Modernist Ashes, Postcolonial Phoenix: Jean Rhys and the Evolution of the English Novel in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

“It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again,” muses Anna Morgan, the emigre narrator of Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark. 1 This 1934 novel about a Creole demimonde illuminates a complex but overlooked genealogical moment in twentieth-century literature: the point when the exhausted limits of modernist form revealed the lineaments of postcolonial fiction. Rhys’s semicanonical tale of a chorus-girl-turned-prostitute has generally been read as a key to pre-War London, a novel of female flânerie, or one among the author’s several fictions of feminine self-destruction. 2 In this essay, I argue that in order to understand the English novel’s “postcolonial turn” in the middle of the twentieth century, we should revisit Voyage in the Dark and its interventions into British literary modernism. The novel’s complex transnationality—the contrapuntal geography that oscillates between England and the West Indies—gives rise to its transitional literary quality: Rhys produces a new geopolitics that challenges the continued relevance of modernist formal accomplishments, and, simultaneously, inaugurates what would soon become the central goals of postcolonial literature in English. And although Voyage in the Dark has been overshadowed by Rhys’s 1966 masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, it is the earlier novel that shows us a crucial transformation in the aesthetic priorities and political thrust of twentieth-century English fiction. As this fleeting, slight work gradually renders obsolescent the longstanding modernist worship of form, it announces the visionary and revisionary work of a nascent postcolonial literature.