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Part One: Chapter 4
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Voyage in the Dark, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Homesickness, Memory, and Belonging
Sexism, Love, and Power
Race and Identity
Money and Happiness
Summary
Analysis
Anna goes out to dinner with Walter and his cousin, Vincent. Afterwards, she’s surprised to hear from Walter that Vincent is very fond of her. Apparently, he even wants to help her career on the stage by putting her in touch with some powerful people he knows in the entertainment industry. Walter thinks this is a great idea and wants to pay for Anna to take singing lessons. The whole time he talks, though, Anna wonders when he’s going to start kissing her. But Walter is too hung up on the idea of Anna developing a successful career. She tells him that all she wants is to be with him, but he laughs at such an idea, saying that she’ll surely grow tired of him soon enough—a comment that upsets her.
Walter’s insistence that Anna will tire of him suggests that he doesn’t expect their relationship to last very long. In fact, he probably likes the idea that she’ll be the one to break things off, since this would make it easier for him to eventually pull away. As it stands, though, Anna seems to have fallen deep into their relationship, so the suggestion that it won’t last very long startles and upsets her.
Themes
As Anna drinks whiskey, she tells Walter about her life in the West Indies. Her Uncle Bo is a big drinker, she explains, but it’s hard to tell when he’s drunk. She used to mix him drinks when she was just a little kid, which is when she had her first sips of rum. Walter, for his part, thinks Anna is still too young to be drinking quite as much as she does, but he doesn’t stop her from having whiskey. She tells him about finding an old list of enslaved people at her family’s estate in the West Indies. There was one 18-year-old woman named Maillotte Boyd who was a “house servant,” and though Anna doesn’t mention her name aloud to Walter, she often thinks about Maillotte.
Walter reveals his own hypocrisy when he implies that Anna is too young to drink as much as she does. If she’s not old enough to drink, it’s unlikely that she’s old enough to be in a relationship with a much older man. But Walter is apparently unconcerned about the age difference between them. On another note, the existence of a list of enslaved people at Anna’s family estate associates her family with oppressive white colonizers in the West Indies—her family either enslaved people themselves or, at the very least, bought property from enslavers. Either way, it’s evident that her family history is fraught with racist privilege.
Themes
Anna’s family used to own a small estate called Morgan’s Rest. Her father was a planter who used to have a much larger estate, but he sold it when he married Hester. Anna drunkenly tells Walter that she’s a “real” West Indian, since she’s the fifth generation on her mother’s side to have been born there—a detail she has already told Walter several times throughout the night. Finally, Walter starts kissing her, noting as an aside that she seems pretty drunk.
Anna has complicated ideas about race: she claims to be a “real” West Indian because she and her mother (and generations before her mother) were all born there. But she’s also white and lived in what seems like a former plantation owned by an enslaver. She also benefits from the many privileges that come with being white, though she’s eager to distance herself from her white European ancestry in order to feel more like a “real” West Indian. On another note, Walter disparagingly comments that Anna is drunk, but this doesn’t stop him from making a sexual advance on her. He mentioned earlier in the conversation that he didn’t think she was old enough to drink so much, but now that she’s drunk, he apparently has no problem with the idea of having sex with her. This contradiction is yet another indication that he really only cares about satisfying his own desires.
Themes
