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Disturbing the Genre: Colonialism and Modernity in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the

Dark

Author Jean Rhys, like her female protagonists, is historically situated between multiple but interrelated worlds. Rhys’s fiction often crops up in discussions of modernist literature, feminist literary criticism, and postcolonial theory, which often intersect

(Wilson & Johnson 1). Ideological battles over whether Rhys’s work is Caribbean or

European discursively represent the politics of both the literary canon and “Rhys’s status as a white Creole woman” (Wilson & Johnson 3). Rhys still remains, as Peter Kalliney wrote, a “strange case” that destabilizes literary history and traditional conceptualizations of literary genres (The Oxford Handbook 429).

Rhys’s importance within Caribbean literary traditions is no doubt due to the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966. Wide Sargasso Sea is the “prelude” or postmodern/postcolonial response to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). The novel is narrated mainly from the perspective of Antoinette Cosway, who later becomes Bertha,

Mr. Rochester’s mentally unstable wife (Ashcroft et al 190). Told through multiple voices (Antoinette’s both as a child and young woman and Rochester’s), the novel pinpoints the relationship between home and empire as it unravels the contradiction inherent in Brontë’s canonical text. While Wide Sargasso Sea is probably the most famous of Rhys’s texts, her earlier works, Quartet (1929), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie

(1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939) are also gaining literary importance. Significant criticism, known collectively as “Rhys studies,” is being done to relate Rhys to modernism and Rhys’s modernism to postcolonial theory. For the purposes of this paper, modernism as a literary tradition relates to a mid-nineteenth and Osborne 2 early twentieth century cultural landscape that was marked by complex, overlapping cultural formations around national identity, colonialism, and gender in Western Europe.

Rhys’s voice within this cultural and historical context can be distinguished as “a measured assessor of imperial modernist culture,” (Dell’Amico 1) which suggests that

Rhys’s use of modernism, in some ways, critiques the imperio-colonial relations whose consequence was Western modernity; this paper understands and situates Rhys within this context.

Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark (1934) is at first glance a bizarre story of a naïve, young woman, Anna Morgan, who moves to England from her home in the West Indies after the death of her father. The novel is told through Anna’s voice, whose voice is by most accounts, unclear and fragmented. As Anna struggles working as a chorus girl, she becomes entangled with an older man, Walter, who begins to pay her for sex. As extremely vivid daydreams of the West Indies haunt Anna’s sense of identity and relationship with London, she falls into physical illness and depression. The novel ends with Anna barely recovering from a botched abortion.

Voyage in the Dark is of course more than it seems. The text’s coloniality is located in Anna’s dreams of the West Indies, her ambiguous racial identity, and her contradictory impressions of London and Englishness. Often describing London as

“cold”, “gray”, and “…perpetually the same,” (Rhys 8) Anna conceptualizes her voyage to England as one in the dark and England as ultimately, unknowable. Rhys’s modernism in this novel is clear from her use of the “stream of consciousness” narrative style; however, the coloniality of the novel destabilizes the continuity of the modern, making it almost seem undone. This paper focuses on the discontinuity that undoes the modern. Osborne 3

These aspects of discontinuity, moments where the modern is turned onto itself, problematize modernism as a genre and as a mode of expressing the feminine and experiences of racial otherness and/or racial exclusion. Moreover, it can be argued that the deployment of modernist tropes is distinct in Voyage in the Dark, almost as if these deployments enact colonial mimicry, “almost the same but not quite”, as Homi Bhabha would suggest. Ultimately, this paper argues that Rhys’s mimicry in Voyage in the Dark ruptures and challenges the internal dialogue of the modern subject constructed out of nineteenth century imaginings of an urban, masculinized self. Finally, this paper complicates the notion of Rhys as simply a modernist writer; labeling Rhys in simplistic, normative terms fundamentally misses the ways in which an examination and critique of modernity is at work within Rhys’s texts.

Jean Rhys was born Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams on August 24, 1890 in

Roseau, Dominica, West Indies.1 Like Anna, following her father’s death in 1909, Rhys joined a touring company as a chorus girl, and in 1910 had an affair with an older man, who, after a year, leaves and pensions her off. In recent years, Rhys studies has moved away from emphasizing the autobiographical quality of Rhys’s earlier works and instead have used Rhys’s real, marginal position in England as a Creole woman as a metaphor for her marginality within the English, modern canon (Wilson & Johnson 2). Rhys’s relationship to Anna Morgan is therefore more about the ways in which both women are positioned relative to imperio-colonial historical contexts and, more importantly, how

Rhys aesthetically positions Anna as both resistant and complicit in imperial England

1 Biographical information from Wyndham, Francis and Diana Melly. eds. The Letters of Jean Rhys. New York, NY: Viking, n.d. 315. Print.

