Grant Yoon ’27 is a prospective English major. They enjoy writing poetry for the campus literary magazine, The Gallery, and reading whatever books have a good vibe to them (currently on Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies). They also like sitting by large bodies of water, drinking lots of coffee and overthinking movies, songs and things in general. Contact them at giyoon@wm.edu.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
In Jean Rhys’s “Voyage in the Dark,” meaning is suspect and inevitably destroyed. A semi-autobiographical novel along the lines of “The Bell Jar,” Rhys constructs a protagonist — Anna Morgan — with cutting and accurate depictions of loneliness in a modern and graceful style that continues to work today. Though similar in their committed portrayal of an intelligent, cynical young woman discovering the world, the novel’s composition precludes the triumphant or egotistical moments of Slyvia Plath’s “Bell Jar”; Anna Morgan is utterly hopeless. Her voice speaks without any real belief in the possibility of a tranquil or contented life.
An example: When a man falls in love with Anna Morgan and begins to fund a more extravagant lifestyle for her, the tone of the novel remains exactly the same. No lift. As Morgan says of a sudden sum of money she receives, “It was as if I’d always had it. Money ought to be everybody’s. It ought to be like water. You can tell that because you get accustomed to it so quickly.” But Morgan appears to become accustomed to everything that happens to her: her boyfriend leaving her, her unstable housemate threatening suicide and ultimately, an unplanned and aborted pregnancy. The novel gives the reader no place to breathe, no moments of the sublime in the mechanical hell of Anna’s life; it is too truthfully suffused with its protagonist’s dread to pretend anything else.
Being mechanical, however, does not make the novel overly monotonous. In stark contrast to the more emotionally-lucid novels offering an idea of the female perspective that preceded Rhys’ other writings (such as “Jane Eyre,” which Rhys wrote her most successful book “Wide Sargasso Sea” as a prequel for), the arrangement of events which Anna experiences or comments on is disorienting, seemingly disjointed. Her reaction to the constraints of money, to the limits of human love that never fully reach or engage with her, is not inspiring.It is real, difficult, wrought from pain and honesty. It is one of powerlessness and of morbid acceptance. And that is why Anna Morgan only appears to be unaffected; somehow, against the darkness of a terrifying loneliness, the thing one remembers about Rhys is her humanity. Even after fitting ugly masks onto people who have been cruel to her protagonists and on her protagonists themselves, the rawness and vulnerability of the world is exceptionally memorable for being so subtle — and so true.
In her most well-known novel “Wide Sargasso Sea” — the aforementioned prequel to “Jane Eyre” — follows the madwoman of Rochester’s attic before madness. Or, more accurately, the novel closely follows her into madness. A series of tragedies and horrors are lodged into the psyche of Antoinette Cosway since childhood: the prolonged threat of violence against her family, the deterioration of her mother and then a mob’s burning of her home and a brush with death, prevented only by a superstitious sign (a parrot burning to death). Later, living in an abbey, Cosway confesses to a nun “I had a dream I was in hell.” And recalling the image of her worn mother being taken away to an insane asylum, she begins to cry, asking “why, why must such terrible things happen?” The nun offers no consolation, telling her only to “put that dream out of [her] mind” before sadly concluding “we cannot know why the devil must have his little day.”
It’s in this way that Rhys’ complex struggle with the world feels so different from the usual depressing, indulgent misanthropy of other intellectuals (I think of Emil Cioran’s “The Trouble with Being Born,” where he describes being physically repulsed by a pregnant woman, or as he calls her, a murderer. Very fun guy). Her spells of unreality — a glass sheet between her and the world — prime readers for later experiences of sorrow, innocence and disillusionment, finding a deep stream of meaning in the terror that she never really learned to live with.
How her novels are human — it’s like the Rilo Kiley song “A Better Son/Daughter,” in which the singer tells her mother “to give into the demons that possess her / And that God never blessed her insides” before crawling back into bed and dreaming of younger, more peaceful years. What makes this line so poignant is the contradictory meaning underneath the cruel assertion, the incredulous reality that the people we love are, somehow, blessed from the inside, sparked with divinity, and the thick, ugly skin of the world getting in the way of that. Through intense description, Rhys suddenly cuts through that skin in her novels, reminding us who we are underneath it all, somehow encouraging us to be kind and loving even as cruelty after cruelty mounts upon her voice.