Voyage into The Female Relationships in The Novel "Voyage in The Dark"

Voyage into the Female Relationship

The novel Voyage in the Dark is a tale about a girl named Anna Morgan who is in a constant struggle with her identity. She was born in the Caribbean, a child of a white man and a Caribbean woman. Though she loves her life in the Caribbean, her father's death leads her to move to England, a place she finds cold and dull compared to the lush beauty of her home. In England Anna's struggles with her sense of self because of her mixed racial identity only grow worse, something that is partly to do with how she surrounds herself with toxic people.

Though her male relationships do tend to also be negative, with her choosing men that do not stick around, it is her female relationships that bring the most complexity. Though she does find some good friends, such as in Maudie or Laurie, the relationships with these girls throw Anna into a life of which is toxic. Anna's female relationships have seemingly more impact on her than the male relationships, as these girls are there to push her in both positive and negative ways. Take into account Hester and Ethel, two characters who pose more trouble than anything else to Anna. Though they show a façade of helping her, they are only doing so in their own self-interest which seems to be a recurring theme in Anna's life. She is a tool for others to us in order to further their own plans, and she does not seem to notice enough to allow more positive people in her life. Specifically, Anna's relationships with Hester, Ethel, and Laurie throughout Voyage in the Dark show the protagonist’s complex and often negative relations with females as a whole.

One of the more negative female relationships in Anna's life is with her stepmother, Hester. Anna was placed in her stepmother's care when her father passed, uprooting her life in the Caribbean to live in England. Hester is the one who first showed Anna the constraints she must put on herself as a colonial white woman, while also putting Anna and her mixed-identity down. As if that was not bad enough, Hester also is accused by Anna's Uncle Bo of stealing Anna's inheritance that her father had left her after he passed away.

Instead of supporting her stepdaughter and being the stepmother that Anna needs at this time in her life, Hester confines Anna to the idea that she has to live up to her classist and racist ideology, and then attempts to send Anna back to the Caribbean when Hester decides that Anna is not living up to her personal standards for a colonial woman. When Anna says, “You won’t have to give me any more money. Or Uncle Bo or anybody else either. I can get all the money I want and so that’s all right. Is everybody happy?" to Hester, it becomes even more clear that Hester cares little for Anna because they lose touch shortly after.

As Hester is one of the first people who outwardly displayed her disdain for the Creoles, she was one of Anna's first experiences with racism and therefore had a large impact on why Anna felt so unsure about her own self. This can also explain why Anna feels that she does not want to be defined as white, saying, "I wanted to be black. I always wanted to be black…being black is warm and gay, being white is cold and sad". Due to dealing with years of Hester's constant racism and classism, Anna spent her childhood divided between the coldness of her white stepmother, and the warmth of the black slaves working within her home. An example of this is Francine, a slave girl working in their home in the Caribbean's that Anna befriended, only for Hester to fire Francine as she did not approve of Anna being friends with someone both black and lower in class than her.

With Francine, Anna says that "the thing about Francine was that when I was with her I was happy. She was small and plump and blacker than most of the people out there,". She correlates happiness with being black because she was happy when she was with Francine and unhappy with the white people, mainly her stepmother, that she was surrounded by in her childhood. Hester's later visit in England then only deepened Anna's depression and reminded her that she is not enough of an Englishwoman to fit in with the other colonial white women in England, and not enough of a Creole woman to fit in with the other Creole women in the Caribbean. This depression leads Anna to spiral down further, allowing mistreatment and toxic relationships within her life in exchange for the feeling of being cared for and belonging.

In the midst of this spiral, Anna meets a woman named Ethel, who becomes another source of isolated chaos. Though Ethel seems nice enough at first, giving Anna employment and a place to sleep, she continually talks bad about foreigners to Anna, who is herself a foreigner. Ethel wants Anna to help push her own goals forward, but also to maybe not be alone. As she is a very calculating older woman, Ethel sees the attention young Anna gets from men and knows she can use Anna to receive more clients for her own business. At the same time, Ethel is also very insecure because she knows that she is not able to receive the same attention and that leads her to lash out at Annie. Just as her stepmother does, Ethel puts down Anna's foreigner side through her own xenophobia.

Furthermore, Ethel is always talking about being a lady and making a point to say how she herself is one. Anna was confined to the idea of what a colonial white woman's duties and purpose were by these women, instead of being allowed to live as she wishes. Yet, when Anna is making bad decisions, such as with Carl, Ethel only sees the benefit to herself and does not try to help Anna make the right decision. Ethel needs Anna to further her business, but she does not care about Anna as an individual. This is shown multiple times throughout Voyage in the Dark, with Ethel’s initial desire to have Anna around, her explosion on Anna and demand she leaves after Anna is unable to stop laughing when a client burns his foot, and Ethel’s subsequent breakdown when she threatens to kill herself if Anna were to leave, despite having told her to do so. Then, Ethel becomes sickly sweet with Anna, in clear approval of her affair with Carl because of how it is positively affecting her business. While Anna does see Carl as a financial opportunity, she is still full of hope that he will fall in love with her. Ethel does not care that Carl will only break Anna’s heart, she only cares about how she can manipulate the situation between them to enhance her personal ambitions.

On the other hand, there is the character of Laurie, a sex worker that Anna grows close to and eventually moves in with. Anna’s relationship with Laurie is the least toxic relationship she involves herself in throughout the novel, as Laurie seemed to genuinely care for Anna because of who she was and not just what she could provide. Laurie is free-spirited and comfortable within her own skin, even though, as she says, she has “good strong peasant blood in [her],”. She is one of the first people that Anna befriends in England who does not make constant racist and classist statements, instead, she sees her peasant blood as a source of strength. Laurie also allows Anna to move in with her after Anna leaves Ethel's, and is there for Anna when she decides to get an abortion.

Despite this, one could not say that Laurie was a positive influence as she had a hand in introducing Anna to the men that would cause her heartbreak. Alongside that, Laurie also introduces Anna to her life as a sex worker, involving an already fragile girl into a tumultuous life in exchange for money. Just as Hester and Ethel used Anna as though she was just a financial opportunity, Laurie continued the recurring theme and used Anna as a way to get more money from her clients. This can be seen when she introduces Anna to Carl, saying to him, ''Well, Carl, what do you think of my little pal? Don't you think I've found a nice girl for you?". Not only does she belittle Anna by talking about her as though she were just a child, but Laurie also talks as though Anna was only brought there to be a companion for Carl. Furthermore, Laurie worsens Anna's alcoholism, continually bringing her into the presence of alcohol, which seems to be a staple of the sex worker life.

Altogether, Anna’s relationships with these women negatively affected her personal life, as did her relationships with most everyone did in Voyage in the Dark.Anna was in need of a guiding and helping hand, but instead was met with her stepmother Hester who only exacerbated Anna’s already existing struggle with her identity and exploited her for her inheritance, a woman named Ethel who had similar issues with race and class while also using

Anna to further her financial gain, and her friend Laurie who is albeit much better than the other female influences in Anna's life, but also aids in her spiral downward with her introducing Anna to the life of a sex worker and worsens her alcohol problems. Anna repeatedly surrounds herself with toxic people, which explains why she seems to always be spiraling down in her depression instead of thriving in England. She has rarely had any positive relationships with white females or males, and that has led her to see the white race in a negative manner. Yet, instead of realizing this and choosing better female and male companions to surround herself with, she starts over just to begin the cycle again with someone new but equally as toxic as those she left behind.