With Sasha Jansen, Jean Rhys created in Good Morning, Midnight a female character who has no place in the world. Sasha walks the streets of Paris, commenting, reflecting, remembering. Her few coping mechanisms show how deeply alienated she already is from the world, even from herself. As a reader, this is fed little by little, in fragments, jumping between actual narrative, memories and internal monologues. As a woman, in late 1930s Paris, Sasha Jansen is far ahead of her time. In her book on Jean Rhys, Elaine Savory says of Sasha: "She lives in the 1930s, when women were supposed to gain social standing through marriage to a man (preferably of means), or, if they remained single, by maintaining respectability, even in difficult times." (p68) Sasha is lonely, her ex-husband left her at some point in the past, she lives in rented rooms, has very little money and is definitely going through a hard time because she is very aware of it and doesn't feel good about the own aging. Instead of "clinging to respectability", he drinks. Sometimes he cries in public. She takes men to her hotel room and has random sex. His drinking habits seem old, he seems to have been drinking for a long time, regularly. Drinking is one of his main coping mechanisms. Whenever he finds himself in an emotionally difficult situation, he craves a strong drink to calm down, to feel less of the pain that is his life. After starting to cry in the house of an artist friend, she says: 'I have an irresistible desire to take a long, strong drink to make me forget that once again I have given damned human beings the right to pity me and laugh of me. ' (p. 78)While living in London, he tried to drink himself to death and...... middle of paper......actually it wouldn't have been so bad to be happy, to be in a better place inside yourself or simply in a brighter and more beautiful room. But the end of the book is so surprisingly dark that it takes away all hope. She accepts the only man on her floor whom she detests and fears, she invites him to enter, into her bed, into her body: "So I hug him and pull him down onto the bed, saying: 'Yes - yes - yes...' (p .159) She finally reaches this place of indifference where nothing matters, where she doesn't care if she lives or dies, since the stranger in the dressing gown could easily kill her. Works Cited Rhys, Jean. 2000. Good morning, midnight. London: Penguin BooksSavory, Elaine. 2009. The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.AL Kennedy. 2000. Introduction. In: Rhys, Jean. 2000. Good morning, midnight. London: Penguin Books