"Jean Rhys’s narrator suffers from a sense of internal division between a responsive but covert inner self and a mechanical external one" - Elizabeth Abel

Feminists have questioned the archetypal figures of modernity as traditionally conceived are modern men. Janet Wolff (1985) was one of them who conceded that the life of streets, where the flaneur wanders, fails to describe women’s experience. Women were rigidly excluded from public sphere that privileged the male; women are confined to the private sphere and thus, the ‘flaneuse’ of Wolff’s title is an impossible figure.

 

Her statement is slightly inaccurate in suggesting that women had been “practically invisible” from city life. Ipso facto, most of them including Anna Morgan, were emerging more and more into the practice of consumption in England by the closing year of nineteenth century. Whilst Jean Rhys’ portrait of hotels, cinemas and shops of London has marked the geographical modernity for flaneuse, women’s experience in public sphere is still grounded by the rampant consumerism (i.e. clothing) and alienation within the context of masculinity. In other sense, the literature of modernity can be understood as a controlling mechanism for regulating the ways in which women became visible in public sphere. Partly opposing Wolff’s claim, this paper propounds and establishes a wider definition of women’s experience, arguing that women themselves are one of the causes to their invisibility.

 

Flaneur was imagined as a woman – a moderate shift from the 18th-century ideology that flaneuse was consorted with prostitute or chorus girl who was positioned somewhere between subject of financial independence and object of social disdain. Thus, she was never seen as equal as having a rightful status in the public sphere. Dreyer and McDowall (2011) note that, “[F]lâneuse does not have the same freedom to stroll the streets as her male counterpart as a result of the intricate connection women have with consumerism, specifically by being an object as well as a subject of consumerism.”  In Voyage in The Dark, Anna, exists as a chorus girl, is able to enjoy some degrees of freedom – she is free to “go to Cohen’s in Shaftesbury Avenue” to shop (24), “go out for a walk” to see “how parts of London are as empty as if they were dead” (36) or “go into the cinema” (92); however, she does not fully have the freedom to pursue the pleasures of the street as she enters the city through the route of consumption. Anna is highly aware of the clothes she wears as females walking on the street are usually commodified as an object to be gazed or discussed (22):

When I thought about my clothes I was too sad to cry. About clothes, it’s awful. Everything makes you want pretty clothes like hell. People laugh at girls who are badly dressed.

 

Shops can be a useful site to examine women’s experience of modernity, which is associated with consumption rather than production upon the urban fabric. Shopping becomes a common practice for flaneuse to roam freely. In Rhys’ novel, shopping is also a continuation of a female body as a commodity. The purpose of going to shop stretches beyond the regime of economic transaction – a place for Anna to search for leisure but ultimately entrapped herself in the hands of a man’s leisure (22-23):

And the shop-window sneering and smiling in your face… “All right, I will do anything for good clothes” … The ones without any money, the ones with beastly lives. Perhaps I’m going to be one of the ones with beastly lives. 

 

“Anything – anything for clothes” has been reiterated by Anne, revealing that the circulation of female body within public sphere is articulated with the movement of consumerism, where money appears exclusively from bourgeois men in London, who take the advantages of the sexualized public place to get women for their sexual desire and financial exchange. To dress nicely, therefore, enters the discourse of commodification as Anna ponders, “There was a black velvet dress in a shop-window, with the skirt slit up so that you could see the light stocking. A girl could look lovely in that, like a doll or a flower.” Female body is objectified as a doll or flower, pointing to the fragility and submission of femininity that is destined to be consumed by men. Ironically, Anna puts on this black velvet dress carefully (82) to meet Walter outside. In a critical sense, Anna is indeed “visible” in the public domain in which she consumes and is consumed, her presence is a result in furthering the powerlessness of women. Gleber (1997) states that women, whether they are the prostitutes or the homeless, are never equal to the experience shared by male flâneur, “within the public facets of female lives, these women form nothing if not the cynically distorted female images of consumption… in an age of capitalist and sexist exploitation.” Women adjust themselves in order to fit into this form of visual regulation in flavor especially to men. The shopping experience satirically entraps them into inconspicuous circulation within the public domain.  

 

Flaneuse finds it hard to wholly free herself in public sphere, as Gleber (1997) makes it clear that women cannot take ownership of the streets, as they are always subject to public conventions that affirm their position as an object of male gaze. Anna, who roams the street, experiences the unwanted male gaze as well (86):

I got out into the street. A man passed… he looked at me funnily and I wanted to run.

