Voyage in the Dark
Carnival/Consciousness
Toward the middle of Voyage in the Dark, the protagonist Anna Morgan thinks to herself, “Everybody says, ‘Get on.’ Of course, some people do get on. Yes, but how many? What about what’s-her-name? She got on, didn’t she? ‘Chorus-Girl Marries Peer’s Son.’ Well, what about her? Get on or get out, they say. Get on or get out.”1 That Anna and “they” perceive getting on as getting married reflects the conventions of the nineteenth-century realist novel in which, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis has pointed out, the female protagonist must either marry or die: “Why are these endings in marriage and death both part of a cultural practice of romance? Marriage celebrates the ability to negotiate with sexuality and kinship; death is caused by inabilities or improprieties in this negotiation, a way of deflecting attention from manmade social norms to cosmic sanctions.”2 Jane Eyre provides the perfect example of a friendless orphan who manages her sexual and kinship negotiations successfully; Maggie Tulliver in Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss gives an example of a heroine who fails, who commits an “impropriety” and so must die.
The “they” who say “Get on” might include some readers and critics of Rhys’s novels who seem to admire them in spite of their themes and especially in spite of their characters who definitely do not “get on.” Not only do Rhys’s heroines not get on; they do not die properly, with remorse for their improprieties or with a satisfying integrity of self.
The endings to Jean Rhys’s novels, then, often become the sites of critical puzzlement and debate. The ending to Wide Sargasso Sea, occurring as a dream, appears to some readers as a passive flight from reality, to others a suicide and yet a triumph. The ambivalence is heightened if the reader approaches Antoinette’s “character” from a European psychological point of view, expecting to judge her integrity or her ability to unify her “self” and triumph as an autonomous individual. For feminist readers, the problem becomes especially acute since we wish to draw well-deserved attention to Jean Rhys as a woman writer and perhaps feel that to do so we must somehow redeem her seemingly “failed” female characters. If we are unable to view them as victorious, we become trapped in victimology.
Recent readings of Voyage in the Dark, Rhys’s first novel but third to be published (1934), show similar assumptions at work concerning the interpretation of character, assumptions that become particularly problematic in the moral judgments made concerning the novel’s ending. Voyage in the Dark presents another female character exiled between two worlds. Anna Morgan is also marooned—in the sense of wrecked and abandoned—but, in her case, on the island of Britain, where her complex history and identity as a West Indian are suppressed and where she suffers from poverty and sexual exploitation. At the novel’s beginning, she works as a member of a traveling chorus troupe, then gives this up to become the mistress of a man much older than she; when he grows tired of the affair, she resorts to prostitution. Discovering that she is pregnant, Anna undergoes an illegal abortion that causes her to hemorrhage badly. The doctor who attends her remarks cynically, “She’ll be all right, . . . ready to start all over in no time, I’ve no doubt.” In the final lines of the novel, Anna repeats his words: “I lay . . . and thought about starting all over again. And about being new and fresh. And about mornings, and misty days, when anything might happen. And about starting all over again, all over again . . .” (Voyage, p. 160).
Giving the novel its finely crafted shape and saving it from the melodrama suggested by its plot, narrative juxtapositions of several voices, all spoken from Anna’s first-person point of view, delineate the powerful cultural conflicts that Anna internalizes. These conflicts map her unconscious, giving voice to several “selves” and to at least two different and conflicting modes of ironic commentary. Recognizing the narrative fragmentation and the various narrating voices, critics look for resolution to the conflicts and unification of the various selves as a sign of Anna’s success as a heroine. And most often, they must concede her “failure,” commenting on her nostalgic or “childish” return to her past and wishful thinking as substitutes for successful integration and adaptation to the present.3
Readings of the ending are complicated by the now well known fact that Rhys’s publisher asked her to change the original version in which Anna dies from the abortion.4 Rhys altered the last lines, heightening their ambiguity, and also cut out large sections of the final part of the novel. Since Rhys apparently preferred her original version, some critics read the published one as censored and uncharacteristic of her writing. Others defend the published version. Both arguments rely on notions of formal or thematic unity to make their cases. The aesthetic value of unity matches the criterion for character “success” that lies behind frequent critical judgments of Anna. The prevailing disunity of her consciousness in the last section of both versions and her inability to make her past and present “fit” remain signs of her failure to progress beyond what may be perceived as her degraded condition or, in more sympathetic readings, her need for an absent mother.5
But as the mythmaking strategies in Wide Sargasso Sea indicate, the notion of a unified autonomous self conflicts with the protagonist’s quest, a quest for place within a collective history and pluralist culture. European and North American psychological theories of identity and ego development impose inappropriate or only partially appropriate values on texts that emerge from a Caribbean context. Even Lacanian psychoanalysis, with its acknowledgment of the decentered subject, remains focused on the individual’s internalized oppositions and differences within European patriarchal society, ignoring broader cultural differences and collective histories.
