Voyage in the Dark: Jean Rhys (Penguin Modern Classics)

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In some ways, she is exploitative, but really, she's more of a victim - unlike some of her friends, such as the one who advises, "The thing with men is to get everything you can out of them and not care a damn", after all, "People don't give you what you're worth... They give you what they think you're used to". Mind you, the men know the rules, too, fully aware that "a girls's clothes cost more than the girl inside them".

Character interactions feel wooden, despite being a story about passion, forbidden love and heartbreak. In fact, the characters are so flat – Anna included – that her plight is rendered emotionless. Early on, Anna seems to have a very negative impression of (all) men: one eyed her up "in that way they have" and "he didn't look at my breasts or my legs as they usually do", but the story progresses, her thoughts on men are replaced by introspection and memories of home. When she is a kept woman, she muses "I am hopeless, resigned, utterly happy. Is that me? I am bad, not good any longer, bad". Anna is like a dress rehearsal for Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea: adrift in cold London with her troubled memories of her upbringing in the Caribbean, just eighteen when the book opens, and a victim of her own naivety and innocence. Languorous, emotionally exhausted, unable to tell the difference between coercion and a fantasised (is it?) love affair, she has been abandoned by her stepmother who appropriates her inheritance, floats into and out of a job as a touring chorus girl and slips into a hazy position where she is not quite a prostitute but where her lovers slip money covertly into her handbag. She doesn't even have the dignity of controlling the transaction. They go out again to a hotel. It is implied that Laurie is a prostitute, and Anna goes into hysterics, and throws a scene. In a great deal of the book Anna reflects nostalgically about her island home. “I’m a real West Indian……” (Pg.47)Laurie and Anna meet up with Vincent to arrange the money for the abortion. He assures her that everything will be all right, but commands Anna to return the letters between her and Walter, which she does. Jean Rhys, rediscovered treasure, gives us depression in all its gruesome splendor in "Voyage in the Dark." Most of the time, Anna describes events in such short, sparse sentences that it's almost like an early reading primer. I know she's naive and not very educated, but her voice annoyed me: "I pulled my hand away. I thought, 'No, I don't like you.' We stopped at Germaine's flat." Tum-te tum-te tum-te-tum.

Her eloquence in the language of human sexual transactions is chilling, cynical, and surprisingly moving' There is plenty of hypocritical hand-wringing in contemporary media about societal pressures for women and girls to look beautiful at all times, but that's not entirely new. Anna agonises over the fact that "everything makes you want pretty clothes like hell", and sees people looking at the latest fashions, "Their eyes were fixed on the future, 'If I could buy this, then of course I'd be quite different.'" In contrast, scenes which could actually be sensual, are generally described in cold, detached terms - even when there is some warmth in the relationship concerned. Viagem no Escuro publicado em 1934 é supostamente um romance autobiográfico de Jean Rhys (1890 – 1979), uma história simples de relacionamentos complexos e consequências imprevisíveis. Many other books set in this period feature chorus girls, but usually in a peripheral way that makes their lives seem exotic and exciting, until they settle down to conventional respectability, quietly disappear, or, less often, meet a tragic end. The storyline here is more nuanced and complex - and still relevant today.

Anna receives a letter from Vincent saying that Walter is sorry, but he is no longer in love with her. They both still want to assist her as much as possible.

Ethel is inquisitive about Carl and doesn't seem to disapprove. Carl tells Anna that he is leaving the country soon; both he and Joe have wives in the States. One day Anna meets Maudie, who borrows some money. She needs to buy new clothes or else she thinks the man she is going out with won't marry her. Anna performs on stage, lives on her own, has relationships with men - and yet she is also very naive: she needs the support (partly, but not not only, financial) of others, but some of those people take advantage of her (women as well as men). Anna is represented as being caught between worlds: finding herself isolated socially and emotionally from those around her, she is unable to comfortably reconcile her West Indian and her British heritage. The novel employs modernist techniques to represent this, merging fragments of Anna's past with the action in England by means of a dreamlike stream of interior monologue, which destabilizes and ruptures the narrative, and emphasizes Anna's detachment from English society. This strongly autobiographical novel was written in the early 1930s . Anna works as a chorus girl (as Jean Rhys herself did) and the author paints a convincing picture of the circumstances facing an unmarried woman with no family. It is a bleak, hopeless portrait. “We are wholly inside Anna: inside her feelings, her sensations, her memories; inside the vivid and sinister images that fill her mind” writes Carole Angier in her introduction to this Penguin Modern Classics Edition. Even though this is mostly the case, I could not truly connect to the main character. She remains oddly distant to the reader, as perhaps was Jean Rhys’ intention. I often felt abandoned by the narrator, and not really able to get a grasp of Anna’s true thoughts and feelings.It was if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again. The colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave you right down inside yourself was different.” (p.7) It is important to be a beautifully dressed woman. Otherwise they sneer at you. As if it isn’t enough that you want to be beautiful. Clothes are important. Sometimes clothes become more important than the woman inside them. Coat, shoes, hat, voice; anything that makes them more ‘ladylike’. So much impetus on being ‘ladylike’. And on being young and looking young. Men like Walter, Carl like young looking women. Nineteen is a great age. Youth and beauty and can be bartered and bought by these older men who infantilize these women. Their own marital statuses, ages do not seem to matter. The boundaries are drawn. Women like Anna can never be assimilated in the prescribed dictates of domestic respectability. Even in the conversations between Walter and Anna there is no genuine interest in her memories, her inner life that she desires to share. He reveals very little of himself. He hardly talks. Any curiosity that might pervade the personal recess of the space that is firmly guarded, is met with a sturdy silence. There is too much anxiety that’s based on superficial, socially prescribed notions of beauty and femininity. And the desire to hold on to these men with superficial appearances, I was so nervous about how I looked that three quarters of me was in prison... If he had said that I looked all right or that I was pretty, it would have set me free. This slender morsel covers the 18-to-19 year old Jean. She vaguely tried to be a chorus girl in travelling productions, then vaguely thought a rich boyfriend would support her, then vaguely drifted from one boyfriend to another. The place where it isn’t exactly prostitution but it isn’t exactly not. This is a beginning. Out of this warm room that smells of fur I’ll go to all the lovely places I’ve ever dreamt of. This is the beginning. We think she’s just a maudlin drifter, but then we get a flash of horror when she realises she’s now one of the poor, and the viciousness of the image: