Language in Jean Rhys' Voyage in the Dark
Streams of Consciousness and Disjointed Narratives
Feb 8, 2009
Sudden eruptions of violence show the unrest that is underneath Anna’s passive exterior. By stubbing her cigarette out on Walter’s hand, starting an argument with Laurie, and killing a moth, she shows the violation that she is feeling. Of the time when Anna almost hits a man on the street for talking to her, Angier writes in the novel’s introduction that ‘what happened is that she has already moved from hurt child to vengeful woman’.
A Shift in Language
Anna’s language at the start of the novel is simple, with abrupt sentence structures such as ‘I didn’t like England at first. I couldn’t get used to the cold.’ It is the language of a 19 year old girl, a language of innocence and simplicity. As the novel goes on she falls into streams of consciousness, regularly using fragmented language and shifting to different times in her life. The harsh experiences that she has been exposed to have changed her.
An example of this is at the end of Chapter 7 when she receives a letter from Vincent explaining that Walter won’t be seeing her any more. The chapter ends with her wondering who the envelope is from, and the next begins in a completely different setting, with a seemingly unconnected memory of her uncle and his false teeth. It is only after she has been thinking about this that we are presented with the letter that she has already read.
By escaping in her thoughts to a different time in a country she loved, she is escaping from the unhappiness that she is facing. Rachel Bowlby comments in Still Crazy After All These Years that Rhys situates her women in ‘social and psychical places that are oppressively constant and claustrophobic’, which is certainly the case with Anna.
Streams of Consciousness
Streams of consciousness create displacement and this effect creates Anna’s feeling of being lost. She has no fixed abode and lives a life of movement. Once she is settled in England she still travels from city to city as a chorus girl, and so her places of residence are always in other peoples homes or lodging houses.
Two locations are juxtaposed; in this case, England and the West Indies, which to Anna cannot be joined together. Her lives in both places run parallel to each other, entwining her Caribbean childhood with her current British life, and are experienced simultaneously. The present is constantly disturbed by memories, dreams and nightmares. This skewers her mode of living in the present, and the past and present are occurring together.
Disjointed Narratives
On her contrasting worlds she states ‘I could never fit them together’ as everything alternates. This movement in her mind shows an exploration of the movement across national borders. Maren Linett gives the opinion in New Words, New Everything that ‘Rhys worked to undermine dominant discourses with her disjointed narratives’.
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