The art of failure in Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark and Una Marson's The Moth and the Star

Abstract

ABSTRACT Though both writers migrated from the Caribbean and lived at the same time in England in the 1930s, Jean Rhys (1890–1979) and Una Marson (1905–1965) did not run in the same circles – or know of each other. Marson's poetry and plays emerge from her anticolonial, feminist political commitments while Rhys has often been read as an isolated figure in modernist and Caribbean literary histories. They each had a complicated relationship to both European modernism and to mid-twentieth-century Anglophone Caribbean literature. Rhys and Marson have been put in implicit conversation in the wake of the new modernist studies because they are uneasily positioned within familiar canons of twentieth-century literature. Importantly, as this article argues, both writers also focus on failure – personal, aesthetic, and political – in their key works exploring migration in the 1930s – Rhys's novel Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Marson's poetry collection The Moth and the Star (1937). Failure in these texts is double sided, recasting personal and aesthetic failure as the failure of dominant narratives to recognize their characters. Reading these texts together, this article argues that late colonial women writers at once registered and challenged dominant conceptions of failure in their reconstruction of inherited forms.