Osborne 4 through her use of typical modernist preoccupations such as temporality, fragmentation, and the textual uncanny in Voyage in the Dark.

The form and narrative structure in Voyage in the Dark suggests a “political unconscious,” making historical and material realities inseparable from the work the text does ideologically. In The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

Marxist literary critic, Fredric Jameson, provides a theory of postcolonial aesthetics

(Ashcroft 169) by suggesting that narrative, or the text, can be “unmasked” to reveal the

“reflexive relationship between social process and text” and that “the text paradoxically,

‘brings into being that very situation to which it is also, at one and the same time, a reaction’” (Ashcroft 170; Jameson 81-82). The narrative of Voyage in the Dark “brings into being” the situation of modernity and “at the same time” operates as a reaction to it.

With Anna as the protagonist, Rhys brings the situation of modernity in Voyage in the

Dark into being through Anna’s coloniality, connecting modernity to its imperio-colonial historical context. The text’s operation as a reaction to modernism is thus located in

Anna’s presence in London (the seat of British empire) and Anna’s postcolonial gaze.

Furthermore, to the extent that Rhys is connected to a feminist literary tradition, the narrative in Voyage in the Dark illustrates the contemporary feminist concern with the

“questioning of forms and modes, to unmasking the assumptions upon which such canonical constructions are founded, moving first to make their cryptic bases visible and then to destabilize them” (Ashcroft 173). It seems that Rhys’s canonical construction, which she makes visible and destabilizes, is literary modernism.

The “big idea” in Voyage in the Dark has “something to do with time being an illusion…the past exists—side by side with the present, not behind it; that what was—is” Osborne 5

(Letters 24). Rhys, in part, creates this illusion by “…making the past (the West Indies) very vivid—the present dreamlike…” (Letters 24). For England to be presented as dreamlike suggests that Anna’s voyage is perhaps made backwards. In other words, she discovers nothing to be true in England, but instead is lucid in the lands under colonial jurisdiction. Modernism’s relation to time is quite familiar; the rationalizing of time, or the homogenizing of the “logistics of everyone’s day-to-day life,” took place in 1884 during the Prime Meridian Conference where in which Greenwich Mean Time was established. This represents the linear mechanism of modernity, that moves forever forward (Flynn 44). The symbolic power of the clock is related to ways in which all aspects of nineteenth century society reorganized conceptualizations of time and history

(Flynn 44).

With his publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, Charles Darwin

“…bestowed on the global project a decisive dimension—secular time as the agent of a unified world history;” this global project was imperialism (McClintock 36). After 1839, social evolutionists began to read “the discontinuous natural record” as “a single pedigree of evolving world history” (McClintock 36). In other words, global history could be mapped onto the human species; and efforts to organize the evolutionary family “Tree of

Man” was simultaneously an effort to organize global history, thus making anatomy “an allegory of progress” (McClintock 38). With the white, European male at the apex of evolutionary progress, the black and female, for instance, is stuck in an evolutionary past.

The physicality of anatomy as progress was conceptualized onto geographical space as well, meaning that to travel to lands under colonial occupation is to travel back in time; Osborne 6

“geographical difference across space is figured as a historical difference across time”2

(McClintock 40). This idea is best understood through the trope of the European traveling to the colonial land, only to find it backward, mysterious, and completely unknowable; the European’s journey is a journey to the past.

In Voyage in the Dark, Anna disrupts this linear mechanism of time. Rhys turns the modernist trope of the journey (think Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) on its head, by making Anna’s voyage to England a voyage in the dark. Furthermore, Anna’s vivid recollections of the West Indies, her rich descriptions of Morgan’s Rest (her father’s estate), Francine (Anna’s black servant), and the lushness of the West Indian landscape blur the line between past and present. For Anna, there perhaps is no boundary between the two, exposing the boundary as constructed and contestable. For Rhys to make what was become what is she imports coloniality into the modern illustrating that modernism itself is interrupted by an imperio-colonial reality which destabilizes its sense of order and progress. Both Anna’s daydreams and her presence import this coloniality into

London; Anna daydreams haunt her and she haunts England (Dell’Amico 48). Anna tries to remember a woman begging:

And the place where the woman with yaws spoke to me. I suppose she was begging but I couldn’t understand because her nose and mouth were eaten away; it seemed as though she were laughing at me…I kept on looking backwards to see if she was following me, but when the horse came to the next ford and I saw clear water I thought I had forgotten about her. And now there she is (150-2).

