Abstract
This chapter scrutinizes the complex narrative moves that Jean Rhys makes in Voyage in the Dark in order to illustrate the intricacy of space against a burgeoning tourist industry. Tourism contains clear narrative events: departure, arrival, and return. Voyage in the Dark addresses the failure of tourism as a narrative template. Rhys sketches the backdrop for a complex global subjectivity that becomes apparent in the late twentieth century. This chapter marks a strain of the modern novel that has close ties to postcolonial Caribbean Anglophone literature: a novel that registers transitions in mass visual culture and bridges the aesthetics of shock with the routines of everyday life. Voyage in the Dark demonstrates Rhys’s variation on the Bildungsroman through her record of a life caught in the crosscurrents of a changing empire and rapidly internationalizing modern world.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 269.
- 2.
Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (London: Norton, 1982), 8. References hereafter are cited parenthetically from this edition.
- 3.
Urmila Seshagiri, “Modernist Ashes, Postcolonial Phoenix: Jean Rhys and the Evolution of the English Novel in the Twentieth Century” Modernism/modernity 13, no. 3 (2006): 489.
- 4.
The colonial outskirts are drawn in lush and brilliant colors, where spaces are familiar, maps are the accrual of childhood memories, and one is warmed by a sun that never sets. Conversely, the city is regarded as dull and dangerously synthetic, where alienation amidst uniformity is the rule, one can become lost without directions or a cab, and the grayness of day nearly indistinguishably fades into a darker gray of night. As Elaine Savory has put it, “Anna reads her world as dualist, the West Indies versus England, which signifies many subordinate oppositions.” See Elaine Savory, Jean Rhys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 91. Lucy Wilson suggests, “counterpoint is the main structuring device employed in the novel.” Lucy Wilson, “European or Caribbean: Jean Rhys and the Language of Exile,” in Literature and Exile, edited by David Bevan, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), 79. See also, for example, Thomas Staley, Jean Rhys: A Critical Study (Macmillan Press, 1979), 61. Also see Urmila Seshagiri, Race and the Modernist Imagination (Cornell University Press, 2010), 77–139.
- 5.
Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 265.
- 6.
If in its hostility toward empire’s presumptive cultural values and geographical centering Voyage in the Dark stands as a postcolonial prefiguration, as I shall endeavor to show here, it is also a novel that consolidates a range of modernist concerns. As its very title indicates, Voyage in the Dark offers an uncanny conflation of Virginia Woolf’s A Voyage Out and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Much like both earlier texts, Rhys’s novel forges a complex relationship between home and away through a narrative of human alienation that explores the limits of literary representation and psychological rendering. Yet almost as if set against the work of these literary giants with whom Rhys maintained an uneasy creative relationship, Voyage in the Dark constructively picks up on the real and implied elliptical breaks within these novels.
- 7.
Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 265.
- 8.
Thomas Atwood, The History of the Island of Dominica (London: J. Johnson, 1791, reprinted London: Frank Cass, 1971), iii. See also Thomas Coke, A History of the West Indies (London: A. Paris, 1810), especially 332–383.
- 9.
Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 110.
- 10.
Anna notably offers a thumbnail account of the genocide of the Caribs. See page 105.
- 11.
V.S. Naipaul, “Without a Dog’s Chance,” The New York Review of Books 18, no. 9 (1972): 29.
- 12.
Naipaul, “Without a Dog’s Chance,” 29.
- 13.
Seshigiri develops aspects of Naipaul’s observation to offer a more compelling frame for Anna’s “literary successors” who “move through former capitals of imperial power undaunted by their historical status as empire’s second-class citizens. Racial hybridity, cultural multiplicity, and geographical restlessness no longer hold life-narratives hostage, but instead illuminate the mercurial labyrinths of national and familial history.” Seshigiri, “Modernist Ashes, Postcolonial Phoenix,” 501.
- 14.
