Embracing Liquidity amid a Solidified Alienation: The Sea as an Emblem of Re-connection in Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark (1934)

Nadal-Ruiz, Alejandro

En : Modernism and Matter: Literature in Quest of a 'new assembly of elements' (1907-1941)
2025
Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée Montpellier
ISBN: 978-2-36781-521-3
Pp: 47-64

Resumen: This chapter explores the symbolic presence of the sea in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark (1934), a novel often read through the lenses of alienation, trauma, and displacement. While critics have addressed Rhys’s use of material culture and her protagonists’ urban estrangement, the sea has received little sustained attention in relation to her modernist fiction. This study argues that the sea, whether remembered or imagined, emerges as one of the few elements capable of loosening the protagonist Anna’s sense of paralysis in metropolitan England. Set against the bleakness of her daily struggles, the Caribbean Sea recalls movement, colour, and vitality, contrasting with the rigidity of the urban environment that isolates her. Through close reading, the analysis shows how Anna’s memories of water—ranging from island seas to imagined voyages—create moments of reconnection with her fractured self and with a homeland that remains just out of reach. The sea functions not simply as backdrop but as an active agent in the narrative, opening a space for hope and tentative recovery. In doing so, the novel reveals Rhys’s subtle engagement with material environments and highlights the sea as a relational force that links trauma, memory, and the possibility of renewal.

Nota: The research carried out for the writing of this chapter is part of a project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Competitiveness (MINECO) (PID2021-124841NB-I00). The author is also grateful for the support of the Government of Aragón and the European Social Fund (ESF) (code H03_20R).