists that he is her father. In the dream Sasha is trapped in a crowded passage in a London tube station. The sign announcing an invisible exhibition takes the place of a nonexistent exit. We are still inside the impasse, but the appearance of a little, bearded man who wears a long white nightshirt and insists that he is her father adds another dimension to it. "'I am your father,'" the man repeats, "'remember that I am your father"' (13). Blood streams from a wound on his forehead and he screams, "Murder." Helplessly she watches, too frightened to speak. Sasha finally wakes up to hear herself shouting, "Murder, murder, help, help" (13).
The white nightdress suggests that the dream has been occasioned by her sinister next-door neighbor, a man who hangs around the landing outside her room and habitually wears a long, white dressing gown that reminds Sasha of a priest's robes. She finds him frightening and repulsive. He is "thin as a skeleton," and has a "bird-like face and sunken, dark eyes with a peculiar expression, cringing, ingratiating, knowing" (14). Perhaps because he lurks about waiting for her, she is always running into him. Sasha names him "the ghost of the landing"; she imagines that he is a "commis voyageur" (14), a commercial traveler who is temporarily unemployed. But the fact that she dreams he is her father suggests that he is already familiar to her, and that his appearance next door is an externalization of something, or someone, who has been there all along, yet another embodiment of the wolf who "walks by her side."
One evening she returns to find him on the landing, this time wearing a flannel nightshirt that barely reaches his knees. When he sees Sasha he
grins, comes to the head of the stairs, and blocks her way. She walks past him and slams the door to her room, but that doesn't stop him: he believes that women living alone in cheap hotels want only one thing, and he intends to give it to her:
I have just finished dressing when there is a knock on the door. It's the commis, in his beautiful dressing-gown, immaculately white, with long, wide, hanging sleeves[. . . .] He stands there smiling his silly smile. I stare at him[. . . .]
At last I manage: 'Well, what is it? What do you want?'
'Nothing,' he says, 'nothing.'
'Oh, go away.'
He doesn't answer or move. He stands in the doorway, smiling. (Now then, you and I understand each other, don't we? Let's stop pretending.)
I put my hand on his chest, push him backwards and bang the door. It s quite easy. It's like pushing a paper man, a ghost, something that doesn't exist.
And there I am in this dim room with the bed for madame and the bed for monsieur and the narrow street outside (what they call an impasse), thinking of that white dressing-gown, like a priest's robes. Frightened as hell. A nightmare feeling. . . . (35)
This ghostly, even paternal figure provides the opportunity for Sasha's final self-sacrifice; in the book's concluding passage, when the female "other" has disappeared, Sasha welcomes the commis into her bed. He is her final destination, the "home" to which Dickinson's poem alludes. But if in Kant's sublime the imagination's failure is the key to reason's enhancement and provides the way out of its impasse, here what is staged is the ambiguity of its consent. For the novel's conclusion articulates both the complexity of Sasha's abjection and the power of her assent.
On the evening she visits the Dôme, a handsome young man approaches her. His name is René but, although never completely certain he is one, she calls him "the gigolo." Sasha intends to enjoy his mistake: she will lead him along, let him make his pitch, and then "be so devastatingly English that perhaps I should manage to hurt him a little in return for all the many times I've been hurt" (73). But there is something between them. Like her, he's foreign, homeless, down on his luck, and looking for comfort. He says he doesn't want money, just to "put my head on your breast and put my arms round you and tell you everything[. . . .] I could
die for that" (75). When she is with him she sometimes feels "natural and happy, just as if I were young (I've never been that young)" (155). She almost believes him. Briefly it seems that they might become lovers, but after a series of complex interactions she becomes increasingly mistrustful; after a second evening together Sasha says good night at the door of her hotel. He follows her and when they meet in the darkness outside her door, Sasha throws her arms around him: for a moment she believes that he does really want her. Unfortunately, the hoped-for love-making turns into a near rape. The gigolo accuses Sasha of "playing a comedy" (179). How did she know who was on the landing? Hasn't she just been pretending all along? If she was so sure he'd follow her that she'd kiss him without being able to see him, why didn't she say yes right away? René wants to be paid to have sex while maintaining the pretense that money has nothing to do with it, but pretends not to be a gigolo in a way that makes him impossible to believe.