Naipaul, “Without a Dog’s Chance,” 29.
- 15.
Akin to the escaped slave (Maroon) culture, Anna’s retreat offers a powerful autonomy. As Gikandi explains, “like the slaves fleeing into the hills to establish autonomy, the modern Caribbean writer seeks to rework European forms and genres to rename the experience of the ‘other’ American.” See Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 20.
- 16.
Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), 3.
- 17.
Margaret Paul Joseph, Caliban in Exile: The Outsider in Caribbean Fiction (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992), 28.
- 18.
Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 141.
- 19.
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 209.
- 20.
Andrea Lewis, “Immigrants, Prostitutes, and Chorus Girls: National Identity in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys,” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 6, no. 2 (1999): 89.
- 21.
See Alvin Thompson, The Haunting Past: Politics, Economics and Race in Caribbean Life (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997).
- 22.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 86.
- 23.
See Nancy Harrison, Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988) 81–82.
- 24.
Veronica Marie Gregg, Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 132–133.
- 25.
Thomas Stothard’s The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies represents a contemporaneous perspective of how the mass migration of blacks to the West Indies was depicted. Its accompanying ode cites Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and unites the two figures through the metaphor of sexual conquest: “The loveliest limbs her form compose./Such as her sister VENUS chose./In FLORENCE. where she’s seen:/Both just alike, except the white./No difference. no—none at night./The beauteous dames between.” Quoted in Neville Connell, “Colonial Life in the West Indies as Depicted in Prints,” Antiques 99, no. 5 (1971): 732.
- 26.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 116.
- 27.
See Andrea Lewis, drawing on Sander Gilman’s work on nineteenth-century sexuality and medicine, “Immigrants, Prostitutes, and Chorus Girls,” 86.
- 28.
Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 109.
- 29.
Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, 108.
- 30.
Deborah Cherry, “Algeria In and Out of the Frame: Visuality and Cultural Tourism in the Nineteenth Century” in Visual Culture and Tourism, eds. David Crouch and Nina Lübbren (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 46.
- 31.
Paul Gilroy has shown how tradition can figure as a source of power in the face of subaltern conditions: “The discourse of tradition is thus frequently articulated within the critiques of modernity produced by blacks in the West. … However, the idea of tradition is often also the culmination, or centre-piece, of a rhetorical gesture that asserts the legitimacy of a black political culture locked in a defensive posture against the unjust powers of white supremacy. … In these conditions … the idea of tradition can constitute a refuge. It provides a temporary home in which shelter and consolation from the vicious forces that threaten the racial community (imagined or otherwise) can be found.” See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 188–189. So far as Anna attempted refuge is driven by what Gilroy discusses as the grasping at the discourses of tradition, it is also indicative of a remarkable failure in attempt to develop double-consciousness.
- 32.
If tourism in Jamaica is taken as an indicator, then the increase in tourism between 1919 and 1922 and 1937 was tenfold. See Frank F. Taylor, “The Tourist Industry in Jamaica, 1919–1939,” Social and Economic Studies 22, no. 2 (1973): 205–228.
- 33.
We need not agree with all the conclusions of anthropologists like Dennison Nash, who investigates the ways in which tourism is a form of imperialism and find suggestive similarities between metropole-periphery relations and the host-guest dynamic that characterizes touristic systems. Dennison Nash, “Tourism as a Form of Imperialism,” in Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, edited by Valene L. Smith (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). See also Taylor who recounts debates about public and private land and the evolution of tourism in Jamaica. Taylor, “The Tourist Industry,” 213–215.
- 34.
See James Froude, The English in the West Indies: Or, the Bow of Ulysses (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1888).
- 35.
“A People in the Making,” The Times, May 24, 1910, 37.
- 36.
Quoted in Taylor, “The Tourist Industry,” 207.
- 37.