2 This concept is known separately as “panoptical time” and “anachronistic space;” these concepts are further investigated in Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Osborne 7

“And now there she is” suggests that Anna herself is not necessarily remembering this moment, but that the moment is perhaps happening in front of her. Anna is conjuring “a taunting ghost of history” (Dell’Amico 44) both because this woman is anatomically of the past (almost primitive) and because Anna looks “backwards” to see her. The text thereby effects “a neat collapsing of past and present—a bringing together of London and the Caribbean” (Dell’Amico 45). This “bringing together” also collapses the sense of distinction between past and present, progress and backwardness, illustrating the ways in which the two concepts invent and inform each other and are ultimately inseparable.

Voyage in the Dark has been described as a “Frankensteinian text—a monstrous conjoining of narrative fragments” (Dell’Amico 39). The novel’s fragments operate as

“citations,” creating a “montage narrative” in which Anna moves through London reciting and recollecting (Dell’Amico 40). The fragments are then organized around either Anna’s “extended Caribbean memory sequence[s]” and “block[s] of events occurring in the present” (Dell’Amico 40). The fragmentary quality of the text suggests that the novel creates a “…subjectivity produced by the discourses of others and not itself the source of meaning…”(Sagar 64). While having lunch in London with Hester, her stepmother, Anna notices an advertisement:

There was an advertisement at the back of the newspaper: ‘What is Purity? For Thirty-five Years the Answer has been Bourne’s Cocoa.’ (58).

The narrative shifts back to the advertisement later on:

I sat there. I didn’t know what to say. There wasn’t anything to say. I kept on wondering whether she would ask me what I was living on. ‘What is Purity? For Thirty- five Years the Answer has been Bourne’s Cocoa.’ Thirty-five years…Fancy being thirty- Osborne 8 five years old. What is Purity? For Thirty-five Thousand Years the Answer has been… (59).

The coloniality of the ad is quite clear. Cocoa’s presence in England is a consequence of colonialism and coupled with the question of “purity,” the imperial discourse of the ad invades Anna’s subjectivity with its repetitive quality, which Rhys demonstrates with the scene’s rambling effect. Similar moments in the text illustrate the extent to which Anna captures various discourses around her, making her subjectivity (the text) not “itself the source of meaning and signification” (Sagar 64). This is a significant formal departure from modernism.

The use of impressionist techniques by modernist-colonial writers such as

Kipling, Conrad, and Forster “bestow a knowability on the othered terrain”, in Said’s sense, through the “oversignification” of sensations such as sound, touch, and sight.

Sagar (1991) argues “impressionism’s claim is that consciousness is sensitive and passive, qualities that have literal counterparts in the act in which the observers apprehend the world” (72). The lone observer retains his or her “passivity by their physical remove from the object of their gaze” (Sagar 72). Jameson (1981) writes that impressionism “contains” ideological contradiction through its “aestheticization” of the world (238; Sagar 73). Sagar suggests that Rhys “denaturalizes both the technique and the knowability it confers on the space of the other,” through her foregrounding of the technique in the text. For many scenes in the text, mostly those relating to Anna’s

Caribbean childhood, Rhys makes use of impressionism perhaps as an exaggeration in order to “dissect” the knowability of “sensuous apprenhension” (Sagar 81). In an Osborne 9 important shift in the novel when Anna reads Walter’s letter that announces the end of their affair, Anna asks herself:

I thought, ‘What the hell’s the matter with me? I must be crazy. This letter has nothing to do with false teeth.’ But I went on thinking about false teeth, and then about piano-keys and about the time the blind man from Martinique came to tune the piano… (94)

This moment is the rupturing of the impressionist technique. To think about “false teeth” while reading Walter’s letter is an expression of the impressionist preoccupation with sensation rather concept, and Anna’s realization is that she is crazy to make sense of her world through aestheticization. Furthermore, when Anna recognizes this Rhys denaturalizes the traditional modern subject’s relationship to object. The relationship between the text’s fragmentation and the rupture of the impressionist technique is located in the fact that Rhys’s text does not assume itself to be the source of meaning and signification, but instead utilizes the “montage narrative” where in which the operations of power through discourse is what signifies Anna’s subjectivity. In both her dreamlike memories of the West Indies and her present life in England, Anna recites songs, advertisements, books, and colonial documents, which emphasize both the intertextuality of the subject’s world and more generally, the disruption of the coherence of a literary history.

