La Vulnérabilité dans l’écriture de Jean Rhys : au-delà de la galerie de photographies

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show how Rhys’s narrative voice in Good Morning Midnight invites readers to question details about attitude, clothes, postures as potential signs of vulnerability, especially when they tend to shift or disappear. The multiplication of ephemeral, and often hidden, references to various works of art underlines the fragility of any form of construction. The novel reads as an incitation to share an omnipresent sense of insecurity, as an invitation to constantly recompose a distorted intellectual landscape which evokes the vulnerability of the times. Vulnerability then becomes a source of creativity, an object of fascination for the narrator who does not just present the vulnerability of the heroine but tries to analyse what causes it. The narration oscillates between political and moralist discourse in an attempt to transcend the feeling of fragility.