“How to See the Empire: Some Notes for Travellers,” The Times, May 24, 1910, 48. Tourists from the United States likely carried Frederick Ober’s popular Guide to the West Indies and Bermudas, which appeared in several editions beyond the first 1908 edition.
- 38.
“The British West Indian Islands: Impressions and Views,” The Times May 24, 1910, 34.
- 39.
See, for example, A. S. Forrest and John Henderson, The West Indies (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1905) and Henry Albert Phillips, White Elephants in the Caribbean: A Magic Journey Through all the West Indies (New York: Robert McBride & Co., 1936).
- 40.
The West Indies Illustrated: Historical and Descriptive[,] Commercial and Industrial[,] Facts, Figures, & Resources, edited and compiled by Allister Macmillan, 1st Edition (London: W. H. & L. Collingridge, 1909), 11.
- 41.
Stephen McKenna, “Hospitable Islands: IV Protean Jamaica,” The Times, April 23, 1923, 9.
- 42.
See Patrick L. Baker, Centering the Periphery: Chaos, Order, and the Ethnohistory of Dominica (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994); J. H. Parry and P. M. Sherlock, A Short History of the West Indies (London: Macmillan, 1971), esp. 133–139; Jan Rogozinski, A Brief History of the Caribbean: From the Arawak and the Carib to the Present (New York: Facts on File, 1999), esp. 356–357; John Bryden, Tourism and Development: A Case Study of the Commonwealth Caribbean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). See also Robert Myers’s extraordinary three volume bibliography on writing about Dominica, A Resource Guide to Dominica, 1493–1986, 3 vols. (New Haven: Human Relations Area Files, 1987).
- 43.
When Rhys returned to the island of Dominica in 1936, Tourist Information Bureau had been open for ten years. See Peter Hulme, Remnants of Conquest: The Island Caribs and their Visitors, 1877–1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 204–243.
- 44.
A. Hyatt Verrill, The Book of the West Indies (New York: Dutton, 1919), 74–75.
- 45.
J. M. Cheney, “Dominica, The Gem of the Antilles,” Travel, January 1910, 191–193.
- 46.
Cheney, “Dominica,” 192.
- 47.
Cheney, “Dominica,” 192.
- 48.
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (New York: Norton, 1982), 76.
- 49.
Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 80.
- 50.
But it is also about knowledge and experience of the West Indian island that Anna holds closely to her as her only possession. She will not allow Walter to violate this last realm despite her momentary lapse into wishing he could see it.
- 51.
Kenneth Ramchand, introduction to Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners, (New York: Longman, 1985), 3–20.
- 52.
Silvio Torres-Saillant has compellingly set the groundwork for a unified West Indian literary tradition that might only include Rhys in a limited way: “Caribbean writers present themselves thematically and formally in contradistinction to their counterparts in the Western metropolises. In their attitude to the West, in relation to which they exist as marginal writers, and in their attitude to the local setting, in relation to which they function as spokespersons, Caribbean writers practice a modus scribendi whose uniqueness corresponds to their unique world.” Silvio Torres-Saillant, Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 91.
- 53.
Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), 2. See also Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Servants of Globalization: Women Migration, and Domestic Work (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
Works Cited
“A People in the Making,” The Times, May 24, 1910.
Atwood, Thomas. The History of the Island of Dominica. London: J. Johnson, 1791, reprinted London: Frank Cass, 1971.
Baker, Patrick L. Centering the Periphery: Chaos, Order, and the Ethnohistory of Dominica. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Bryden, John. Tourism and Development: A Case Study of the Commonwealth Caribbean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.
Cheney, J. M. “Dominica, The Gem of the Antilles.” Travel, January 1910.
Cherry, Deborah. “Algeria In and Out of the Frame: Visuality and Cultural Tourism in the Nineteenth Century.” In Visual Culture and Tourism, edited by David Crouch and Nina Lübbren, 41–48. Oxford: Berg, 2003.
Coke, Thomas. A History of the West Indies. London: A. Paris, 1810.
