Being black is warm and gay, being white is cold and sad.” Making any generalization about race is simplistic, but Anna’s statement shows part of the reason why she seems to have such low self-worth. Anna herself views black people as “better” than white people and even states “I wanted to be black. In one scene her stepmother Hester expresses disgust that a member of Anna’s family lived openly with his mixed race children. Race was clearly a highly politicised subject for Anna growing up in the Caribbean.
I’m not trying to excuse or condone any dodgy references to race, but I’m just trying to place them in context and highlight the problematic nature of reading these things. However, at a couple of points she also makes concerning references to Jewish people – again, this feels more like an attitude of the time rather than there being anything explicitly anti-Semitic. One of the most glaring things I found at the start of this novel were references to black people in the West Indies – Rhys uses the N word – which today is shocking to read, but I get the feeling that this was simply the common parlance of the time. This novel shows with a rare and brutal honesty a young woman’s conflicted feelings about relationships, her national/racial identity and aimless place in society. She has a number of difficult affairs with men who she becomes financially and emotionally dependent upon while sinking further into a desultory existence. Instead, Rhys shows how this upbringing and move to England created a deeply conflicted sense of identity for Anna which has persisted and grown as she navigates life in the capital. Flashes of her island life recur throughout the novel, but she doesn’t sentimentalize this experience. In richly descriptive passages Rhys observes the marked differences between the colours, textures and smells of this city compared to her West Indies childhood. The novel begins with eighteen year old Anna who makes a meagre living as an actress in London. In Jean Rhys’ third published novel “Voyage in the Dark”, the conflict the author feels between her childhood growing up in the Caribbean island of Dominica and European adulthood comes to the forefront.
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