Perhaps the most important signal of the importance of Caribbean history and culture to our understanding of Voyage in the Dark appears in its ending and in the choices Rhys made in rewriting it. In the brief final section of both versions of the novel, when Anna is suffering fever and delirium from loss of blood, long passages in italics portray her return, in fantasy, to her Caribbean homeland and, specifically, to its celebration of Carnival. The images recalled in these passages are frightening in their grotesqueness. From a white European point of view, they appear especially threatening, and in both versions Anna recalls the voices of her father and aunt: “A pretty useful mask that white one watch it and the slobbering tongue of an idiot will stick out—a mask Father said with an idiot behind it I believe the whole damned business is like that—Hester said Gerald the child’s listening—oh no she isn’t Father said she’s looking out of the window and quite right too—it ought to be stopped somebody said it’s not a decent and respectable way to go on it ought to be stopped . . .” (Voyage, p. 158). At first in this section, Anna watches with the rest of her family, separated from Carnival by “the slats of the jalousies” and by her white Euro-Creole heritage. Later, however, she becomes part of Carnival’s festivities—“dancing forwards and backwards backwards and forwards whirling round and round” (Voyage, p. 159).
Like Antoinette, Anna has always identified with the native and black people of her island, a home she deliberately recalls in as much concrete and sensual detail as possible throughout the novel, beginning with its first paragraph: “It was funny but that was what I thought about more than anything else—the smell of the streets and the smells of frangipanni and lime juice and cinnamon and cloves, and sweets made of ginger and syrup, and incense after funerals or Corpus Christi processions . . .” (Voyage, p. 7). While memories of island celebrations thus frame the novel, they cannot provide an easy or nostalgic return to an idyllic past. Anna has always known that even her best friend and nurse, Francine, must have disliked her “because I was white . . . I would never be able to explain to her that I hated being white” (Voyage, p. 60). Like Antoinette, she is estranged even from her “home” and most painfully from the people she admires but from whom the history of colonial conquest has separated her. Her participation, in the end, in the celebrations of Carnival represents a significant cultural choice—but one that brings with it a dizzying surrender to something considered “not decent” by her family.
The chaos of carnival voices and the cultural conflicts of the concluding passages markedly intensify what appears throughout the narrative as several fields of consciousness in which various voices speak. Some are spoken by Anna or different versions of Anna, some by those who give shape to and interpret her conflicting identities, internalized voices of “they” who say “Get on or get out.” The get-on-or-get-out passage provides an excellent example of what Mikhail Bakhtin has called the “internal dialogization” of novelistic “heteroglossia.” The style of Voyage in the Dark, with its multiple voices focused within first-person narration, seems to deliberately exhibit this quality of the novel, an exhibition made possible by the “social heteroglossia” enriching the differences and contradictions within the character.6 The first line of the passage, “Everybody says, ‘Get on,’” is spoken by the first-person narrator, addressing herself. It sets up a dialogue, anticipating a response. But even before the response appears, the line itself is divided dialogically by its quotation of what “Everybody” says so that already two voices speak. The second line, “Of course, some people do get on,” replies, but in the same narrative voice as the first line, a commentary or extension of the first thought. The third line, “Yes, but how many?” introduces a second voice within the speaker that questions and criticizes the official commentary quoted by the first voice. The next two lines, “What about what’s-her-name? She got on, didn’t she?” argues back, presumably in the now merged voice of the first narrator and “Everybody,” whose position she has taken for the moment. The merged voice then quotes another, from a newspaper headline, in support of her position, “Chorus-Girl Marries Peer’s Son.” Then the questioning, critical voice responds, “Well, what about her?” indicating the inadequacy of the evidence and expressing frustration at the ideology that prevails in spite of the logic of numbers and probability. The last two lines appear to circle back to the first, repeating what “they” say: “Get on or get out, they say. Get on or get out.”
The repetition contains an important difference, however, acquired by the phrase’s movement among the various voices of the internal dialogue. Like the passage discussed in Part 1, in which Anna’s repetition of the phrase “Oceans away from despair” takes on a new meaning, so has the phrase “get on,” especially with the addition of “or get out.” The lack of social logic behind the ideology has already been exposed; the addition of “or get out” exposes a simplistic either- or thinking in popular opinion. The repetition, however, indicates a futile irony—no matter how simplistic, how illogical, “they” will still say it, and anyone who questions or criticizes will find no alternative. The passage has become an ironic commentary on the power of popular opinion, fed by the official, quoted words of newspapers, and masking the social reality of young women in Anna’s position.
Similar dialogization occurs in Wide Sargasso Sea. The first line, for instance, quotes another “they”: “They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.” We could read the mad play of voices in Rochester’s mind in which he argues with Christophine, himself, and Antoinette as a similar display of novelistic heteroglossia, and, indeed, conflicts of voices, both external and internal, seem to shape the style of all of Rhys’s novels. In Voyage in the Dark, however, we see the tie between this deliberate polyglot and the events of Carnival.
According to Bakhtin, the novel’s unofficial, seemingly disorganized language developed in “the lower levels, on the stages of local fairs and at buffoon spectacles, [where] the heteroglossia of the clown sounded forth . . . where all ‘languages’ were masks and where no language could claim to be an authentic, incontestable face.”7 While Bakhtin discusses the European festivals of the Middle Ages, his descriptions parallel those of Caribbean carnivals, similarities due in great part to the cultural interdynamics of conquest that brought European peasant influences to the Caribbean.8 West Indian writers, like Jean Rhys, have direct access in their own lives to the languages of Carnival and, in adopting the form of the novel, bring it close to its historical sources.
