Nothing can be as cold as life: The Story of Anna Morgan in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark

Jean Rhys's novel Voyage in the Dark deals with the various aspects of the identity of the protagonist Anna Morgan. Her Creole identity, her female identity, her whiteness that is not white and her blackness that is not black, all of them come together in the form of depression and are emphasised in the overall greyness of England. The thesis deals with Anna Morgan's identity through four colours: white, black, grey, and red. The first colour, white, deals with Anna's identity in the West Indies, where she is perceived as white, yet wants to be black. The second part deals with the colour black, i.e. how Anna is perceived as black in England, under the male (and female) colonisers' gaze. It also deals with her identity as a woman coming to the Mother country and the inablity (and the unwillingness) to become an Englishwoman. The third part, grey, deals with Anna's depression triggered by the sameness and the greyness of England, her inability to escape it, her first heartbreak, poverty, survival without really living, etc. The colour red symbolises her near-death experience as a ramification of the badly-done abortion. This part culminates in hallucinations and a hope for a new beginning, but it cannot happen for her