 

Anna and her friend, Maudie, are followed by two men who are “try[ing] to get off with” them (10). In modern sexual economy, women do not enjoy the freedom as their male counterparts who can observed without being observed in return. Such conception echoes with Wolff’s argument that the literature of modernity does not merely entail men’s experience, but marginalize women from pursuing a sense of freedom.

 

Regarded as trespassers on a masculine public place, women wander the edge of street without respectability and dignity as equal as men. Although women have been increasingly appearing in the public domain, the masculine sphere still constitutes the centre of power in the city, with women at the periphery. In other words, women are considered subordinate subjects in relations to a public realm of male concerns. After all, Anna, being entrapped in this endless circling sphere, is difficult to see the differences of the streets in London. Darkness and coldness of the houses and streets reflect Anna’s uneasiness and phobia in the metropolis (82):

Then the taxi came; and the houses on either side of the street were small and dark and then they were big and dark but all exactly alike. And I saw that all my life I had known that this was going to happen, and that I’d been afraid for a long time, I’d been afraid for a long time. There’s fear, of course, with everybody. But now it had grown, it had grown gigantic; it filled me and it filled the whole world.

 

The feeling of alienation engulfs Anna’s mentality, as she only finds discomfort from her idleness – women are incapable to be entirely at ease in public space and are subconsciously surrounded by the rises of consumerism and male dominance, leading to their inability to indulge full fascination within the city. This can explain Wolff’s argument on the exclusion of women in public space, where women are placed in greater fear and are reluctant to become visible in public places. Towards the end, Anna says, “But I stopped going out; I stopped wanting to go out.” (120)

 

The absence of female flaneuse appears not only as the fear of male dominance but as a blind spot of society where women play a role in supporting and prolonging the conventions that place women in disadvantages. In this novel, clothing is a materialist concept to please men, meanwhile, it serves as a benchmark for women to judge one another. When Anna returns from the shop, dressed up to the nines, the landlady said, “I don’t want no tarts in my house, so now you know.” (26) Maudie also examines the way Anna dresses and comments, “Very lady-like… Well, if a girl has a lot of good clothes and a fur coat she has something, there’s no getting away from that.” (39) The social expectations of being ladylike, a wider conception of modernity, is mostly agreed by women themselves without knowing that they will be inevitably complicit in the world of consumerism, a system that zeroes out those who try hard to get by. Anna, attempts to fit in this convention, feels thwarted (36):

While you are carefully putting on your gloves you begin to perspire and you feel the perspiration trickling down under your arms. The thought of having a wet patch underneath your arms – a disgusting and a disgraceful thing to happen to a lady – makes you very miserable.

 

As a result, Anna continues to be trapped in the double-bind of private and public metropolitan social space. Women’s experience to enjoy the full autonomy to their body is disempowered by the gendered modernity, by which many women are bound unanimously.

 

I agree with Wolff that women are constantly excluded in public work place, making them economically vulnerable – Anna is one of the examples, who has been degraded into lives of poverty and inept prostitution. Interestingly, it is Ethel, a woman, who lures Anna to becoming a prostitute. She is exploiting Anna’s naivety to make money by making good use of the system of consumerism to consume unhomely and homeless young girls. Nevertheless, when Anna lets Ethel down, Ethel dismisses her existence, “You’re not all there; you’re a half-potty bastard… Anybody’s only got to look at you to see that.” (124) With women’s gazes and judgements, Anna feels that she has been forced to obliterate herself (140):

They watched you, their faces like masks, set in the eternal grimace of disapproval… Why didn’t you bloody well make a hole in the water?”

 

Conforming with commodified femininity, Anna only feels more frustrated with her traumatic situation. While she thinks that some men and women are getting her financially dependent, she is de facto relinquishing her will and body that enables the society to produce more commodified products on women. Eventually, women who are visible in the public domain are drifted towards the periphery, where no one even notices their struggles and uneasiness.

 

Rhys, in lieu of creating a self-willed heroine, has depicted a darker side of urban experience through the story of Anna Morgan – a representation of a passive, narcissistic and masochistic victim in a world of consumerism and alienation. Her story signifies that women, in 18th century, can be seen practically visible for their existence, but consequently invisible between the fault-lines of consumer culture.