11 - The Enemy Within

Summary

What undermines Sasha's struggle to avoid the hostile gaze of others, her self-invention, her search for acceptance, even her mockery, is her own self-doubt. Like the Creole, she has internalized the condemnation and scorn of those around her. Rhys’ psychic patterning of those excluded and humiliated is something far more complex than the pathos of oppression. Hatred breeds hatred, brutality breeds brutality. If Delmar reflects Sasha in her attempts to shut out the world through withdrawal and apathy, and Serge her emotional vulnerability and moments of compassion and warmth, there are other drives within her. I talked earlier of the lure of the fantasy of the willing victim; it is a lure which all Rhys’ protagonists at times feel, the temptation to escape the fight against denigration by embracing and eroticizing abasement. Yet Sasha, in her relation with the gigolo, is in no sense a victim; indeed, she attempts to be a victimizer. She is conscious that René is another of her quasi alter egos – he trades on his sexuality as she has so often traded on hers – but for most of her relationship with him she plans to inflict on him the pain and humiliation that others have made her feel. Significantly, the passage in Good Morning, Midnight most often quoted to show the ‘Rhys woman's’ masochism suggests in its context more tangled, ambiguous motivations, for it occurs while Sasha is rejecting the gigolo's plea to go to bed with him, is trying, in fact, to be hard and ruthless, to avenge her own earlier suffering at the hands of men on him. A sudden fantasy sweeps across her mind like a scene remembered from a film:

I am in a whitewashed room. The sun is hot outside. A man is standing with his back to me, whistling that tune and cleaning his shoes. I am wearing a black dress, very short, and heel-less slippers. My legs are bare. I am watching for the expression on the man's face when he turns round. Now he ill-treats me, now he betrays me. He often brings home other women and I have to wait on them, and I don't like that. But as long as he is alive and near me I am not unhappy. If he were to die I should kill myself. (GMM 147)