Analysis Of Heteroglossia In Rhys's Voyage In The Dark

In Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, we eventually see the character of young Anna Morgan shift from a naive chorus girl to a hardened woman who endures an unending cycle of pain and suffering. It is through Anna’s eyes we can see the gritty reality that was England back then and a life from which she can not escape. In this novel, Rhys creates a “heteroglossia”, a term defined by novel theorist Bakhtin, and culminates all interactions into one coherent experience for the reader. This is what makes this novel much more than just a delivery of Anna’s tale because it also dives deep into many of the social issues that prevailed in England back then. In the novel, Anna’s internal voice and the use of language resembles her psychological instability: the sentences are lengthy and

Growing up in the West Indies, she has very fond memories of home, which also includes most of the slaves that used to work under her father. Anna doesn’t have the same hate towards black people as her stepmother does. Her stepmother tried her best to not allow Anna to behave “like a nigger” (65), but in her stepmother’s words, Anna chose to anyway. We can see this is the scene where Anna says, “I always wanted to be black” (31) while talking about her memories of Francine. This shows off her naïve personality, where Anna does not truly understand the gravity of what it truly means to be black. Even in her further description of Francine, she compared being black to “warm and gay” (31) and being white to “cold and sad” (31). This also shows how Anna is outcasted from both her family for being the child of her father’s illegitimate relationships with a black person, which to her family, means that she is not white and