『어둠속의 항해』

Voyage in the Dark: Women’s Writing Trapped in Silence

The Dominican Creole novelist Jean Rhys developed her autobiographical novel Voyage in the Dark (1934) out of some early notebooks in which she wrote out her painful experiences of life and despair resulting from an affair in her youth with the much older and well-to-do Englishman Lancelot Smith in London. The novel came into the world by the experienced, skilled and mature novelist, in more than 20 years’ gestation time after a naive teenage girl wrote as a therapeutic pouring. The protagonist, Anna Morgan, white West Indian chorus girl, goes through a downward career to prostitution after the relationship with Walter Jeffries echoing Rhys’s own affair. She endures a mishandled dangerous abortion and comes to death in the original version. But in the published novel rewritten at the demand that the publisher’s editor should give the girl a chance, Anna is compelled to live in death like an abject slave in a world where nobody is, and no time remains, for her. Jean Rhys tried to describe the deathlike despair of a divided self by juxtaposing the present and the past repeatedly recurring in the first-person narrator’s memory, imagination, dream and desire. The purpose of this paper is to investigate Jean Rhys’s subversive writing strategy by following the fragmentary narrative of a bewildered and silenced subject which is configurated in various forms of metaphor, image and symbol such as masquerade, mirror, room, house, drowning, and black and white opposition. The modified open ending to accommodate the male editor’s demand ironically results in emphasizing Anna’s tragedy by making her start a new life without any autonomous reality. Consequently, Rhys sought to accomplish her freedom and renewal in her subversive and strategic writing by practising Carnival spirit of ridiculing satire, laughter and regenerative ritual, and established her identity as a Caribbean woman writer in an authoritative European literary tradition as well.