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Part One: Chapter 1
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Voyage in the Dark, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Homesickness, Memory, and Belonging
Sexism, Love, and Power
Race and Identity
Money and Happiness
Summary
Analysis
Anna has dinner with Walter. Each table at the restaurant he chooses is in its own isolated room, giving him and Anna complete privacy—except, that is, for the waiter. Walter orders the waiter around with confidence, demanding that he bring them a new bottle of wine because he claims that the first one is corked. Anna feels herself wanting to laugh but tries to hide her smile, since Walter would know right away that she’s laughing at him. After dinner, Walter compliments Anna by saying that she has the “loveliest teeth.” He also talks about how “pathetic” she looked while shopping for stockings, and then he starts kissing her.
The way Walter orders the waiter around suggests that he wants to impress Anna. Sending back the bottle of wine because it’s “corked”—or spoiled—is most likely his way of posturing as wealthy, powerful, and important in front of Anna. He also doesn’t do a particularly good job of trying to charm her; it’s a bit unusual, after all, to compliment a person’s teeth. Furthermore, he says that she looked “pathetic” while shopping for stockings, effectively insulting her. The only conceivable reason he would say such a thing is to make Anna feel inferior, thus cementing the power imbalance between them.
Active
Themes
After kissing Walter for a moment, Anna gets up and explores the room. She discovers a door she hadn’t noticed and realizes that it opens into an attached bedroom. Walter chuckles at her surprise. She laughs, too, thinking that’s what she’s supposed to do. He kisses her more passionately and doesn’t let go when she tries to push him away. Finally, after she threatens to make a lot of noise, he lets go and apologizes, saying he behaved stupidly. As soon as he’s not holding her anymore, though, she stops disliking him so much.
The existence of a hidden bedroom clarifies the illicit nature of the restaurant Walter chose, making it obvious that he assumed Anna would have sex with him. When she laughs about the bedroom, she does so because she thinks that’s what she’s expected to do, thus indicating that she feels pressured to behave in a certain way. Her impulse makes sense: Walter does pressure her into physical intimacy, and though he eventually stops, he doesn’t immediately listen to her when she resists his advances—a sign that he doesn’t care what she wants.
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Anna wishes kissing Walter had gone differently. She gets her coat and walks into the bedroom, shutting the door behind her and then waiting to see if he follows. She expects him to come in and start kissing her again, and maybe it will feel different than it did before—but he doesn’t come. After a while, Anna leaves the bedroom, and Walter says he thought she fell asleep. They then leave the restaurant, and he takes her home. All the while, she can’t stop thinking about how much the other chorus girls would laugh if she told them what happened.
In bed that night, Anna thinks about her clothes. Walter pointed out that she was wearing all black, which made her self-conscious. She wishes she had better clothes and thinks about how frustrating and sad it is to yearn to be beautiful. Wanting to be beautiful should be enough, but it never is. She doesn’t have enough money to buy new clothes, so she wonders if she’ll always be poor—maybe this is just what her life will be like; maybe she’ll be one of those people who never has enough money but still manages to survive.
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The next day, Anna receives a letter from Walter that says he’s worried about her. He wants her to buy some nice stockings with the money he has enclosed—that is, as long as she won’t look sad while buying them (like she did last time). That day, she buys a beautiful dress and a coat, and the woman at the store treats her with respect, urging her to return soon because they’re getting a shipment of stylish new dresses from Paris.
Back at her room, Anna starts to feel sick. The landlady hasn’t lit the fire in her bedroom, even though she asked her to. When the landlady finally comes upstairs, Anna asks her to light the fire and bring some tea, but the landlady insists that she’s not there to be ordered around. She also tells Anna that she will have to leave the room on Saturday, and when Anna protests, the landlady says that she and her husband don’t put up with women like her. She knows that Anna came “crawling” in at three in the morning, and now here she is bringing back fancy new clothes. “I don’t want no tarts in my house, so now you know,” she says as she leaves.
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Anna writes a letter to Walter telling him that she has fallen ill and asking him to visit. She mails it and then returns to lie down. She feels so terrible that she no longer cares if Walter comes. In a feverish state, she thinks about her home in the West Indies, missing her family’s housekeeper, Francine. Francine is Black, and when Anna was growing up, she always wished she were Black, too. “Being black is warm and gay, being white is cold and sad,” she thinks. Lying in bed, she remembers riding in a boat and watching the West Indies recede in the distance, which was the first time she realized she was leaving home.
Walter arrives and gives Anna a heavy blanket, a bottle of wine, and some nourishing food. He kisses her and says he has to leave town the next day, but that he will arrange for his doctor to come see her this evening. He also promises to speak to her landlady so that she doesn’t have to find a new place to stay. When he leaves, it seems to Anna that the room feels bigger.
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