Voyage In The Dark

“He laughed. I laughed too, because I felt that that was what I ought to do. You can now and you can see what it’s like, and why not?”

Walter attempts to seduce Anna, who realizes after dinner that there is a bedroom next to their dining compartment and that he wants her for a rendezvous. Although she is a virgin, she has enough curiosity to want to try going on a date with him, but not expecting such a proposal, she panics.

“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.”

With a large amount of money from a Walter, a sum meant to entice Anna into sleeping with him, she immediately uses the money to buy the lovely clothes that she’s always desired. This moment provides a high that leads her to a relationship with Walter.

“I would think about when he made love to me and walk up and down thinking about it; and that I hated the looking-glass in his room—it made me look so thin and pale. And about getting up and saying, ‘I must go now,’ and dressing, and going down the stairs quietly, and the front door that clicked so silently, that clicked always as if it were for the last time, and there I was in the dark street.”

Anna is now a kept woman and for her, although the relationship develops into something more considerable, at the end of each night with Walter, she must return to her home. These moments turn Anna’s very identity into one based on currency and transaction.

“Sometimes the earth trembles; sometimes you can feel it breathe. The colours are red, purple, blue, gold, all shades of green. The colours here are black, brown, grey, dim-green, pale blue, the white of people’s faces—like woodlice.”

Anna can never love England in the free-spirited and sensual way she longs for the Caribbean. In her description of both places, she reveals what she thinks of England by expressing it through dull colors and comparing it to the shades of a pest. Despite her honest intentions to depict the beauty of the Caribbean to Walter, he fails to understand her, or her homesickness.

“That was when it was sad, when you lay awake at night and remembered things. That was when it was sad, when you stood by the deed and undressed, thinking, ‘When he kisses me, shivers run up my back. I am hopeless, resigned, utterly happy. Is that me? I am bad, not good any longer, bad. That has no meaning, absolutely none. Just words. But something about the darkness of the streets has a meaning.’”

Walter is showing signs of wanting Anna to become more independent because he will leave her at some point. Anna questions her own identity and virtue before doing away with the notion of a moral compass entirely, eschewing it for the very real knowledge of the dark street, which can be viewed as the future, and the need to plan for it.

“The stew tasted of nothing at all. Everybody took one mouthful and then showered salt and sauce out of a bottle on to it. Everybody did this mechanically, without a change of expression, so that you saw they knew it would taste of nothing. If it had tasted of anything they would have suspected it.”

Anna meets Hester, as planned, for the first and last time in the novel. Her understanding of England was brought by her stepmother, who Anna does not hate but also does not truly like. As they meet for lunch, Anna observes the predictability at play in both England and Hester.

“I always did my best for you and I never got any thanks for it. 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.”

Hester is outraged by a letter sent by Anna’s Uncle Bo accusing Hester of cheating Anna out of her money and assuming to wash her hands of her stepdaughter’s responsibility. She pours out her anger on Anna, revealing her disgust for her Caribbean upbringing and anything associated with black identity, including Anna’s friendship with Francine, her childhood cook and companion.

“The thing about Francine was that when I was with her I was happy. She was small and plump and blacker than most of the people out there […] What I liked was watching her eat mangoes. Her teeth would bite into the mango and her lips fasten on either side of it, and while she sucked you saw that she was perfectly happy.”

An integral part of her life, Anna describes the importance of Francine because she, unlike Hester, could make Anna feel truly happy, a concept that Anna and even Rhys is said to have desired and never attained. For Anna, Francine, and Francine’s blackness, represent a feeling that Anna desperately desires but cannot acquire.

“But I knew that of course, she disliked me too because I was white; and that I would never be able to explain to her that I hated being white. Being white and getting like Hester, and all the things you get—old and sad and everything. I kept thinking, ‘No.…No.…No….’ And I knew that day that I’d started to grow old and nothing could stop it.”

Anna understands that being white makes her hated by those subjugated to systemic abuse by that particular identity. At the same time, she despises her own whiteness, which she sees as a deterrent to being content and complete, as there is nothing more pitiable than an aging, white woman in Anna’s eyes.

“Everybody says the man’s bound to get tired and you read it in all the books. But I never read now, so they can’t get at me like that, anyway.”

Here, we see Anna deluding herself through logical fallacy: if Anna refuses to pay attention to and/or accept the writing on the wall, the writing can’t possibly be there. Ann indulges in this type of escapism in moments of crisis or fear.

“And when you’d had a drink you knew it was the best way to live in the world, because anything might happen. I don’t know how people live when they know exactly what’s going to happen to them each day. It seems to me it’s better to be dead than to live like that.”

Anna’s escapism leads to her to alcoholism, her coping mechanism. By the end of the novel, this addiction assists her in dealing with the difficult aspects of England. In many ways, this line also reveals that her mental health is deteriorating because suicidal thoughts begin to appear and the lack of desire to live has a stronger foothold than prior.

“I was so nervous about how I looked that three-quarters of me was in a prison, wandering round and round in a circle. If he had said that I looked all right or that I was pretty, it would have set me free.”

Walter picks up Anna to take her with him to the countryside, where he will be joined by Vincent and Vincent’s girl. Anna has a sense of foreboding, but instead of addressing the issue that she fears, she is eager to please Walter and for him to approve of her in the hopes that he will not leave her. This reliance on others for self-worth will aid in spelling Anna’s downfall.

“People say ‘young’ as though being young were a crime, and yet they are always so scared of getting old.”

Walter leaves with Vincent for a trip to New York. Anna warns him not to forget her before their last meeting, and he obliges, in order to prevent any hysteria. Anna falls into a depression, ceasing daily activity, although she tries to leave London for a few days, only to return again. She daydreams of a bathing pool near her home, when the landlady, Mrs. Dawes, enters to tell her that a “young girl” like herself should not live the way Anna is, leading Anna to think about the pressures of age and aging.