The coherence of “an unmediated reality that an authentic literary tradition must ideally reveal…” (Bhabha 95) is challenged within Voyage in the Dark by the incoherence of Rhys’s status as a modernist writer and by the text’s relinquishing of origins. Questions abound as to whether Rhys has been “assimilated” into the British modernist literary tradition as a means to depoliticize the textual politics of her novels Osborne 10 prior to her obvious positioning as a postcolonial writer with Wide Sargasso Sea (Sagar

62). Additional questions criticize Rhys, as a white Creole woman, for having appropriated aspects of Afro-Caribbean culture and erasing Afro-Caribbean women as a consequence (Wilson & Johnson 3). These reveal the ways in which a coherent literary history is ideological, making the imposition of postcolonial writers and the coloniality of modernist texts ideologically destabilizing to the regime of modernist-colonial representation. Rhys is particularly interesting in this case because she often reveals the difficulty of representation through the text itself. For instance in Wide Sargasso Sea, an

Afro-Caribbean female character, Christophine, drops out of the narrative into relative silence compared to the bourgeois, white protagonist, Antoinette. Spivak (1985) argues that through silencing Christophine, Rhys proves the “the limits of representation for the white Creole writer” (Spivak; Mary & Wilson 3).

Similarly in Voyage in the Dark, Rhys reveals the difficulty in modernist notions of origins and the simultaneous lack of stability. Rhys situates this difficulty and lack in the uncanny as it pertains to “hauntings of history” (Dell’Amico 41). For Rhys, “the uncanny produces no Forsterian or Conradian metaphysics of the unknown…for the Rhys protagonist there is no metaphysical enigma to unravel,” (Sagar 88) suggesting that there is nothing on which to base the enigma, disrupting even the “certainty of uncertainty”

(Sagar 65). Anna’s world is one that is “resistant to the self’s sense-making efforts,” which inverts the modernist theme of origins (Sagar 64). Furthermore, Anna does not have a “home” in England. She and the other chorus girls stay in boarding houses in various neighborhoods in London. Going from place to place, Anna does not have a stable point of origin; even her previous “home” in the West Indies is set within an Osborne 11 imperio-colonial landscape where in which white ownership required constant ideological maintenance. Thus the subversion of European, specifically British, modernist preoccupations with coherent, linear history and origin is evidenced by both

Anna’s “unhomeliness” and the ways in which Anna haunts the English, imperial metropolitan center.

Dell’Amico (2005) argues that one of the recurring motifs in Voyage in the Dark is Anna’s “disconcerting looks and presence” operates as a textual uncanny (41). Anna’s combination of “familiarity and strangeness” haunts the English characters in the novel due to the ways in which Anna’s coloniality “agitates the uneasy bed of imperial repression,” making Anna a “hysteric who induces hysteria” (Dell’Amico 41). For instance, while Anna is renting a room from Ethel, she is accused of an accident while working as a manicurist for Ethel. Ethel loses control and says:

‘And as a matter of fact you’re enough to drive anybody crazy with that potty look of yours’ [….] ‘The thing about you, she said ‘is that you’re a half-potty bastard. You’re not all there; that’s what’s the matter with you. Anybody’s only got to look at you to see that’ (145).

Ethel’s comments are racialized and alleges that Anna is a “half-potty bastard” and is

“not all there,” essentially that she is from elsewhere, not white or really English. In another moment, Hester discusses Anna’s voice:

‘…I tried to teach you to talk like a lady and behave like a lady and not like a nigger and of course I couldn’t do it. Impossible to get you away from the servants. That awful sing-song voice you had! Exactly like a nigger you talked—and still do. Exactly like that dreadful girl Francine. When you were jabbering away together in the pantry I never could tell which of you was speaking…’ (65).

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Again, Anna’s face, actions, and mannerisms inspire disconcert from the British characters in the book; Anna seems to conjure up repressed spirits that haunt the sense of self and stability in the British characters. Ultimately, Dell’Amico argues that Anna serves Rhys in two ways: as a colonial and also as “a representative Briton in the text”

(48). However, it is equally sufficient to say that Anna, formally, warps the modernity of the metropolitan center (i.e. London) and exposes the racial and material contradictions inherent in literary modernism.

This is not to suggest that Rhys is not a modernist writer but that the complexity of the textual politics of her earlier novels and Voyage in the Dark particularly, illustrate the extent to which Rhys “reinscribes the modernist text from its postcolonial margins” and “disrupts the central myths” of modernism’s ordering of the world and subject (Sagar

3). To recover modernism “from its postcolonial margins” is to situate the colonial (i.e.

Anna) within a city, whose main ideological work is to repress the imperio-colonial elements of its material maintenance. Quite literally, Rhys moves Anna “from the colonial periphery to the imperial center, the West Indies to London” (Dell’Amico 39).

