Post-scripted Transmissions in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark

Abstract

Epistles fill Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark. The most prominent is Vincent’s letter, which ends Anna’s relationship with Walter and erases her at the level of the written word. In the letter, Vincent replaces Anna’s experiences with maudlin sentiments and includes a postscript requesting her return of Walter’s letters. This article focuses on Anna’s relegation to the postscript of Vincent’s letter, and by extension, to the subtext of her society’s dominant discourses. Examining the narrative’s structure (in particular, the disproportionate quartering of its sections and its circularity), and considering Anna’s relation to subaltern figures, I address Rhys’s strategy of writing Anna’s story both against dominant discourses and within the subtext to which those discourses relegate her. I argue that the novel, read as a ‘post-scripted’ transmission, establishes a communicative impasse that problematizes the recovery of lost voices.

Keywords:

• epistle
• Jean Rhys
• postscript
• subaltern
• subtext
• transmission
• Voyage in the Dark

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Discussions of the novel’s circularity can be found, for example, in Maren Linett (2005), Helen Nebeker (1981), and Teresa F. O’Connor (1986).

2 Because of their frequency, my in-text citations for Voyage in the Dark (1982) will use the simple format ‘(V page#)’.

3 I allude here to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s observation that, in the case of reading the East India Company’s records of the names of satis, ‘one cannot put together a “voice”. The most one can sense is the immense heterogeneity breaking through even such a skeletal and ignorant account’ (2010: 50).

4 The teeth, through their revelation of concealed malice, also allude to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Later in Voyage, Rhys draws a connection between Anna, who burns her own unsent letters in a fire, and the vampiric Lucy, who, in a stupor induced by the Count, tears apart her memorandum about her mother’s death (Stoker 2003: 163).

5 For discussion about the link between the two titles, see, for example, Carol Dell’Amico (2005) and Urmila Seshagiri (2006).

6 Veronica Marie Gregg observes how, in this moment, Rhys recalls a classic artistic construction of a lewd colored female figure against ‘pure’ white individuals; Anna’s recalling the repressed Other during sex with Walter creates a formulation of ‘the white woman’s body, constructed as pure, over and against the lascivious black/colored woman and the body of the English upperclass gentleman’ (1995: 118). Gregg also helpfully cites Sander L. Gilman (1985), whose article discusses how the Nana of Manet’s portrait has the physical form of the sexually stigmatized Hottentot.

7 Ethel’s letter interestingly presents Anna as a dual Jane Eyre / Bertha Mason figure. Ethel initially complains that Anna is ‘deceiving’ and without ‘a pleasant word’ (V 166). In Jane Eyre, Mrs Reed informs Mr Brocklehurst in a letter that Jane has ‘a tendency to deceit’ (Brontë 1994: 39), and Jane writes that the Reeds thought her incapable of ‘adding to their pleasure’ (Brontë 1994: 13). Ethel then remarks on Anna’s cigarette burns, which link her to the incendiary Bertha Mason. Additionally, Ethel’s letter, like Vincent’s letter, includes a revealing postscript. In her postscript, Ethel tells Laurie, ‘Hoping to see you soon. And my landlord has complained about her too’ (V 167). This postscript reveals that Ethel, by shaming Anna and praising Laurie, seeks to acquire Laurie as a roommate and secure her flat on Bird Street.

8 According to her editor Diana Athill, Rhys may have come to prefer the revised ending and to use her commentary on its forced change as one of her ‘“automatic “anti-them” stories, rather than a comment on the book”’ (Brown 1985: 43).

9 Here I engage with the scholarly debate over the better ending. Sympathetic to Rhys’s comment about the original ending as ‘the only possible ending’, many scholars, including Nancy Hemond Brown (1985) and Mary Hanna (2006), privilege the original version over the published version. Meanwhile other scholars, such as O’Connor (1986), argue for the superiority of the published version.