Of course, Jean Rhys’s writing was also influenced by European modernism, and its peculiar form of irony as well as its emphasis on spareness, fragmentation, and interiority complicate the effects of carnival languages in her writing. It may be helpful to describe the ways various voices appear in Voyage in the Dark and the dialogic positions they take.
Some of the voices appear in memories, marked by ellipses, quotation marks, or italics or inserted in the narrative through the conventional “I would pretend . . .” or “I thought of . . .” Others appear, not as memories but as commentaries, often parenthetical or, again, distinguished by italics. Through her own various voices Anna sometimes coaches herself (“It’s soppy always to look sad. Funny stories—remember some, for God’s sake”), or makes naive wishes (“This is a beginning. Out of this warm room that smells of fur, I’ll go to all the lovely places I’ve ever dreamt of. This is the beginning”), or comments ironically, with an unaccountable sophistication, on her own situation (“This is England, and I’m in a nice, clean English room with all the dirt swept under the bed”). The formal play of voices and the clash of cultures that sparks them parallels the carnival theme of the final section. Considering them together, we can discern at least two different kinds of irony in the novel, one influenced by European modernism, the other by carnival traditions of satire and the grotesque. Both kinds of irony are at work throughout the novel, sometimes merging, sometimes playing against one another, but always moving the narrative away from a purely interior or subjective consciousness to the formal system of language and public discourse or into a collective cultural history.
Returning, for a moment, to the get-on-or-get-out passage, we see in it the same kind of irony expressed through internal dialogization that we find in the italicized passage concerning the “nice clean English room with all the dirt swept under the bed.” Both passages challenge an official and prevailing rule, but the concluding voice expresses futility or defeat in the face of the rale’s power. In this sense, we see a modernist irony at work, one that concentrates on the negative, acknowledging loss of power and hope. Paul Fussell has described the irony of the First World War and its laughter as “. . . the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate.” Such irony, he states, resulted from the war being so much worse than expected and from the reversal of the “Idea of Progress” it brought about.9 While Fussell describes a completely masculine world and alteration in masculine consciousness, he nevertheless describes very well the kind of irony expressed in Rhys’s novel with its feminine characters and setting. The great trick played on Anna and most young women of her class is precisely in the promise of “getting on” (another way of assuming progress), finding love, marrying a duke, and the reality is indeed much worse than expected. In a sense, Anna has joined a war that waged for control of women’s labor and sexuality, and it too takes place in 1914, the year in which Voyage in the Dark is set. In the next chapter, I will go into more detail concerning the nature of this war and its battle over and on women’s bodies. Here I want to concentrate on the specifically female modernist irony developed in the novel.
Making a rough distinction, we can read three narrative voices in Voyage: the first narrates present events in England, the second recalls past associations in Dominica, and the third comments ironically on the gap between the first two. Juxtapositions of the first two voices portray a double consciousness like the dual personality social scientists note as characteristic of marginal individuals caught between two conflicting cultures.10 The third voice first appears in the second chapter, following Anna’s meeting with Walter Jeffries and the beginning of her affair with him. He has taken her to dine at a hotel restaurant, in a private room with adjoining bedroom. Anna resists his attempts to seduce her but then accepts the money he sends the next morning. In spite of feeling ill, she goes out shopping and buys a new outfit of clothing. The passages narrating her interaction with the saleswomen include the paragraph in italics, previously quoted, in which Anna almost chants her hopes: “This is a beginning. Out of this warm room that smells of fur I’ll go to all the lovely places I’ve ever dreamt of. This is the beginning” (Voyage, p. 24). Here she believes the promise made to her, naively accepting the possibility of love and getting on.
When she returns to her room, however, her landlady evicts her, saying, “I don’t want no tarts in my house, so now you know” (Voyage, p. 25). Faced with illness and homelessness, Anna writes Walter, asking him to visit. Here all three narrative voices come into play:
I went out and posted the letter and got some ammoniated quinine. It was nearly three o’clock. But when I had taken the quinine and had lain down again I felt too ill to care whether he came or not.
This is England, and I’m in a nice, clean English room with all the dirt swept under the bed.
It got so dark but I couldn’t get up to light the gas. I felt as if there were weights on my legs so that I couldn’t move. Like that time at home when I had fever and it was afternoon and the jalousies were down and yellow light came in through the slats and lay on the floor in bars. . . . Then Francine came in and . . . changed the bandage round my head and it was ice-cold and she started fanning me with a palm-leaf fan. (Voyage, p. 26)
Francine’s attentions bring her relief and happiness. In the gap between that childhood contentment and her present condition, in which she is already marked a “tart” and becomes “too ill to care,” appears the newly ironic third voice. The italics link it to the earlier passage concerning new beginnings, but the connection is one of contrast. Naiveté has changed to cynicism. The landlady’s reinterpretation of her status and her dependency on Walter effect the change.