This move disrupts modern temporality, modernist discourses of progress, and origins due to the ways in which Anna herself is both oddly placed in England and her relationships with others cause them hysteria or discomfort. Whether or not Anna successfully moves the margin to the center is difficult. During her lapse into delirium as she begins to hemorrhage after the abortion, Anna repeats:

‘I’m giddy,’ […] ‘I’m awfully giddy.’ […] ‘I’m giddy,” (185-6).

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In this moment, at the end of the novel Anna is experiencing disorientation. Her marginality has not replaced the center; however her presence continues to disorientate

England’s imperial centrality. It seems that, for Rhys it was important to illustrate that the center is at best shaky, with no significant origin to trust.

This paper has argued that Voyage in the Dark, one of Jean Rhys’s early novels, is postcolonial and works to destabilize modernist literary traditions and ideological preoccupations. Rhys’s protagonist, Anna Morgan represents the coloniality that has been repressed from modernist traditions. She operates in Voyage in the Dark as a haunting spirit, who is haunted by her own fragmented identity and disconnect from stable origins.

The temporality of the British, modernist literary tradition is related to England’s imperialist imagining of itself as representing both human progress and civilization. In this sense, to look “backwards” is to look at both people who are lower on a human evolutionary scale and stuck in a primitive past; and to travel to the colonial periphery is to travel back to a biological and cultural evolutionary past. For Anna, her past and present are blurred. Her dreams and memories of the West Indies and her present life in

England bleed into each other as she falls into mental instability. As a colonial in

England, she constantly reminds her English interlocutors that she is not all there, here but from somewhere else. Considering the ways modernist temporality is entangled with race and geography, Anna’s disconcerting and uncanny presence represents an imposition of race and imperio-colonial relations in an England desperate to erase the materiality of those relations. Furthermore, Anna’s voyage is made backwards, she is not relieved at the clarity and order of England compared to her colonial life, instead she is morbid, illustrating that the origin and truth upon which English imperialism is based, is a floating Osborne 14 signifier and that life in England is also colonial, further dismantling the boundaries between home and empire.

Rhys’s use of modernist form operates as a metanarrative within Voyage in the

Dark, destabilizing the epistemologies of European modernism. By deploying impressionist techniques, which were utilized by modern-colonist writers such as

Kipling, Conrad, and Forster, and then breaking or denaturalizing them by having Anna speak against, calling herself crazy for its use, Rhys problematizes the use of impressionism in the representation of the other and its imperialist ideological operation.

Moreover, with Rhys’s own status within the traditional modernist literary canon contentious, Voyage in the Dark acknowledges itself as “unhomely” just as Anna is in the novel. The use of intertextuality in the novel further acknowledges that the text was made by the collision and operations of other texts. While, for Anna, the intertextuality means that her subjectivity, due to its marginality and modernity, is constituted by imperial discourse, for the novel it suggests that all texts are also constituted in this way.

Rhys studies is a growing niche in literary studies and perhaps demonstrates the importance of Rhys’s work by virtue of literary critics’ growing interest. However, the ways in which Rhys’s early work has been historically situated within European modernism erases and assimilates her critique of modernity as a colonial enterprise in order to make it aesthetic and more importantly apolitical. The textual politics embedded within Rhys’s earlier works not only establishes that Rhys was most definitely a sophisticated postcolonial thinker prior to Wide Sargasso Sea (Sagar 64) but also that the postcolonial literatures can be more widely interpreted and therefore open up texts that have been previously assimilated elsewhere in literary tradition to the postcolonial critic’s Osborne 15 purview. However, to open up all literature to postcolonial critics is not to suggest that the criteria for a text to be called postcolonial is no longer useful, instead this claim suggests that critics attention to form can acknowledge postcolonial motifs in texts whose postcolonial content may be less obvious.

Focusing instead on the narrative structure and form of the novel, this paper confronted the literary tradition of modernism and resisted attempts to assimilate Rhys’s text into normative literary genres. More generally, this paper wanted to acknowledge the ways in which both Rhys and postcolonial literature ought to be more broadly interpreted, so that the questions critics pose in the future might be more critical of normative discourses that work to erase the complexity of some works of fiction, specifically those that inhabit the margins. This paper contributes to Rhys studies at a critical moment where questions both on Rhys as a modernist and Rhys as a postmodernist are in wide circulation and also resist attempts to simplify Rhys’s earlier work. Ultimately, Voyage in the Dark leaves critics with many more questions. The text is so mysterious and mirrors the enigma of Jean Rhys’s life as a woman writer. However, like Anna, literary critics are bound to start all over again (188), in order to fully grapple with the novel’s complexity and engagement with modernism and imperio-colonial relations.

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