Themes
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.
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.
Themes
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.
What Anna wants out of her relationship with Walter is unclear. After meeting him for the first time, she told Maudie that she didn’t like him, but she still sought him out in London and accepted his invitation to dinner. Her feelings, it seems, are mixed: she’s curious about the possibility of being romantic with him, but she’s not ready to do so. She is, after all, only 18. It’s unsurprising, then, that she finds his extremely forward sexual advances startling and unwelcome. Even though she might be interested in Walter as a potential romantic partner, she’s not ready to dive headlong into a sexual relationship, especially when he behaves so forcefully.
Themes
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.
The topic of money looms large for Anna, who recognizes that wealth can open up all kinds of doors in life. To that end, she views money as something that could have a major impact on how she moves through the world, ultimately making it easier for her to present herself as beautiful. Without money, though, all she can do is wish she had attractive clothes. Her thoughts along these lines help make sense of her interest in Walter—although her interest in him doesn’t seem to be purely motivated by his wealth, there’s no overlooking the fact that being in a relationship with him would make her life a lot easier from a financial perspective.
Themes
Get the entire Voyage in the Dark LitChart as a printable PDF.
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.
Anna has already begun to financially benefit from her dealings with Walter, despite the fact that they’re not even in an official romantic relationship. When the woman at the store shows her so much respect, Anna effectively assumes the role of a wealthy woman with a certain amount of societal power and charisma—something she didn’t have before Walter gave her money.
Themes
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.
The word “tart” is a derogatory term for a woman who behaves in an overtly sexual way. A dated term, it was also sometimes used to refer to sex workers at this time (the early 20th century). The landlady therefore implies that Anna is a sex worker and that Walter is one of her clients. She makes this assumption based on the fact that Anna stayed out late with him and now has enough money to buy expensive clothing. Of course, Anna isn’t a sex worker, but it is the case that her relationship with Walter has a transactional aspect to it, since he's eager to use his money to endear himself to her. Unfortunately for Anna, though, this arrangement leads the landlady to judge her and kick her out of the boardinghouse.
Themes
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.
Anna’s fond memories of home are wrapped up in her complicated thoughts about race. As a white woman, she has idealized Blackness to the point of fetishizing what it means to be Black, claiming that “being black is warm and gay.” This sweeping categorical statement simplifies the many complexities of what it means to be human in general, let alone what it means to be Black. The fact that Anna associates Blackness with nothing but happiness and joy suggests that she has romanticized the idea of being Black, perhaps because she never felt very connected to her identity as a white person living in a predominantly Black community in the West Indies.
Themes
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.
For all of Walter’s off-putting behavior, he shows Anna genuine kindness in this scene by caring for her when she’s ill. She has nobody else willing to look after her, which only emphasizes her sense of isolation in her new life in England. Walter’s kindness, then, is quite significant and has a notable impact on Anna’s overall outlook on her current life, as evidenced by her feeling that the room is bigger after he leaves.
Themes