Their argument escalates, and he tries to rape her. Sasha thwarts him by calmly pointing out that he can have the money without the bother of sex. "I'm just trying to save you a whole lot of trouble," she says." You can have the money right away, so it would be a waste of time, wouldn't it?" (183). She asks him to take a thousand francs from her dressing case, but begs him to leave the rest. "Yes, you're right," he says. "It would be a waste of time" (184). She watches him take some money before he leaves, but once he is gone, she weeps. The voice inside her head taunts her for crying and suggests that Sasha see how much, if any, money remains. When Sasha discovers that the gigolo has taken only 150 francs, she begins to cry again: "I appreciate this, sweet gigolo, from the depths of my heart." The other Sasha mocks her: "'Well! What a compliment! Who'd have thought it?'" "Not used" to such "courtesies," she toasts the "chic gigolo," the "sweet gigolo" (186), and falls into a stupor. Her subsequent dream recalls the previous nightmare and predicts the novel's conclusion: all the gods—Venus, Apollo, even Jesus—are dead, and in their place is a monstrous machine with "innumerable flexible arms, made of steel" (187). This monster has arms instead of hands; its image merges with the "damned voice" that echoes in her head, and the dream ends when Sasha silences "the other" once and for all. She wakes up alone longing for René's return and decides that visualizing his every step will bring him back: the sheer force of her imagination can make him return to her. She turns on the light, leaves the door ajar, undresses, gets into bed,
and tries to imagine every step of his return: "This is the effort, the enormous effort, under which the human brain cracks. But not before the thing is done, not before the mountain moves" (188). She tracks his every step until, certain that he has followed her directions, she sees him turn into the end of her street, come to the hotel, enter the lobby, and climb the stairs:
Now the door is moving, the door is opening wide. I put my arm over my eyes.
He comes in. He shuts the door after him.
I lie very still, with my arm over my eyes. As still as if I were dead. . . . (190)
It will come as no surprise that her imagination fails.
The door opens and a man comes in. She knows his identity without having to look. All that matters is his choice of apparel: is it the blue or the white dressing gown? The commis enters to find her lying naked on the bed. Sasha sees him looking down at her, "his mean eyes flickering":
He doesn't say anything. Thank God he doesn't say anything. I look straight into his eyes and despise another poor devil of a human being for the last time. For the last time. . . .
Then I put my arms round him and pull him down on to the bed, saying: 'Yes—yes—yes. . . .' (190)
The novel ends with Sasha's assent to the man she despises.
Many critics have remarked that Good Morning, Midnight concludes with a phrase that echoes Molly Bloom's last words in Ulysses , but unlike Molly's unambiguous affirmation of sexuality, it is not clear precisely to whom, or what, Sasha is saying "yes." Although critics have interpreted Rhys's reference in distinctly different fashions, those of Elizabeth Abel, Judith Kegan Gardiner, and Thomas F. Staley are representative. Whereas Gardiner argues that Rhys's ending refutes Joyce's stereotypic and polarized views of women, in which "a woman's voice signals both her creator's fantasy of total female responsiveness and his ironic use of a woman's voice to affirm the value of man's existence," and finds that "when Rhys ends her novel 'yes—yes—yes' she says no to Joyce's ideas of women," Staley and Abel hold the more prevalent view that Rhys reinforces and underscores Joyce's message.[54] Staley, for example, thinks that in each ending "feminine consciousness" achieves release "after a
crisis" and believes that Molly's and Sasha's "yeses" affirm "the possibility of union between men and women in which both natures are in harmony and love," while Abel agrees that Sasha's final "yes" is "a sign that she has achieved a portion of Molly's wholeness and simplicity."[55]
But even while critics disagree regarding Rhys's intentions as an interpreter of Joyce, they are in accord in their assessment of its conclusion, a concordance that is particularly surprising given that the end of the novel has produced more commentary than any other event in the Rhysian canon. Even while noting Sasha's humiliation in taking into her bed a man who has verbally and physically abused her, they are anxious to offer a redemptive reading of it. Elgin W. Mellown, for example, postulates that with her last words Sasha "overcomes the drift toward death that obsesses the earlier manifestations of the Rhys woman (and the earlier Sasha) by finding . . . compassion"[56] for Carole Angier, "in accepting the commis as her lover, Sasha accepts into herself, as equal to herself, what is mean and contemptible and mad" and is finally able "to admit her identity with even the most hopeless of the human race";[57] Elizabeth Abel refers to Sasha's "psychic triumph,"[58] while Arnold E. Davidson finds Sasha's act "transcendent."
