Voyage In The Dark
In Jean Rhys’ 1939 novel, Good Morning, Midnight, Sasha has returned to Paris, haunted by the glittering past that now eludes her in middle age. Single and alone, she has no job; her most consistent companion is a charming gigolo, who chooses not to sleep with her. Life is hopeless, and she floats through the city in a depressive haze.
Born in the Caribbean, Jean Rhys moved to England as a teenager, where she was mercilessly mocked for her accent. A failed actress, she toured as a low-paid chorus girl, a time that provided the inspiration for Voyage in the Dark. Anna Morgan, the heroine, reminisces to her past life in the Caribbean: “Sometimes it was as if I were back there, and England were a dream. At other times, England was the real thing and out there was the dream, but I could never put them together.”
Disinherited by her English stepmother, who suspects the racial purity of Anna’s heritage, Anna drifts from one town to the next. After Walter, a wealthy lover who pays Anna for her affections, abandons her, she falls into a heedless survival, conveyed in Rhys’ peerless stream-of-consciousness prose: “‘I picked up a girl in London and she. . . Last night I slept with a girl who. . .’ Not girl, perhaps. Some other word, perhaps. Never mind.”
Anna’s childhood in Dominica is a nostalgic refuge, a dream of escapism, but glimmers with demons as well; she visualizes obeahs, witch-women who dug up graves, and soucriants, a flying demon that sucks blood. In England, the monsters have finally devoured her.
Rhys peered into darkness, unafraid to articulate the experiences of women falling through the cracks in society, and the broken vulnerability that led them into the jaws of men. At the age of 76, after living in obscurity, drowning her sorrows in alcohol, and facing several heartbreaks, Rhys found acclaim with Wide Sargasso Sea. “It has come too late,” she said of her success. Like Vincent Van Gogh or Zora Neale Hurston, Rhys did not live long to see her fame. Her work outlived her.
