Voyage in the Dark Study Guide

Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams was born in 1890 to a Welsh doctor and a Creole woman of Scots ancestry on the Caribbean island of Dominica (then a British colony). At 16 she was sent to England, where she studied to be an actress. Williams was ostracized for her Caribbean heritage and accent—she was eventually taken out of school because her instructors deemed her unable to rid herself of the West Indies accent that would prevent her from getting significant stage roles. She then lived in Britain for nearly a decade, surviving on small acting roles and chorus parts. After having a near-fatal abortion paid for by a former lover, Williams began to write. In 1924, in the midst of a tumultuous marriage, Williams met the acclaimed English novelist Ford Madox Ford. Ford took her in as both a protégé and mistress, suggesting that she change her name to Jean Rhys and eventually facilitating the publication of her work, which often dealt with her own experiences of alienation as a woman at the hands of unjust lovers and an exclusionary society. The three major novels that Rhys wrote during the 1930s—After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, and Good Morning, Midnight—were met with mixed critical success. It wasn’t until 1966 (after several decades of anonymity marked by two more marriages and an increasingly serious alcohol problem) that Rhys published Wide Sargasso Sea and rocketed to literary fame. Wide Sargasso Sea remains her most acclaimed work, having garnered her several major literary awards and a place in the canon of postcolonial literature. Rhys died in 1979, in Exeter, England.

Voyage in the Dark features a covert abortion, which taps into England’s anti-abortion history. Although abortion is now legal in the United Kingdom, it was outlawed until 1967, which is why Anna Morgan is forced to secretly find somebody willing to perform the procedure. Abortion was officially banned in England in the Malicious Shooting or Stabbing Act of 1803, in which it was declared that anyone who performed or somehow aided in an abortion would be subject to the death penalty or 14 years in a penal colony. In the coming years, there were a number of changes to this law, most of which simply added new specifications. The Offences Against the Person Act of 1861, for instance, upheld that it was also illegal to give a pregnant woman any sort of drug with the intent of inducing abortion. This provision would seemingly have applied to Anna, since the doctor who ends up treating her after the abortion indicates that she was given the anti-malarial drug quinine, which was sometimes used in an attempt to induce abortion during the first trimester. (Modern medicine suggests that this is not, in reality, an effective method.) Despite the stringent laws against abortion, though, it was certainly not uncommon for women to seek out the procedure—in fact, it was so common at the beginning of the 20th century that induced miscarriages are said to have made up a sixth of all pregnancies at the time.

Voyage in the Dark is similar to several of Jean Rhys’s other novels, which also feature young women leading lonely lives in places that are foreign to them. The protagonist in Good Morning, Midnight, for instance, is a young woman from England trying to establish herself in Paris. Both novels also explore the relationship between money and romance—or, more specifically, between money and sex, as the novels highlight the complex power dynamics that come along with paying someone for sex and romantic affection. Furthermore, Voyage in the Dark’s focus on Anna’s upbringing in the West Indies—and the way she conceives race—aligns with Jean Rhys’s most famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, which is widely considered one of the most influential postcolonial novels set in the Caribbean. To that end, Voyage in the Dark ought to be considered alongside other books about migrating to England from the Caribbean. Novels like Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and George Lammings’s The Emigrants follow the lives of Black characters who move from the West Indies and try to find stability in the racist environment of London in the mid-20th century. Of course, Voyage in the Dark specifically features a white woman’s experience, so it would be especially helpful to think about the novel within the context of The Lonely Londoners and The Emigrants, which approach many of the same topics from a different perspective.