This narrative technique of contrasting and disjunctive voices achieves, nevertheless, a shifting formal unity that depends on the dialogic intervention of the ironic third voice. Irony emerges from a perceived gap between some ideal and a reality that falls short of or obliterates the ideal. For Fussell, in discussing the effects of World War I on masculine literary consciousness, the gap between the ideal of progress and the actual experience of the war’s horrors generated an ironic laughter. Georg Lukàcs has described novelistic irony more broadly as bridging the chasm separating the “problematic hero’s” ideals and the social reality he encounters. According to Lukàcs, irony indicates a subjective self-recognition aimed at both the author and the author’s heroes.11 As a formal device, it becomes objective, abolishing the subjectivity it recognizes and giving the novel, which would otherwise be shapeless, its formal cohesion. Rhys has retained the naive character and the ironic narrator of the classical novel described by Lukàcs. The irony in this example belongs, however, to the modernist period, indicating the sense of loss and betrayal noted by Fussell. The phrase “dirt swept under the bed” recalls Fredric Jameson’s discussion of modernist irony as expressing a perceived gap between authentic existence and actual experience, a gap that stands in for knowledge of colonialism as a determining condition of subjectivity. That knowledge remains under the bed, so to speak, in early twentieth-century England, intent on defending the privatized middle-class values that enjoin Anna to “get on.” In recognizing such hypocrisy and speaking for that which has been silenced or swept from sight, the ironic voice in this passage and others like it becomes an objective, formal means of exposing and naming the gap from which it emerges. In this sense it participates in the negativity that Bakhtin associates with the twentieth century but also opens up the narrow vision both he and Jameson see in European modernist irony.
Bakhtin traces the changes that the grotesque realism of medieval carnival imagery underwent through the Renaissance, romantic, and modern periods. He criticizes twentieth-century theories of the grotesque for allowing modernist forms to determine their concepts. Discussing Wolfgang Kayser’s work, Bakhtin states, “Kayser’s definitions first of all strike us by the gloomy, terrifying tone of the grotesque world that alone the author sees. In reality gloom is completely alien to the entire development of this world up to the romantic period.”12 A full definition of grotesque realism must acknowledge the liberating transformations of “all that was frightening in ordinary life . . . into amusing or ludicrous monstrosities” that characterized carnivals in the Middle Ages. The modernist period is responsible for narrowing our vision of the grotesque to the hostile, the alienated, and to what Bakhtin perceives as an existential dread of life.
The irony expressed in Anna’s third voice when it remarks upon the dirt swept under the bed expresses that negativity and modernist despair. In addition, the “weights on my legs” and fever that Anna suffers in this scene portray an existential anxiety and paralysis rather than the comic physical degradation Bakhtin describes as essential to carnivalesque imagery. Anna’s social isolation and disillusionment preclude any shared comic laughter that might have transformed the alienation portrayed by her physical symptoms. Her disillusionment results from a rise and fall of expectations for social mobility and personal happiness that would only be experienced by marginalized, working-class women. The deflation of Anna’s innocent beliefs in love, beauty, and happiness continues throughout the novel in this specifically female modernist irony, aimed at her own sexual naiveté and the sexual hypocrisy that destroys it. Yet consistently she names that hypocrisy and thus helps to reveal the sources of her disillusionment.
For example, after Walter leaves Anna and she begins entertaining other men, she is able to reflect on women’s faith in clothes, a faith she had previously shared: “The clothes of most of the women who passed were like caricatures of the clothes in the shop-windows, but when they stopped to look you saw that their eyes were fixed on the future. ‘If I could buy this, then of course I’d be quite different.’ Keep hope alive and you can do anything, and that’s the way the world goes round, the way they keep the world rolling” (Voyage, p. 112). The anonymous but powerful “they” appears in her consciousness now as recognition of social forces opposed to and defeating her earlier dreams. As the irony registers Anna’s growing awareness of these official voices and the forces of society, so does it formally move from subjectivity to objectivity, relocating Anna’s conflicts in the formal system of language and literary conventions. In this way it provides a way out of interiority, a mediating voice between conflicting private and public experiences.
Dialogic in nature, the ironic narrative voice depends upon an increasingly multiple perspective. For example, Anna’s use of the word “lady” transforms its meaning several times, according to her experiences and growing awareness. When she and her friend Maudie go out walking in the first chapter, Maudie comments, “There’s one thing about you . . . you always look ladylike.” Anna replies, in the spirit of a working girl, “Oh God . . . who wants to look ladylike?” But we suspect that she does because the introductory passages have already clued us to Anna’s outsider status among the chorus members and her rather fine sensibility. Compared with Maudie, she is very young and shy, and it matters to her that Walter Jeffries “didn’t look at my breasts or my legs as they usually do.” On the other hand, her stepmother, Hester Morgan, who Anna later discovers has cheated her out of an inheritance, speaks “an English lady’s voice with a sharp, cutting edge to it.” In her reply to Maudie at least three voices dialogue with one another concerning the meaning of “lady”—one that attempts a flippant working-girl attitude and covers a second voice that secretly longs to be considered a lady, and a third that despises the cruel snobbery in her stepmother’s ladylike voice.
