Race and Identity Theme Analysis

Anna Morgan’s cultural identity in Voyage in the Dark is hard to define. In some ways, her social positioning seems straightforward: she is, after all, a white woman living in England. However, she doesn’t identify with British culture, nor does she feel connected to her own whiteness. Having grown up in the West Indies, she doesn’t relate to British ways of life, finding everything in England drab, monotonous, and overly modest. She’s also unaccustomed to being surrounded by white people, despite the fact that she herself is white. Indeed, her relationship with her own whiteness has always been strained, as she grew up wishing she were Black. “Being black is warm and gay, being white is cold and sad,” she says at one point while fondly remembering her family’s Black housekeeper, Francine. Sentiments like this one suggest that Anna has fetishized Blackness by relating it to happiness and joy—an association that fails to take into account that to be Black is to be human, which obviously encompasses an entire range of experiences that go far beyond simplistic feelings of joy. What’s more, her romanticization of Blackness also fails to recognize the many hardships that unfortunately come along with being Black in a racist world. Interestingly enough, Anna is seemingly aware of these hardships, since she suggests at one point that Francine probably resents her and her family for their whiteness and their privileged societal position in the West Indies. And yet, her acknowledgement doesn’t seem to impact her desire to be Black, perhaps because she grew up feeling like she didn’t fit into the surrounding culture in the West Indies. Her desire to fit in therefore leads her to view Blackness in overly simplistic, fetishized ways.

The irony, though, is that when Anna moves to England, she actually does experience some of the hardships of being Black (albeit in mild, subtle ways). Because she’s from a predominantly Black part of the world, for example, the other chorus girls in her theater troupe call her “the Hottentot,” which is a racially charged term originally used to refer to the Khoekhoe people of South Africa (and later applied to a Khoekhoe woman who was displayed at “freak shows” under the name Hottentot Venus). The fact that this term doesn’t even apply to people from the West Indies only emphasizes the racist ignorance of the people surrounding Anna in England, ultimately underlining just how little they know—or care—about where she’s from. What’s more, Anna’s British stepmother, Hester, subjects her to racist remarks when she tells her—in a disapproving tone and using the n-word—that she has always spoken like a Black person, which Hester argues is not the way a respectable “lady” should behave. Hester also scornfully implies that Anna’s mother was secretly multiracial, and even though Anna has previously suggested that she wants to be Black, she immediately refutes Hester’s implication by categorically stating that her mother was white. Her fetishization of Blackness therefore only goes so far: for Anna, the idea of being Black is more of a romanticized fantasy than a genuine identification with Blackness. When she feels white, she wishes she were Black. But when people treat her like she’s Black, she fights the suggestion that she isn’t white. On the whole, her lack of identification with both white and Black culture underscores her broader feeling of alienation and isolation in life.