(Out)Rage Against The Machine: ‘Parasexuality’ and Subversion in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark

Abstract

Jean Rhys's third novel tackles a subversive subject matter, namely a nineteen-year-old chorus-girl who slips into prostitution and nearly dies after undergoing a botched abortion. So much so that Rhys came under pressure from her publisher to change the ending. Our purpose here is to look more closely at some of the strategies used by the writer in order to make her novel acceptable to a large readership without giving in too much to the publisher, particularly in the contentious ‘Part IV’—a modernist montage which had to be sanitised prior to its publication. Alongside the intertextual references to Zola's novel Nana lurking beneath the surface, we will focus on the use of ‘parasexuality’—a technique borrowed from the Victorian and Edwardian music-hall—as a trick to playfully question or evade censorship, in the wake of the Social Purity crusade that swept Britain from the late-Victorian period onwards. This paper will thus address the intertwined issues of sexuality, music-hall and censorship, in the light of the original version of ‘Part IV’.

Keywords

• Jean Rhys
• Voyage in the Dark
• Modernism
• music-hall
• primitivism
• sexuality