After Anna begins her liaison with Walter, following his visit during her illness, she comments again on the qualities of a lady. Stepping out of her room, she is followed by her landlady, who reminds her that she’s been evicted: “But she stayed there staring at me, so I went outside and finished putting on my gloves standing on the doorstep. (A lady always puts on her gloves before going into the street.)” (Voyage, p. 29). The parenthetical comment might well appear in quotation marks or prefaced by “they say,” for it clearly expresses an internalized rule for middle-class feminine behavior. The parentheses highlight its ironic tone, which is directed both at the “they” who implicitly say this and the Anna who has internalized it. It also points to the gap, now repeatedly exposed by the landlady’s remarks, between Anna’s image of what she wished to become and the way others perceive her. Her earlier ambivalence has become more directly cynical, critical of herself and the social forms that distinguish “ladies” from “tarts.”
In a third perspective on the word “lady,” Anna treats it explicitly as a word, giving it an embodied, objectlike status. Abandoned by Walter, she has moved in with a woman named Ethel who brings men to their flat presumably for manicures, insisting repeatedly that she is “really a lady.” Anna thinks, “A lady—some words have a long, thin neck that you’d like to strangle” (Voyage, p. 120). Here the ironic narrative voice openly and violently rebels, at the same time moving Anna’s perceptions into the realm of language and its words. It is as if she has acknowledged the power of the words said by “Everybody,” given them actual bodies, and thus made them also vulnerable to her now angry desire for revenge. It is not surprising after her discoveries about Hester’s deceit that she should want revenge, but the rebellion also follows the end of all her hopes for the relationship with Walter. The double betrayal of her only female relative and her male lover forces her to recognize the grand “trick” played upon her. She harbors no further illusions. And while such complete disillusionment should indicate the modernist irony we have already found in Voyage, here I think it verges on another, historically embedded language—that of carnival satire.
Carnival laughter results from the direct confrontation with terror, the grotesque, and a rebellious “turnabout.” The ritualistic chant that Jean Rhys quotes in her autobiography, spoken by her real-life friend Francine, practices this turnabout: “Francine would say, ‘Timtim.’ I had to answer ‘Bois sèche,’ then she’d say, ‘Tablier Madame est derrière dos’ (Madam’s apron is back to front).”13 The fictional Francine speaks only a part of this ritualistic exchange, ending with the response “Bois sèche,” which Rhys states referred to an obeah god. The allusion to reversal, what Bakhtin calls the “logic of inside out” or “from front to rear,” remains in Anna’s memory of her black friend. And the logic shapes her increasingly rebellious attack on both the idea and the word “lady.”
In the spirit of Carnival, too, Anna parodies Hester, imitating and exaggerating her ladylike voice: “Now that I’ve spoken you can hear that I’m a lady. I have spoken and I suppose you now realize that I’m an English gentlewoman. I have my doubts about you. Speak up and I will place you at once. Speak up, for I fear the worst. That sort of voice” (Voyage, p. 49). At times, her parodies eliminate punctuation, running Hester’s phrases and sentences together to emphasize their monotonous, oppressive attempts to exclude all other voices: “Because don’t imagine that I don’t guess how you’re going on. Only some things must be ignored some things I refuse to be mixed up with I refuse to think about even” (Voyage, p. 54). Such imitation and parody through excess characterized Carnival festivities in which blacks and coloreds imitated their masters’ European dress, dance styles, and class distinctions, but with an exaggeration that ridiculed. Hester’s fraud has declassed Anna, who, in Hester’s eyes, was always reduced to the station of a black, as evidenced by her unladylike voice.
As Bakhtin states, Carnival allowed the play of many voices, languages from all strata of society, liberating them from the prevailing order.14 It’s not surprising, then, that Hester’s attempts to maintain the prevailing order concentrate on the voice: “I tried to teach you to talk like a lady and behave like a lady and not like a nigger and of course I couldn’t do it. Impossible to get you away from the servants. That awful sing-song voice you had! Exactly like a nigger you talked—and still do. Exactly like that dreadful Francine. When you were jabbering away together in the pantry I never could tell which one of you was speaking” (Voyage, p. 55). Hester battles with Francine over Anna’s voice, while Anna, through her memories of Francine’s stories, songs, and laughter, struggles to maintain the multiplicitous language of Carnival, using its principles to resist the reduction of her self to a one-dimensional identity.
Throughout the novel, Anna’s acquaintances refuse to listen to her descriptions of the West Indies, confuse it with other “hot places,” and call her names like “the Hottentot.” When she explains her background to Walter, he merely humors her:
“I’m the fifth generation born out there, on my mother’s side.”
“Are you really?” he said, still a bit as if he were laughing at me. (Voyage, p. 44)
But Anna persists, describing a slave list she once saw on her mother’s family’s estate, a Venezuelan girl she knew at school, and the boatman Black Pappy. When Walter says he prefers “cold places,” Anna stops speaking. Her memories surface, however, when she and Walter make love, an act that somehow identifies her with the mulatto girl whose name she had seen on the slave list: “Mailotte Boyd, aged 18. Mailotte Boyd, aged 18 . . . . . . But I like it like this. I don’t want it any other way but this” (Voyage, p. 47).