Connell, Neville. “Colonial Life in the West Indies as Depicted in Prints.” Antiques 99, no. 5 (1971): 732–737.
Ehrenreich, Barbara and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
Forrest, A. S. and John Henderson. The West Indies. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1905.
Froude, James. The English in the West Indies: Or, the Bow of Ulysses. New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1888.
Gikandi, Simon. Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Gregg, Veronica Marie. Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Harrison, Nancy. Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
“How to See the Empire: Some Notes for Travellers,” The Times, May 24, 1910.
Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the native Caribbean, 1492–1797. London: Methuen, 1986.
———. Remnants of Conquest: The Island Caribs and their Visitors, 1877–1998. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Joseph, Margaret Paul. Caliban in Exile: The Outsider in Caribbean Fiction. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992.
Lewis, Andrea. “Immigrants, Prostitutes, and Chorus Girls: National Identity in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys.” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 6, no. 2 (1999): 82–95.
Macmillan, Allister, ed. The West Indies Illustrated: Historical and Descriptive[,] Commercial and Industrial[,] Facts, Figures, & Resources. 1st Edition. London: W. H. & L. Collingridge, 1909.
Marcuse, Herbert. Negations: Essays in Critical Theory. Translated by Jeremy Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995.
McKenna, Stephen. “Hospitable Islands: IV Protean Jamaica.” The Times, April 23, 1923.
Myers, Robert. A Resource Guide to Dominica, 1493–1986. 3 Volumes. New Haven: Human Relations Area Files, 1987.
Naipaul, V.S. “Without a Dog’s Chance.” The New York Review of Books 18, no. 9 (1972): 29–31.
Nash, Dennison. “Tourism as a Form of Imperialism.” In Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, edited by Valene L. Smith, 37–52. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.
Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. Servants of Globalization: Women Migration, and Domestic Work. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Parry, J. H. and P. M. Sherlock. A Short History of the West Indies. London: Macmillan, 1971.
Phillips, Henry Albert. White Elephants in the Caribbean: A Magic Journey Through all the West Indies. New York: Robert McBride & Co., 1936.
Ramchand, Kenneth. Introduction to The Lonely Londoners, 3–20. Text by Samuel Selvon. New York: Longman, 1985.
Rhys, Jean. Voyage in the Dark. London: Norton, 1982.
———. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Norton, 1982.
Rogozinski, Jan. A Brief History of the Caribbean: From the Arawak and the Carib to the Present. New York: Facts on File, 1999.
Savory, Elaine. Jean Rhys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Seshagiri, Urmila. “Modernist Ashes, Postcolonial Phoenix: Jean Rhys and the Evolution of the English Novel in the Twentieth Century.” Modernism/modernity 13, no. 3 (2006): 487–505.
———. Race and the Modernist Imagination (Cornell University Press, 2010).
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” In “Race,” Writing, and Difference, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 262–280. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Staley, Thomas. Jean Rhys: A Critical Study. Macmillan Press, 1979.
Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Taylor, Frank F. “The Tourist Industry in Jamaica, 1919–1939.” Social and Economic Studies 22, no. 2 (1973): 205–228.
“The British West Indian Islands: Impressions and Views,” The Times, May 24, 1910.
Thompson, Alvin. The Haunting Past: Politics, Economics and Race in Caribbean Life. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997.
Torres-Saillant, Silvio. Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Verrill, A. Hyatt. The Book of the West Indies. New York: Dutton, 1919.
Wilson, Lucy. “European or Caribbean: Jean Rhys and the Language of Exile.” In Literature and Exile, edited by David Bevan, 77–90. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cohen, S. (2021). Colonial Advertising and Tourism in the Crosscurrents of Empire. In: Beck, C. (eds) Mobility, Spatiality, and Resistance in Literary and Political Discourse. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83477-7_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83477-7_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-83476-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-83477-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)