Voyage in the Dark. Anna Morgan is in her late teens and works on the London stage as a chorus girl. She lives a bohemian, hand-to-mouth existence, moving from show to show, rooming house to rooming house. All in all, it's a rather shabby life but still it's a life that satisfies a restlessness in Anna, a need for novelty and excitement. For Anna, a practical, respectable, bourgeoisie life in which one does more or less the same thing every day would be worse than being dead.
Anna was brought to England by her stepmother after the death of her beloved father. She was raised in the West Indies and spends a good deal of time recalling what now seems an idyllic life on that warm, colorful, multicultural island so different from cold drab London. Eventually, actually pretty quickly, Anna attracts the attention of an older Englishman who wants what all older men, English or otherwise, want from young, unattached, attractive women. Anna gives it to him under the vague impression that Walter loves her and that she loves him.
Well, of course, Walter does nothing of the sort and instead eventually, actually pretty quickly, he dumps Anna. Consequently, she drifts aimlessly into a deep depression which is only partially and temporarily relieved by taking up with various other men who treat her no better. She basically becomes a prostitute and never questions the morality of accepting money and gifts in exchange for sex. If anything, to Anna, and many of her female friends, such arrangements seem perfectly natural. Her women friends fail her, too, if in a different sense, unable to provide her with what she needs. But exactly what does she need? She isn't sure—are any of us? One thing seems certain, whatever it is it can't be derived from other people, each of who seem in it only for themselves. Thus Anna's faith in human nature plummets and misanthropy takes root.
If Charles Bukowski had been a woman (yikes, what a thought!), I can imagine he might have written a novel something like "Voyage in the Dark." Jean Rhys, who lived from 1890-1979, is an under-appreciated 20th century female writer whose neglect, it seems, lies in large part due to her depiction of women as vulnerable and naive, often desperate and needy and manipulative (just like men, only in a different way), but even more particularly in her attitude towards male-female relationships, which aren't as "enlightened" by traditional feminist thinking as they might be and therefore don't sit well with traditional feminists who would prefer to see a woman standing defiantly and independently against male power and privilege instead of seeking a way to live with and off it. But Rhys dares to speak a deeper, if politically incorrect, truth about men and women that many traditional feminists just don't want to hear, as if not having it spoken will make it disappear. It won't. I have a feeling that Rhys will one day re-emerge from the literary shadows into which she's been unfairly exiled and be re-evaluated as the important and daring writer that she was—and is.
What does Anna—and Rhys really want—we ask again. Perhaps what she wants is the delicious misery of dissatisfaction, of being an outsider, of an unpredictable life lived on the margins. At one point, while out partying with a pair of male admirers, Anna observes a typical bourgeoisie woman looking at her and a friend with scandalized distaste and remarks to herself "It was terrifying the way they look at you. So that you know that they would see you burnt alive without even turning their heads away: so that you know in yourself that they would watch you burning without even blinking once. Their glassy eyes that don't admit anything so definite as hate. Only just that underground hope that you'll be burn alive, tortured, where they can have a peep. And slowly, slowly you feel the hate back starting..."
It is this sensation, I believe, that Anna (and Rhys) seeks: the transfiguring ecstatic martyrdom of the outsider, the sainthood of those despised by a hypocritical society. Among literary types, this calling places Rhys in exalted—if predominately male company—among the Rimbauds, Genets, Bukowskis and Burroughses of the world of letters; in other words, in the gutter, where girls, including feminist girls, aren't supposed to play.
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