Walter’s upper-class masculine and very English preferences silence Anna’s voice, which contains the voices of multiple cultures and races, a multiplicity that gives her comfort and a sense of identity. Silenced, she accepts identification with the slave girl, entering, in her relationship with Walter, a slavelike dependency and submission. Though Walter is portrayed as a decent enough man by the standards of his own class, he nevertheless treats Anna as a master would a slave, commenting on her lovely teeth, for instance, and insisting that her virginity is “the only thing that matters.” Walter expresses his attitudes in a language more sophisticated than that of Anna’s landlady or friends, but nevertheless, in all of their eyes, Anna can be one of two or at most three things—a “Virgin,” the name given her by the chorus members at the beginning of the novel, or a “tart,” the name her landlady bestows upon her, or somewhere in between, a kept mistress, but this becomes only a step on the way to prostitution. In this scenario, the official dichotomy of lady/whore (lady/“nigger” in Hester’s version) works forcefully to obliterate all the voices within Anna, all the selves she once was or might have become.
Wilson Harris has described one of the Caribbean slave’s methods of survival and resistance in the following way: “[the slave] found himself spiritually alone since he worked side by side with others who spoke different dialects. The creative human consolation . . . lies in the search for a kind of inward dialogue and space when one is deprived of a ready conversational tongue and hackneyed comfortable speech.”15
The voyage from Dominica to England places Anna in a slavelike position. Deprived of the mixed language of patois that she shared with Francine, deprived of even the opportunity to describe her Caribbean experiences to people who would believe or value them, Anna finds “creative consolation” in “inward dialogue and space.” That space opens even further in the final passages when Anna’s inward dialogue takes her back to the Constance estate of her mother’s family and to the time of Carnival.
When Anna first becomes aware of her pregnancy, her memories of Dominica intensify; she tries hard to remember, as if her memories can shield her from what is happening in the present. Like Antoinette, she has been in danger of losing her memory, of becoming a zombie, dead while living only as others, alien to her, see her. Through her memory, she attempts to return to her mother’s home, recalling the road, mounting her horse, riding by the sea and through the coconut palms along the road. Francine’s voice appears in parentheses here: “(Francine says that if you wash your face in fresh coconut-water every day you are always young and unwrinkled, however long you live),” emphasizing the female culture and bonding central to her memories. That Anna quotes Francine so frequently also indicates the degree to which Francine’s voice has become a part of Anna’s, constituting the internal dialogue necessary to her spiritual survival.
The journey to Constance Estate contains, like Carnival, which she soon recalls, beauty, pleasure, and terror. It becomes a metaphor for Anna’s life voyage: “It took three hours to get to Constance Estate. It was as long as a life sometimes.” The more certain of her pregnancy she becomes, however, the more her memories focus on the kind of argument portrayed most intensely in the concluding Carnival passages—arguments over Caribbean cultural practices and beliefs: “and Anne Chewett used to say that it’s haunted and obeah—she had been in gaol for obeah (obeah women who dig up dead people and cut their fingers off and go to gaol for it—it’s hands that are obeah)—but can’t they do damned funny things—Oh if you lived here you wouldn’t take them so seriously as all that—” (Voyage, p. 139). The voice that prevails, however, convinces her that she has undergone metamorphosis and become something other than human: “—they look like people but their eyes are red and staring and they’re soucriants at night—looking in the glass and thinking sometimes my eyes look like a soucriant’s eyes . . .” (Voyage, p. 139). Later, prefiguring her abortion, she dreams of returning to an island, on board ship with a dead child. The island “was home except that the trees were all wrong.”
Fear and alienation predominate in these memories, the inevitable feelings of an exile returning to a home in which she was always an outsider so that the home was never quite right. Knowledgeable of its culture, she remains nevertheless afraid of it. Anna’s visit to the abortionist, her return to the flat she shares with Laurie, the pain she experiences and the bleeding are all punctuated and made meaningful by memories of these earlier fears. Soon the multiplicitous internal voices and faces become composites, so that the white face of a man with whom she has had sex, the white face of the doctor, and the white Carnival mask condense into the same image. Similarly the voice saying “Stop, please stop,” at first Anna’s voice speaking to the man with the white face, then speaking to the doctor, metamorphoses into both her aunt’s attitude toward Carnival and the landlady’s voice observing about Anna’s bleeding that “it ought to be stopped.”
These two condensed elements of Anna’s delirium are central to understanding the role of Carnival in this passage. The white mask becomes the image that brings together all of Anna’s most immediate and fearful visions. It represents the trick played upon her by Walter, by England and its white culture, and by her own naiveté, “Like that time at home with Meta, when it was Masquerade and she came to see me and put out her tongue at me through the slit in her mask” (Voyage, p. 153).
