“Get on or Get Out”: Failure and Negative Femininity in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark

Abstract

This essay locates failure as a productive form of critique, linked to a feminist and anticolonialist project. Focusing on Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark and After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie , I argue that Rhys’s protagonists’ failure to successfully enact prescribed gender roles is a feminist response, one articulated through a negative feminism rather than a conventional liberal feminism. Using Jack Halberstam’s notion of shadow feminism and Sianne Ngai’s noncathartic emotions, I show how Rhys exposes the need for an alternate model of white female respectability through her narratives of failure.