Voyage in the Dark
First edition
|
|
| Author | Jean Rhys |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Constable Press |
|
Publication date
|
1934 |
| Media type | |
Voyage in the Dark was written in 1934 by Jean Rhys. It tells of the semi-tragic descent of its young protagonist Anna Morgan, who is moved from her Caribbean home to England by an uncaring stepmother, after the death of her father. Once she leaves school, and she is cut off financially by the stepmother, Hester, Anna tries to support herself as a chorus girl, then becomes involved with an older man named Walter who supports her financially. When he leaves her, she begins a downward spiral. Like William Faulkner's The Wild Palms, the novel features a botched illegal abortion. Rhys' original version of ''Voyage in the Dark ended with Anna dying from this abortion (see Bonnie Kime Scott's The Gender of Modernism for the original ending), but she revised it before publication to the more ambivalent and modernist ending in which Anna survives to return to her now-shattered life "all over again." The novel is rich in Caribbean folklore and tradition and post-colonial identity politics, including black self-identification by its white protagonist.
The title Rhys chose for her depiction of European modernity recalls another work of modernist literature, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (first serialized in 1899). Rhys's title turns Conrad's on its head: instead of a journey from England to the dark depths of savagery in colonial Africa, it is in England that Anna travels through darkness and despair, while the colonies created in the West Indies are depicted as places of light and innocence. London is represented as a monotonous, suffocating, and alien city, in contrast to Anna's bright, vibrant, and sensual home in Dominica.
Through the character of Anna, Voyage in the Dark presents the tension between wanting to be integrated into English society and simultaneously resisting it, a trait it shares with other works of modernist literature written by Anglophone authors such as the Maori writer Witi Ihimaera, whose characters express a desire to engage with and absorb the best of the colonial legacy, yet simultaneously seek to assert their own identity and to avoid becoming absorbed by the culture of the colonial power. Anna's alienation and subordination is caused not only by her heritage but also by her sex, and it is possible to read her mistreatment at the hands of men as a metaphor for rejection of traditional values.
Anna is represented as being caught between worlds: finding herself isolated socially and emotionally from those around her, she is unable to comfortably reconcile her West Indian and her British heritage. The novel employs modernist techniques to represent this, merging fragments of Anna's past with the action in England by means of a dreamlike stream of interior monologue, which destabilizes and ruptures the narrative, and emphasizes Anna's detachment from English society.
...
Wikipedia