VOYAGE IN THE DARK
by JEAN RHYS
Jean Rhys
THE RECAP
The power of Voyage in the Dark lies in its perfect fusion of style and alienation. Through Anna Morgan's descent from chorus girl to kept woman to something worse, Jean Rhys creates a modernist masterpiece that feels shockingly contemporary. The novel presents itself as a young woman's coming-of-age story, but beneath this surface runs a savage critique of colonialism, patriarchy, and the commodification of female desire. Published in 1934 but set in 1914, the novel captures both the end of the Edwardian era and the birth of modern feminine consciousness.
The Architecture of Alienation
"It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known," Anna thinks as she moves through London's cold streets. Rhys constructs her protagonist's alienation through precise sensory detail. The "gritty" London light that makes everything look "shabby and ugly," the perpetual chill that seems to radiate from the walls themselves, the "dark passages" of boarding houses that smell of "beef and cabbage and soap"—these details create a visceral map of displacement. For Anna, who grew up in the warmth and color of the Caribbean, England represents both literal and metaphorical coldness.
The novel's spaces grow increasingly constrained as Anna's options narrow. From the relative freedom of touring with the chorus to the claustrophobic furnished rooms she inhabits as a kept woman, her world contracts both physically and socially. Rhys pays careful attention to interiors: the "dark red wallpaper" of one room, the "cracked mirror" of another, each detail reflecting Anna's diminishing circumstances.
Style as Survival
Rhys's modernist technique serves her theme perfectly. The novel's fragmented narrative style—with its sudden shifts between present and past, its interpolation of memories and dreams—mirrors Anna's dislocated consciousness. When memories of her Caribbean childhood interrupt the London narrative, they appear not as nostalgic reveries but as wounds in the text: "And watching the shadows of the leaves... I dreamed about England."
The prose maintains a kind of defensive flatness that suggests both emotional numbness and survival strategy. Anna observes her own experiences with detachment: "After a while I got up and dressed and went out." This affectless style, influenced by Rhys's reading of French modernists like Colette, creates devastating emotional effects through understatement. When Anna finally breaks down, the rupture in tone feels earned: "Everything was dark and cold and shutting-up time."
Economies of Desire
Money appears with almost obsessive precision throughout the novel. Anna notes every payment, every gift, every calculation of what she can afford. The "five one-pound notes" Walter gives her initially seem like liberation but mark the beginning of her commodification. Later, she'll receive two pounds from another man, then one pound, marking her declining value in the sexual marketplace.
Rhys links this economic precision to colonial exploitation. Anna's family fortune, built on slave labor in the Caribbean, has disappeared, leaving her to navigate a different kind of bondage in London. The novel draws explicit parallels between different forms of commodification: the colonial exploitation of the Caribbean, the sexual exploitation of young women, the way capitalism reduces everything to transaction.
Colonial Afterlives
The novel's treatment of colonialism feels startlingly contemporary. Through Anna's memories of her Caribbean childhood, Rhys explores how colonial power structures shape individual consciousness. The black servants who raised Anna appear in her memories as more real than the white Londoners who surround her, yet she can't fully acknowledge their humanity without confronting her own family's role in their oppression.
Rhys uses temperature as a metaphor for colonial relations. The "cold" of England represents not just climate but an entire system of social relations based on repression and exploitation. Anna's "hot" Caribbean background marks her as other in English society, yet her whiteness and colonial privilege complicate any simple victim narrative. The novel never lets us forget that Anna's childhood paradise was built on others' suffering.
Paths Through the Dark—A Reading List
Essential Rhys
Good Morning, Midnight takes the themes of feminine alienation and urban isolation even further, following a middle-aged woman through Paris in the 1930s. It offers fascinating parallels to Anna's London journey while pushing modernist technique to new extremes.
Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys's most famous work, returns to the Caribbean setting of Voyage in the Dark to tell the story of another white Creole woman destroyed by patriarchal English society. Reading these books together reveals how Rhys developed her critique of colonialism and gender oppression across her career.
After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie completes what might be considered Rhys's trilogy of feminine precarity. Its protagonist Julia Martin offers a glimpse of what Anna's future might hold.
Literary Context
Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage sequence, particularly "Pointed Roofs," provides essential context for understanding how modernist women writers were developing new techniques to capture feminine consciousness. Richardson's stream-of-consciousness style influenced Rhys's own experiments with narrative form.
Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out shares fascinating parallels with Voyage in the Dark, both in its colonial themes and its portrait of a young woman's sexual awakening. Reading these novels together illuminates how different modernist writers approached similar themes.
May Sinclair's Mary Olivier: A Life offers another perspective on how women writers of this period were reimagining the coming-of-age narrative. Its experiments with interiority and memory complement Rhys's own innovations.
Theoretical Frameworks
The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys by Lilian Pizzichini focuses specifically on Rhys's early years and their influence on Voyage in the Dark. Pizzichini's analysis of how Rhys's own displacement from the Caribbean shaped her narrative technique helps us understand the novel's groundbreaking treatment of memory and consciousness.
Judith Kegan Gardiner's The Colonized Speaks: 'Wide Sargasso Sea' and Voyage in the Dark provides crucial insight into how Rhys's narrative techniques serve her colonial themes. Her analysis of how fragmented consciousness in the novel reflects both colonial and gender oppression remains foundational for understanding Rhys's project.
Conclusion
Voyage in the Dark endures because it captures something essential about feminine alienation while pushing narrative technique in new directions. Through Anna's story, Rhys shows how social forces—colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism—shape individual consciousness. The novel serves as both modernist masterpiece and proto-feminist critique, demonstrating how formal innovation can serve political purpose.
What makes the novel particularly devastating is its attention to the small humiliations that make up large-scale oppression. Each tiny transaction, each cold room, each dismissive glance accumulates until Anna's breakdown feels inevitable. Yet Rhys's genius lies in maintaining both sympathy for her protagonist and clear-eyed recognition of how systems of power operate through individual choices.
