"Yes, it can be sad, the sun in the afternoon": Kristevan Depression in Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight

This essay applies Julia Kristeva's Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1987) to Jean Rhys's fourth novel, Good Morning, Midnight (1939). Kristeva maintains in Black Sun that the root of women's depression lies in their thwarted mourning for the lost maternal—their refusal to separate from the mother and enter into language and society. Most people separate from—Kristeva says "negate"—the mother and subsequently recover her in signs, in language. Depressives, however, "disavow the negation: they cancel it out, suspend it, and nostalgically fall back on the real object (the Thing) of their loss, which is just what they do not manage to lose, to which they remain painfully riveted" (Kristeva, BS 43). Denying the negation blocks normative language and social development. Black Sun, then, yields significant insights into the heroine of Rhys's novel, Sasha Jansen, whose seemingly aberrant behavior and nonsensical language may now be understood as symptoms of Kristevan depression.