She thereby judges her own previous judging to see that she and the commis are equally . . . 'another poor devil of a human being.' It is a simple enough recognition, but under the circumstances it is also transcendent. . . . Her immediately subsequent 'yes' . . . is 'yes' to a different kind of love, one that depends entirely on her. She will now define, for herself, what her love—or whatever it is—is.[59]
Judith Gardiner also concludes on a remarkably optimistic note. According to Gardiner, Sasha finally is able to "accept the burden of a full humanity possessed of the ironies of having been incarnated female in a patriarchal society. . . . She has returned from the 'wrong bed,' the position of monsieur, to her own more capacious bed, and there she regains the power of speech, the power of the last word."[60]
Her critics' unanimously positive interpretation is perhaps symptomatic of their wish to discover a way out of Sasha's impasse, for they transform an extremely complex moment of abjection into an expression of triumphant wholeness. Such a reading duplicates the structure of the Kantian sublime in which the imagination's scapegoating is the condition for reason s success and its sacrifice occasions resurrection or rebirth. Even
more important, it reinscribes the Kantian notion of transcendence Rhys calls into question.
Sasha's consent is neither an act of "supreme charity," nor a "relationship" into which she "actively enters," as Davidson and Abel would have it, but a final manifestation of her own desire, this time in erotic form.[61] In assenting to the commis Sasha relives the nightmare with which the novel began and enacts the wish it conceals: her "yes" is at once a consent to the priest, the skeleton, the ghost, the traveling salesman, wounded father, and steel-armed man, for the metaphor of the white dressing gown condenses all these associations. Sex with the commis is perhaps an incestuous ritual consummated with a priestly figure who reminds her of her father; but his feminine garments, tentacle-like arms, and appearance immediately after Sasha has finally silenced the voice of the maternal "other" also suggests that "he" is also a surrogate for the mother. (If this is indeed the case, Rhys succeeds in representing the act of maternal incest Shelley kept at bay.) Saying "yes" to the commis is, in any event, an assent to her own degradation at the hands of a man she detests: the mean-eyed "lover" despises her and uses sex to demonstrate it, and she, with full awareness of his feelings, welcomes them. It is as if she might reach the exhibition, the unattainable destination in her dream, only by becoming an exhibition herself. If, as Weiskel maintains, the sublime recapitulates the (male) Oedipus complex, perhaps the feminine sublime depicts its transformation.[62]
The novel's conclusion demonstrates the fictionality of the notion of choice that the majority of Rhys's critics would wish to maintain. For Sasha cannot, as Davidson would have it, simply "define, for herself what her love . . . is," nor is it the case that "the kind of love" to which she says yes "depends entirely on her(self)."[63] To endorse such a view of individual choice is both to deny the extent to which the self is socially shaped and constrained and to ignore the extent of the misogyny Rhys so meticulously depicts. Sasha is not free to decide, independently of society and its judgments, what sex with the commis will mean.[64] Her welcome does not change his assessment; from his perspective the woman lying naked on the bed is worse than a whore, and her consent alters neither his loathing nor her awareness of it. Like Kant's imagination, Sasha is free to choose only her own violation: just as the imagination has no choice but to will its own destruction, all she can do is sacrifice herself. The one act to which she can consent is her own rape, and the commis is the agent who enables it.