However, carnival masks symbolize transformation and metamorphosis, the visual image of turnabout. Anna recalls in detail the masks worn by the players as she watched from behind the jalousie shades:
—the masks the men wore were a crude pink with the eyes squinting near together squinting but the masks the women wore were made of close-meshed wire covering the whole face and tied at the back of the head—the handkerchief that went over the back of the head hid the strings and over the slits for the eyes mild blue eyes were painted then there was a small straight nose and a little red heart-shaped mouth and another slit so that they could put their tongues out at you—(Voyage, p. 158)
These masks clearly imitate to excess, to the point of ridicule, the faces of pink, mildly blue-eyed, straight-nosed, and painted-mouthed white men and women. Commenting on the differences between the masks worn by the men and those worn by the women, Deborah Kelly Kloepfer has argued that the wire covering of the women’s masks portrays the silencing of all women.16 This interpretation ignores the fact that the black women wearing them are imitating white women, “their dark necks and arms covered with white powder.” It also ignores the irony of Anna’s uncle’s statement, “—you can’t expect niggers to behave like white people all the time.” The blacks do not behave like white people (they dance and sing), but they “act” like white people, parodying the whites’ behavior, including the censorship imposed upon white women within their own culture.
The wire mesh, covering the whole face and worn by the black women, suggests another turnabout in white-black relations enacted by the Carnival players. A common punishment administered to slaves for intoxication consisted of a wooden mask fitted tightly onto the head with slits for eyes, a triangular space for the nose, but no mouth opening.17 It is interesting to compare this instrument with that used in seventeenth-century England as a punishment for “scolds.” To punish the woman accused of what we might call too much voice, a mask constructed like an open frame was fitted over the whole face. A metal lever with sharp points on it was forced into her mouth, and the “brancks,” as it was called, tied in the back with a long string by which the woman was led about.18 By simply parodying what they observed in white sexual relationships and gender behavior, the black women confront the white “ladies” with their own subordinant and silenced condition, one paralleled to that of the black slaves in the visual representation of muzzling.
Anna’s memory of this particular mask effects a turnabout in her consciousness concerning the alliances she wishes to make and point of view that she takes. The argument over Carnival, whether it ought to be allowed or “ought to be stopped,” that her white relatives carry on prompts her to reverse her position and to take up again her journey home. As she listens to “their voices . . . going up and down,” Anna’s fears are altered by sudden understanding: “I was looking out of the window and I knew why the masks were laughing” (Voyage, p. 159). In the original version, an additional line explains, “But I knew why they were laughing they were laughing at the idea that anybody black would want to be white.”19 In both versions, Anna’s moment of understanding the blacks’ point of view transforms her from a distant and frightened observer to a giddy participant. In both versions the carnivalesque heteroglossia intensifies; past and present, Caribbean and English voices enter the delirious dialogue. Now, in her vision, she joins the dancing, and when Walter’s voice interrupts, saying “You ought to be going,” rather than returning to her room as she would have done during their affair, she balances herself on a saddle and begins her horseback journey again, taking the same road, but with a different perspective and arriving at a different place.
The earlier memory of this journey concluded with the frightening figure of another silenced woman, a “woman with yaws . . . her nose and mouth were eaten away” (Voyage, p. 130). This time Anna’s ride takes her to the same “turning where the shadow is always the same shape—shadows are ghosts you look at them and you don’t see it only sometimes you see it like now I see—.” What she sees now is not the diseased beggar woman, but “a cold moon looking down on a place where nobody is a place full of stones where nobody is” (Voyage, p. 160). The description suggests that her home no longer exists, but has become a ruin, reminiscent of the ruined Coulibri in Wide Sargasso Sea, creator of ghosts and nobodies. Discovery of this more accurate image of her home where both parents no longer live and where she can in reality no longer return signals the deciding point in Anna’s consciousness of her multiplicitous selves. She may succumb to others’ views of her and become nobody, or she may persist: “I thought I’m going to fall nothing can save me now but still I clung desperately with my knees feeling very sick” (Voyage, p. 160). The passage indicates her persistence and also that her journey is not yet complete.
Death completes her journey in the earlier version and may have seemed to Jean Rhys a more logical closure for the novel. It is certainly more logical by the literary criteria Rachel Blau DuPlessis has identified that demand either marriage or death for a novel’s heroine. Adding ambiguity rather than closure, the published ending completes Anna’s journey in a different way. Though Rhys cut large sections of the final chapter for the published version, she cut only a few brief lines from the scenes describing Carnival. Her decision to concentrate on those scenes indicates the importance of carnival images and logic in the formal dynamics of the novel and suggests that they will figure in its conclusion.
When Anna repeats the doctor’s words, “ready to start all over again,” with her more hopeful vision of “being new and fresh,” it seems at first that she has learned nothing but simply returned to her previous naiveté and wishful thinking. Taken in the context of the Carnival passages, however, this inner dialogue with herself recalls one of the most important aspects of carnival logic and laughter.