“My dear Infant, I am writing this in the country, and I can assure you that when you get into a garden and smell the flowers and all that all this rather beastly sort of love simply doesn’t matter.”

In the letter Vincent writes on Walter’s behalf, he infantilizes Anna by addressing her love and relationship with Walter as a negligible event in Anna’s life, one to forget about and move on from. Throughout the novel, Anna’s youth is held against her as everyone seems to treat her like a child and yet expect her to act like an adult.

“It can’t be ‘legions’. ‘Oceans’, perhaps. ‘Oceans away from despair.’ But it’s the sea, I thought. The Caribbean Sea. ‘The Caribs indigenous to this island were a warlike tribe and their resistance to white domination, though spasmodic, was fierce.”

Anna escapes to thoughts of the Caribbean. She has left her previous boarding house and her depression has made her immobile and unstable. She begins to sing and repeats a passage from a book she has read on the “indigenous Caribs” that fought to survive British rule. A major feature of this book is the effects of colonialism on identity.

“I was thinking, ‘I’m nineteen and I’ve got to go on living and living and living.’”

At the cinema with Ethel, Anna suddenly realizes that life has only begun for her. Her foray into adulthood will be full of certainty, something that she wishes to escape.

“She had another whisky and went on about being clever and putting money away, and her voice joined in with the smell of the room. ‘There are all sorts of lives, ’I thought. ‘I bank half of everything I get,’ she said. ‘Even if I have to do without, I still bank half of everything I get, and there’s no friend like that […] Never mind, you’re a good little cow; you’ll be all right. Come along and have a look at the flat.’”

Anna meets Laurie at an opportune moment and comes over to her flat. Anna tearfully confides that her heart has been broken by Walter and that he has left her. Even though Laurie consoles her, she takes the situation matter-of-factly as, Laurie knows, this is what men do, if not worse.

“Keep hope alive and you can do anything, and that’s the way the world goes round, that’s the way they keep the world rolling. So much hope for each person. And damned cleverly done too. But what happens if you don’t hope any more, if your back’s broken? What happens then?”

Before Anna goes to see Ethel’s flat and discuss her offer, she stops to see dresses displayed in a shop window. She imagines the women who stare at it and who think that a dress could change their lives, when it can do nothing more except provide hope for a future that does not exist. Even for Anna, her fancy clothes do no sustain her, nor do they save her relationship with Walter. In the end, clothing, like hope, can only cover, and not solve. Anna is reaching the bottom of her depression and becoming a victim to her circumstances.

“But instead I started counting all the towns I had been to, the first winter I was on tour—Wigan, Blackburn, Bury, Oldham, Leeds, Halifax, Huddersfield, Southport…I counted up to fifteen and then slid off into thinking of all the bedrooms I had slept in and how exactly alike they were, bedrooms on tour. Always a high, dark wardrobe and something dirty red in the room; and through the window the feeling of a small street would come in. And the breakfast-tray dumped down on the bed, two plates with a bit of curled-up bacon on each. And if the landlady smiled or said ’Good morning’ Maudie would say, ‘She’s very smarmy. What’s the matter with her? I bet she puts that down on the bill. For saying Good Morning, half a crown.’”

Anna knows that she must leave Ethel’s flat and her present situation. She has money left from Carl and all she must do is start with a plan. However, as is Anna’s tendency, she escapes reality by going into her own thoughts; it can be argued that her mental state is not well enough for her to take action. In addition, even if she goes to another English town, they are, in the end, all the same. Anna effectively pushes away the future by declaring that it will be just like the recent past.

“It’s always like that with money. You never know where it goes to. You change a fiver and then it’s gone.”

By chance, Anna meets Maudie, who asks her for money to impress a prospective candidate for marriage. Anna lends it, and it is here she realizes the fleeting nature of money. By extension, there is the notion of the fleeting nature of youth, especially for females in the book, and Rhys would seem to argue that both currency and young women are essential parts of capitalism, though neither a fiver nor a young woman are given much say in where they go, or how they are used.

“‘Poor little Anna,’ making his voice very kind. ‘I’m so damned sorry you’ve been having a bad time.’ Making his voice very kind, but the look in his eyes was like a high, smooth, unclimbable wall. No communication possible. You have to be three-quarters mad even to attempt it.”

Anna arranges a meeting with Vincent, who agrees to help her finance her abortion on behalf of Walter. However, he has his own agenda, which is getting Walter’s letters from Anna and assisting Walter to rid his guilt of destroying Anna. It is obvious Vincent does not care. Here, white male privilege is made into a wall impossible for Anna to scale.

“D’Adhémar was with her. He said. ‘T'en fais pas, mon petit. C'est une vaste blague.’”

After arranging matters in relation to her abortion with Vincent, Anna meets Laurie and her friend, D’Adhémar. She is overcome with emotion that her abortion will proceed and that it has been sorted, to which Laurie comforts her and D’Adhémar says to her (translated from French): “Do not worry, kid. This is a big joke.” Life will contain these tough decisions, and it will move from one tragedy to the next. The best approach is to consider life as lightly as possible.

“Everything was always so exactly alike—that was what I could never get used to. And the cold; and the houses all exactly alike, and the streets going north, south, east, west, all exactly alike.”

After Anna has her abortion completed, she moves to her new flat and notices her surroundings. No matter if she has never seen it before, she has come to terms that everything will always be the same here—whether it is the cold or the architecture—and she will never be able to adjust to it. For Anna, this is a realization that she can never fully find a place for herself in England.