Understanding Sasha's "yes" as an enactment of the sublime told from the imagination's perspective nonetheless contributes to our understanding of oppression, for it makes explicit the strategies that bring about what looks like consent. Audre Lorde's perceptive analysis of internalized oppression as the technique par excellence to perpetuate sexism and racism fits both the issue of feminine misogyny and the problematic status of Sasha's consent. Lorde describes the internalization of patriarchy's values as the royal road to the continuation of oppression, so that, like Sasha, the victim becomes incapable of choosing anything else:
The way you get people to testify against themselves is not to have police tactics and oppressive techniques. What you do is build it in so people learn to distrust everything in themselves that has not been sanctioned.[65]
Because the victim's identification with the desires of the other is the operation that best maintains the status quo, Lorde emphasizes that "the true focus of revolutionary change" must never be only external:
never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressor's tactics, the oppressor's relationships.[66]
Such a view exposes the superficiality of Margaret Atwood's famous injunction: "This above all, to refuse to be a victim," for it shows that the victim is defined by the fact that she cannot refuse to be victimized.[67] As Lorde reminds us, effective resistance is possible only when we recall that, like Sasha's wolf, the oppressor is within as well as without and does not necessarily appear in masculine form.
If Good Morning, Midnight does not offer a way out of the impasse it presents a meticulous exploration of it, and in so doing suggests a version of the sublime that at last makes explicit the extremity of feminine misogyny, implicit within and securely contained by the Kantian formulation. Here we see the sublime as the wish for and affirmation of a moment of utter self-loss, but one in which feminine sacrifice does not ensure reason's aggrandizement. If the imagination can participate in and have access to the mind's supersensible vocation only by laying waste to itself, Sasha assents to a sacrifice that is at once sheer abjection—her bitter
recognition of the fact that "sacrifices are necessary"—and a defiant resistance to the forces that have determined it. That she becomes the agent and not merely the recipient of her own destruction is a perhaps dubious victory. But I would like to imagine her final "yes" as a moment of self-mutilation that wounds the self not only to nullify but perhaps also to sustain it, albeit in fragmented form. Unlike the Kantian version, this sublime calls into question the efficacy of the dividing line as such. For at the end of the novel self-shattering and self-constitution have become one and the same, and if Sasha finally embraces negativity itself, the condition is that feminine self-hatred has, for perhaps the last time, not been denied.
We might read Sasha's "Yes—yes—yes. . . ." as the subversive rather than compulsive repetition of a woman's assent to her own violation. Sasha does not see the entrance of the commis as the invasion of an external force that would demonstrate her own weakness. Rather, once she knows that it is he (and not René) who has entered her room, she scripts the event as a performance. The commis must wear the white dressing gown, perhaps so he can appear as priest-like and remind her of her father (and her mother); he must be silent, so that she can speak. If the costume were different, if he were to talk, there is no reason to suppose that Sasha would embrace him with her parody of Molly Bloom's "yes." But as it is she takes the opportunity to transform her room from a hiding place, one that she's just successfully defended against René, into a theater where she can perform, imitate, and therefore transform the narrative of female subjugation that haunts the entire novel. As Judith Butler has argued, we can see the resemblance between behavior by lesbians and gays that contests the norms of heterosexual conduct by demonstrating that the norm exists only insofar as it is performed and (compulsively) reiterated.[68] Sasha, too, transforms what might appear to be her fate in a certain novelistic genre into a performance; an affirmation of the exertion of her own agency that has the paradoxical effect of transforming the very event she performs/repeats, for she says "yes" to the possibility of taking her own pleasure in a scene with incestuous overtones. In the Kantian sublime the affirmative moment is reserved for masculine reason, which insists on its transcendent validity at the expense of the imagination; here Sasha performs and parodies that role, and in doing so she not only transgresses sexual norms
but subverts and displaces them. Her "yes" is indeed excessive with respect to the norms that have made her a marginal and outcast figure; but it is also excessive in respect to the excess acknowledged by the theory of the sublime and the narrative of female sacrifice with which it is complicit.