Language and Belonging in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark

“I only have one language; yet it is not mine,” reads the controversial thesis of Jacques Derrida’s lecture on Monolingualism of the Other (2). Throughout the lecture, Derrida critiques the very idea of possessiveness inherent to this statement—ofhaving a language—because it sets up the failure of the second sentence: language always belongs to somebody else and belonging—in both of its meanings—connotes exclusiveness. Anna Morgan, the protagonist of Jean Rhys’s 1934 novel Voyage in the Dark, has two or maybe even three languages, yet none of them is hers. She speaks English, French, and possibly also French Creole, yet she feels excluded from each of them: the ladylike sharp edges of her stepmother Hester’s English (57), the French of the Swiss woman who performs her abortion (176), and the Creole of her childhood friend and household servant Francine (72). Like many texts written by transnational migrants, Voyage in the Dark adopts an experimental multilingual form that includes untranslated Welsh, French, French patois as well as several varieties of English: West Indian, King’s, and cockney. Attention paid to these instances of foreign and accented language in the novel points to new foci within the text; multilingualism here not only mimics the linguistic diversity of Dominica, where the protagonist grew up, but also forces languages to coexist comparatively. The novel’s preoccupation with language and accent leads to a critique of the idea of linguistic ownership that depends on standards and discernment in any comparative situation. While many critics have commented on the racial tensions inherent to Rhys’s work, my chapter will focus on the linguistic and accentual exclusions, because telling the difference between nations, languages, and accents here always connotes exclusion and privileging of one of the pair as uniquely better in a way reminiscent of racial hierarchies in colonial societies.