Assimilation Aborted and Fantasies Traversed in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark
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Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark places Anna, a half-English, half creole from the West Indies, on the streets of London, and forces her readers to witness Anna’s repeated failures to assimilate. Through such failings, Rhys strips the abstraction from the potentially subversive force of hybridity. Anna is “not quite” and “less than” in both of her worlds. She identifies herself as a West Indian, but she knows that her whiteness prevents her from truly belonging to the region and its culture. The “stereoscopic vision” Anna possesses enables her to penetrate the exclusivism that bolsters the colonial world(s), but her critiques do not resolve her unbelonging for hybridity’s disruptive force works mostly on an epistemological level. Anna’s attempts to assimilate are aborted because she is a self-identified other—London offers no place for one whose tertiary alterity symptomatically reveals the fundamental flaw in the binary framing that undergirds imperial and nationalistic discourses. Through Anna’s failures to belong, Rhys betrays the fantastical nature of the master narrative maintains the imperial order and, thus “traverses” the fantasy that is the imperial/symbolic order. Anna the hybrid returnee fails to really “return,” but because she does, Rhys is also able to reveal that the concept of subversive hybridity is itself a fantasy.
Abstract
Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark places Anna, a half-English, half creole from the West Indies, on the streets of London, and forces her readers to witness Anna’s repeated failures to assimilate. Through such failings, Rhys strips the abstraction from the potentially subversive force of hybridity. Anna is “not quite” and “less than” in both of her worlds. She identifies herself as a West Indian, but she knows that her whiteness prevents her from truly belonging to the region and its culture. The “stereoscopic vision” Anna possesses enables her to penetrate the exclusivism that bolsters the colonial world(s), but her critiques do not resolve her unbelonging for hybridity’s disruptive force works mostly on an epistemological level. Anna’s attempts to assimilate are aborted because she is a self-identified other—London offers no place for one whose tertiary alterity symptomatically reveals the fundamental flaw in the binary framing that undergirds imperial and nationalistic discourses. Through Anna’s failures to belong, Rhys betrays the fantastical nature of the master narrative maintains the imperial order and, thus “traverses” the fantasy that is the imperial/symbolic order. Anna the hybrid returnee fails to really “return,” but because she does, Rhys is also able to reveal that the concept of subversive hybridity is itself a fantasy.
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