Identity in Jean Rhys' Voyage in the Dark
The Loss of Home and Belonging
Modernist writers use experimentation and formal complexity in their writing. Rules of perspective are challenged through different ways of seeing. The internal is valued over the external, rethinking time and space and with an emphasis on mood, memories, and thoughts, as can be seen in Jean Rhys’ Voyage in the Dark. It is also a reaction to social and political. In Periodizing Modernism, Susan Stanford Friedman states that ‘All modernisms develop as a form of cultural translation or transplantation produced through intercultural encounters’.
Voyage in the Dark as a Title
The title Voyage in the Dark gives away a lot about the novel itself. The original title of the novel was Two Tunes which reflects the two different cultures, lives and identities of Anna that are entwined throughout yet never quite connect together. Voyage in the Dark as a title shows a reversal of Europe’s typical view of the Caribbean or Africa as being ‘the dark’, and instead relocates the darkness in Europe itself.
Rhys offers an interrogation into the value of nationhood in modernist Britain. The idea of nationality is fixed with being rooted in one place, of having a home country. By using Anna as a migrant outsider, Rhys places an emphasis on the importance of having a number of different roots rather than an attachment to a singular place. In the novel this is often viewed as a threat, as shown by the constant rejection of Anna and the view of her as an outsider by both herself and other people.
Home and Belonging
Strong notions of home and belonging to only one place appear to lead to the strength of the nation and to break free from itself leads to fears of weakness. Movement challenges the notions of home and this leads to Anna as an outsider. She is never truly allowed to be at home in either of her home countries. In the West Indies she cannot be fully accepted as she is white, and in England she is also rejected for not fitting in with British values.
In Snow on the Field Judith Raiskin writes that the Creole and its identity encompasses ‘both the white native who lives in a cultural space between Europe and black Caribbean societies, and the native of mixed race ancestry living in the islands and England after WW2’. Anna herself is created of this mixing of race, culture and location.
Anna has been born into this world as an outsider and so is powerless to change it. If home is the ‘shelter, comfort, nurture and protection’ that Rosemary George writes that it is in The Politics of Home, then Anna has none.
Anna often seems sedated, wishing for the opportunity to just go to bed and sleep forever. This inactivity shows an ultimate desire for death. Her bedroom however has already been corrupted, instead of a place of retreat and sanctuary, she uses it for her work. She does not have a country that she can call her home, and by using her own private space for her work and using her body as a commodity, she no longer has a room to call her own either.
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