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Part One: Chapter 5
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
Hester arrives in London, so Anna visits her at a boardinghouse. She’s upset and has a pressing matter to discuss with Anna—it has to do with correspondence she’s had with Uncle Bo about Anna’s future. Hester originally wrote him a letter saying that Anna would be better off living back in the West Indies. Hester explains that she has been worried about Anna, especially after Anna got so sick last winter. Plus, taking care of Anna is too much of a responsibility for Hester, so she thinks Anna should go home. Her letter to Uncle Bo laid out these reasons, but it also said that Hester would only pay for half the price of Anna’s return trip.
Before Anna started seeing Walter, she cobbled together a semblance of financial stability by working as a chorus girl and accepting money from Hester. Now, though, Hester informs her that she doesn’t want to keep paying for her to live in England. What Hester doesn’t know, though, is that Anna no longer needs her financial support, now that she has Walter to pay for everything.
Themes
Hester shows Anna the response from Uncle Bo. He opens by noting that he never approved of Anna’s new life as a chorus girl, though he didn’t interfere because he thought Hester knew what was best. Now, though, he can hardly believe she wants him to pay for half of Anna’s return. He resents Hester’s attempt to shift the responsibility of caring for Anna onto him, especially since Hester sold Morgan’s Rest even though Anna’s father originally intended the property to be Anna’s inheritance. If Anna is to live in the West Indies with Uncle Bo, Hester will have to provide Anna’s fair share of the money from selling Morgan’s Rest.
Uncle Bo’s letter to Hester gives the impression that nobody wants to be responsible for Anna. And yet, it also suggests that Hester hasn’t been all that fair in how she has used the money she earned from selling the family estate, thus framing her as somewhat selfish and unwilling to help Anna with money—money to which Anna should be entitled. The mere fact that Hester shows Anna this correspondence highlights just how little she cares about her stepdaughter, since she clearly doesn’t mind letting Anna discover that nobody cares enough about her to want to care for her.
Themes
Enraged, Hester insists that Uncle Bo is being unreasonable and that he only wrote the letter to hurt her. She claims that Morgan Rest was a terrible piece of property and that it’s not her fault that she had to sell it at a loss. She hated living in the West Indies, though Anna’s father loved it. He even said in his final years that he never felt the need to visit England again, which made Hester think he was crazy. She, for her part, thinks England is far superior to the West Indies, saying that it was very difficult for her to live in a place where it was so rare to see white people. She scornfully adds that Anna grew up as if she were Black.
Hester’s comments here make it quite clear that she’s racist. Whereas Anna has idealized—and even fetishized—Blackness, Hester finds it unacceptable that her stepdaughter grew up so far removed from her white family roots. Hester and Anna therefore have opposing views when it comes to race, though it’s arguable that both of their viewpoints (and not just Hester’s) are rather problematic, since Anna’s romanticization of Blackness reduces what it means to be Black into a very simplistic idea.
Themes
Hester claims she only had 300 pounds when she left the West Indies, most of which went toward paying for Anna’s journey to England and the clothes she needed for school. She asked Uncle Bo for money, but he only sent five pounds and said he had his own three children to support. His response infuriated Hester, who implies that Uncle Bo has fathered a number of Black children in the West Indies. All in all, Hester thinks it’s unfair that she has to support Anna, especially considering that she disapproves of Anna’s lifestyle. She doesn’t want to know the details of Anna’s life, but she still has a good sense of what’s going on.
Hester’s allegations about Uncle Bo further reveal her own racism. She’s appalled by the fact that he has impregnated other women, but her issue doesn’t necessarily have to do with the fact that he committed adultery—rather, her scorn specifically stems from the fact that the women he impregnated are Black.
Themes
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Hester declares that she’s going write one more time to Uncle Bo and then never contact him again. She’s going to tell him he’s not a gentleman. Anna can’t help but laugh—she knows Uncle Bo will get a kick out of receiving an angry, snooty letter from Hester about how he’s not a gentleman. Hester doesn’t appreciate Anna’s laughter, saying it was a disgrace that her father acted like it wasn’t a big deal for Uncle Bo to have so many “illegitimate” children. She also disapproved of everyone telling Anna that these children were her cousins.
Hester’s disapproval of Anna is wrapped up in her racist worldview. She dislikes the West Indies because it’s a predominantly Black part of the world, and she disapproves of the fact that Anna was raised within—or at least surrounded by—Black Caribbean culture. And though Anna is white, Hester now reveals that she has non-white relatives, because Uncle Bo fathered many Black children. Hester, for her part, thinks it’s disgraceful that everyone told Anna these children were her cousins, but this viewpoint only further reviews her racist bias. After all, they literally are Anna’s cousins, and to ignore that fact would be nothing more than a racist impulse to distance the Morgan family from its Black relatives.
Themes
On the whole, Hester thinks Anna was always destined to behave disgracefully, “considering everything.” When Anna asks what she means by this, Hester implies that Anna’s mother was Black. Anna immediately refutes this claim. But Hester pretends that’s not what she meant, insisting that Anna always accuses her of terrible things. In reality, she says, she has always tried to help Anna, making an effort to keep her from speaking like a Black person (she uses the n-word). But it was no use, Hester says, since Anna always spoke just like Francine. To add to this, Hester resents that she’s the one held responsible for the fact that Anna’s adult life is turning out disgracefully.
Anna has previously said that she wishes she were Black, but now that Hester suggests that she might be, Anna apparently changes her mind: she doesn’t want to be Black, it seems, indicating that she’s only interested in the vague idea of what she thinks Blackness stands for—namely, a life that is “warm and gay.” Needless to say, Anna’s life is not “warm and gay,” so it’s inconceivable to her that she could be Black. It’s also possible that Anna wanted to be Black while living in the West Indies because she wanted to feel a sense of belonging. Now that she’s in England, though, being Black would further expose her to prejudice and alienation. Because she no longer finds the idea of Blackness convenient and alluring, then, she stops romanticizing it.
Themes
Anna informs Hester that she won’t have to support her anymore. She starts to tell her why, but Hester stops her—she doesn’t want to know how Anna will support herself. Anna has previously suggested that she’s going to try to join a show in London in the fall, so Hester is going to assume that’s how she’ll to make ends meet.
Hester senses that Anna doesn’t actually intend to return to the theater. But she doesn’t want Anna to confirm her suspicions, since she’s so concerned with things like respectability and reputation. It’s obvious to her that Anna has found a man to support her, and the fact that she assumes their relationship is clandestine and taboo only illustrates her low opinion of Anna.
Themes
After leaving Hester’s boardinghouse, Anna thinks about Francine. Whenever she spent time with her, she always felt happy. She now remembers Francine eating mangoes, how she never wore shoes, and how she would carry things on her head (something Hester used to criticize). But there were also times when Anna suspected that Francine resented her for being white. In fact, Anna resented her own whiteness, especially because it seemed to link her to Hester, who in her eyes was “old and sad.” Anna always thought of white people as “old and sad,” so she wished she were Black.
Again, Anna romanticizes Blackness. She legitimately misses Francine because she felt connected to her. And yet, she also recognizes that Francine most likely resented her, implying that the Morgan family was a powerful white family in the West Indies that attracted scorn from the Black community. Anna’s idealization of Blackness, then, is partially a desire to disassociate herself from her family in order to better fit into her surroundings.
Themes