Anna has undergone what we might call a series of bodily degradations, beginning with the sexual bartering that initiates her affair with Walter, continuing in her relations with other men in which she exchanges sex for money, and resulting in her nearly fatal abortion. This is probably the only work of fiction in the early twentieth-century that describes abortion from the woman’s point of view, and in doing so it borders on the “grotesque realism” that Bakhtin describes as essential to carnival language. Grotesque realism depends upon the body and bodily life, but as collectively, not individually, experienced. It represents the cycles of fertility, pregnancy, deterioration, dismemberment, and decay, and involves the “essential principle of degradation.” This collectively experienced cycle of life is opposed to the European realistic convention of “character.” In the realist convention, Bakhtin argues,
the process of degeneration and disintegration . . . (the second link of becoming) drops out and is replaced by moral sententiousness and abstract concepts. What remains is nothing but a corpse, old age deprived of pregnancy, equal to itself alone; it is alienated and torn away from the whole in which it had been linked to that other, younger link in the chain of growth and development. . . . Hence all these sterile images representing “character,” all these professional lawyers, merchants, matchmakers, old men and women, all these masks offered by degenerate, petty realism.20
We might add to his list all these virgins, tarts, and fallen women, women who must die to compensate for their errors in negotiating sexual and kinship relations.
We should modify, however, his concept of the whole and of the community in which the cycles are realized. Resisting all along not so much her status as prostitute per se as the reduction of her identity to a single dimension, Anna has sought aid from Francine. She also seeks identification with the slave Mailotte Boyd and recalls the collective voices of black Caribbean women, a quest that culminates in her sudden understanding of the women’s Carnival masks and laughter. She can only fully join their community, however, if she can share the spirit of the laughter which, as Bakhtin indicates, “has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one.”21 To do so, Anna must make a choice concerning the voices she hears.
When the doctor remarks, “You girls are too naive to live, aren’t you?” Laurie laughs, and Anna listens “to them both laughing and their voices going up and down.” Their cynical laughter expresses the modernist irony of loss and betrayal; it also stands in for and obscures knowledge of an entire sex/gender and colonial system. It pays tribute to the modernist fear of life that Bakhtin claims opposes life and death in a gesture contrary to the true carnival spirit of grotesque realism. This is the gesture and the despairing vision that Anna refuses when she repeats the doctor’s next words, “Ready to start all over again in no time, I’ve no doubt”: “I lay and . . . thought about starting all over again. And about being new and fresh. And about mornings, and misty days, when anything might happen” (Voyage, p. 160).
While traditional Carnival renewal depended upon fertility and pregnancy—what Bakhtin describes as the adult woman’s bodily “degradation” for the sake of new life—we might see Anna’s vision of “starting all over again” as enacting a specifically female turnabout on this logic. In Anna’s earlier dream, the dead child becomes a “boy bishop” who wears a priest’s robes and a ring. From his coffin, he rises and bows: “His large, light eyes in a narrow, cruel face rolled like a doll’s as you lean it from one side to the other” (Voyage, p. 140). The vision of cruelty supplants the “new life” promised by pregnancy, making it clear that for Anna, in her isolation and poverty, the birth of a child can only oppress her. In the dream, she thinks, “I ought to kiss the ring,” indicating the further submission to social and patriarchal authority required by her pregnancy. When she awakens from this dream, however, she continues “dreaming about the sea” and envisions her journey home where she understands “why the masks were laughing.”
The moment of understanding and alliance with the masked black women in her Carnival vision follows the phrase “their voices . . . going up and down.” In her vision, the voices belong to her aunt, uncle, stepmother, and father. The same phrase appears after Anna hears Laurie’s and the doctor’s cynical laughter, “their voices going up and down.” Thus Anna joins together two discussions of moral decency—that of the doctor and Laurie, who are laughing at Anna’s (and Laurie’s) moral condition, and that of her relatives, who are debating the decency of Carnival. Conversely, she associates herself with Carnival and chooses to join it, as object of disapproval and as member of a community of satirical revelers. Her understanding of the masks and their laughter, rather than the laughter of modern European cynicism, allows her to transform the meanings and values attributed to the masking of her own identities.22 Unable to give birth, she refuses the doctor’s interpretation of her body as following a socially illicit cyclical pattern and, instead, returns to her island home as a participant in its carnival culture. Through her imagined return, she enacts another kind of cycle, beginning again and perhaps changing the meaning of the abortion into an event that regenerates her own life.
Though the original version of the ending is the only one to include the reason for Anna’s understanding of carnival laughter, the revised version suggests the possibilities for renewal implicated in that understanding. In giving the revised ending this suggestion of possible renewal, Rhys has completed Anna’s voyage and simultaneously written beyond the apparent narrative requirement that the protagonist die.
Further, Anna’s repetition of the doctor’s words in this final scene gives the dialogical answer to the doctor’s earlier repetition of her words (“Oh, so you had a fall, did you?”). In this way, the text’s despairing modernist irony and its accompanying European point of view speak alongside, but do not suppress, the renewal of life that gives the laughter of Carnival its satirical joy.
The lingering tone of wishful naiveté reflects Anna’s isolation in reality from her chosen community and gives the ending its ambiguity. Conjuring “elsewhere,” she remains, after all, in the social context of modern Europe.23 Nevertheless, following a pattern made more explicit in Wide Sargasso Sea, Anna has “awakened,” gone “wild,” and, in spirit, flown to join the black and native women of her island home. Rejecting the names—“Virgin,” “tart,” “Hottentot,” “foreigner”—given her by English dichotomizing, she sustains her multiplicitous identities. She has not triumphed as an individual, up against society, but rather found the place and the people from which she can envision new life.