Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark: Community, Race, and Empire

Abstract

In my modernism courses, I emphasize experiments in form as they emerge in the context of British imperialism, and often focus on Jean Rhys’s distinctive formal techniques as strategies of reimagining community in Britain. In terms of her biography, her writing, and subsequent literary criticism, Rhys inhabited several important twentieth-century writing communities: feminist modernism, metropolitan European modernism, and Anglophone Caribbean fiction. As I foreground to my students, what makes Voyage in the Dark (1934) unique in each of these contexts is its sustained focus on the figure of the immigrant as a repository of cultural images, critical approaches to Empire, and strategies of racial integration.