46 pages • 1 hour read
Jean RhysVoyage In The Dark
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1934A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1: Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
From Southsea, Anna Morgan reminisces about her upbringing and her current life. She admits she did not like England in the beginning although she “got used to everything except the cold and that the towns we went to always looked so exactly alike” (8).
Anna travels with a theatre company as a chorus girl, and she is accompanied by another older girl and colleague, Maudie. They both stay together at a lodging run by a lady whom Maudie refers to as an “old goat” (8).
As Anna reads a book, Maudie suggests they check the theater for letters and, upon finding none, they go to a store to buy stockings. Maudie comments on Anna’s “ladylike” (10) appearance and realizes they are being followed by two men.
Together, the quartet goes toward the shop and Anna chooses two stockings, which the man she had been walking with pays for. Maudie invites them back to their rooms for tea. Upon Maudie’s questioning, the men introduce themselves as Jones and Jeffries.
Anna feels uneasy with them: “I hated them both. You pick up people and then they are rude to you. This business of picking up people and then they always imagine they can be rude to you”(18).
However, she relaxes as they drink and discuss their ages, with Mr. Jones mentioning, as he touched her hands, that they were “cold as ice” (18). He asks Anna about her life; she reveals she has been in England for two years.
Before the men depart, Mr. Jeffries (the man she originally paired with) asks for Anna’s permanent address, which she provides.
Maudie remarks at the men having money and frustration at her guy of being “a bit of no good” (14). As she wraps her coat around a shivering Anna and speaks of her past love, Vivian Roberts. Anna pretends to listen but thinks of the cold and England and her stepmother.
Later, when they go to their next stop, in Holloway, Anna receives a letter from Mr. Jeffries, with a dinner request for Monday. As advised by the older girls, she cites a “previous engagement” (17), but she accepts his invitation and offers Wednesday as an alternative date.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Anna goes to dinner with Mr. Jeffries, who comments on her black attire: “Do you always wear black” (17). Mr. Jeffries is evidently wealthy, and Anna notes the setting: “There was a red-shaded lamp on the table, and heavy pink silk curtains over the windows. There was a hard, straight-backed sofa, and two chairs with curved legs against the wall—all upholstered in red” (18).
As the night proceeds, Mr. Jeffries takes the opportunity to kiss an inebriated Anna, who realizes that the place has a bedroom and, understanding his intentions, proceeds to make a scene.
She races straight to the bedroom and closes herself from him as she contemplates sleeping with him. However, she instead returns to him in the other room, and he arranges a taxi for her.
The next day, an ill Anna receives money and flowers from Walter. She accepts as if she had always had money and spends the majority on new clothes at an expensive boutique telling herself, “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” (25).
Later, in her rooms, she asks Walter to stop by. He arrives as her condition worsens. Seeing her ill, he brings in food, arranges for a doctor, and persuades the landlady to allow Anna to stay longer.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
The landlady asks if Anna is well enough to leave, to which she affirms. Anna goes to meet Walter, and they spend the evening talking and getting closer to another as she blurts out a lie that she is “not a virgin” (32).
Walter leads a teary and fearful Anna, who is conflicted about the next move, to his apartment, as he teases her: “What’s the matter? Come on, be brave” (32). She sleeps with him and loses her virginity. Upon waking, she thinks “it had been just like the girls said, except that I hadn’t known it would hurt so much” (33).
As Anna quenches her thirst, she sees him slip money into her handbag. Although, her instant reaction is “Don’t do that,” she says, instead, “All right, if you like—anything you like, any way you like” (34).
Walter promises to write Anna again soon as he brings her to a taxi.
Part 1, Chapters 1-3 Analysis
The book begins: “It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again” (7). Anna’s trance-like musings put forth that she either lives in a dream or she has left the dream. England in 1914 is unaccustomedly cold for Anna and every place within it “was perpetually the same” (8), an idea that repeats itself without fault throughout the novel. For Anna, her life in the West Indies will always be in binary opposition with her current existence in England, and she can never find a way for them to merge, or at least reach an acceptable compromise, much like her identity as a white Creole fitting herself into Britain.
Anna is young but not completely unaware. She is a virgin but knows how to pick up men. She is a foreigner but more curious than wide-eyed. She is struggling and believes her way to stability is money. However, youth, from the start of the book, is both prized and punished. Walter desires her for the innocence she projects and invites her to dine with him. He is a much older and wealthy gentleman from “the City” (13) and woos her with gifts and teases her with words that can only affect someone less experienced and more vulnerable.
In the novel, it is the age of a woman which is of utmost importance to the man pursuing her, and to the woman herself, as there is a notion of disposability that surrounds her as she grows older. Alternately, the man may choose to discard her. One of the men, Mr. Jones repeats the beliefs of Mr. Jeffries: “‘He knew you’d be either eighteen or twenty-two. You girls only have two ages. You’re eighteen and so of course your friend’s twenty-two. Of course’” (12). While the condescension does not escape them, the pressure exists on women to stay as young as they can, which is reflected in the choices of Rhys’s female characters in the novel.
To sum it up, Maudie’s worry belongs to all single women with no stable income and no support systems: “‘I’m getting lines under my eyes, aren’t I?’” (16).
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By Jean Rhys
