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Part Two: 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 leaves Laurie’s apartment and walks home, but she doesn’t want to go back to her depressing room. She walks by a pretty dress in a shop window and thinks about how the impulse to buy attractive clothing is really a desire to improve one’s future. When women consider buying a pretty dress, Anna thinks, they do so because they think the dress will somehow change their circumstances. With these thoughts in mind, she decides to go Ethel Matthews’s flat.
Although Anna often seems indifferent when it comes to money, she still recognizes how financial stability can improve a person’s life. Everything related to money, she realizes, is aspirational; wanting an expensive dress is really just a yearning to find something that will improve her life. It makes sense, then, that her transactional affair with Walter felt so meaningful—although their connection was mainly based on money, it still felt significant to Anna because wanting money is just a form of hoping for a better life.
Themes
After ringing the wrong bell and encountering Ethel’s grumpy downstairs neighbor, Anna goes upstairs with Ethel and is impressed by her spacious flat. Ethel shows Anna the room she would be staying in and even says she could have a gas fireplace put in. As Anna considers moving in and working for Ethel’s manicure business, she reminds Ethel that she doesn’t have 25 pounds. But Ethel doesn’t mind. She proposes that Anna should pay eight pounds per month for room and board. Anna will work as a manicurist, and half her pay will go to Ethel. Anna agrees, and then Ethel adds that she’ll need the eight pounds upfront because she put so much money into renovating the flat. Anna agrees, though it doesn’t leave her much money.
Ethel is interested in Anna because she thinks she can squeeze money out of her. Even though Anna doesn’t have 25 pounds to help her open the business, she seems to have identified Anna as someone she’ll be able to manipulate into giving up a fair amount of cash. To that end, she makes Anna pay in advance for the room. She also plans to take half of Anna’s wages for herself. In a way, then, she takes advantage of Anna’s vulnerable position as a young woman without many resources, acting like a kind and helpful friend when, in reality, she clearly wants to cheat Anna out of her earnings.
Themes
Ethel brings Anna some food and sits by the bed while she eats it. She goes on at length about how respectable her business will be and brags that she’s the best masseuse in London. She repeatedly notes that everything is “straight and above-board” when it comes to her business, and then she asks if Anna can bring in any of her own clients. Anna can’t think of anyone she could bring to the business, but Ethel dismisses the topic by telling her to rest.
Ethel’s insistence that her business is “straight and above-board” might seem unremarkable, but the fact that she goes out of the way to emphasize the business’s legitimacy hints that it’s actually not exactly as she says. In other words, her massage company might not be as legal as she’s suggesting, perhaps meaning that she intends to turn it into a discrete brothel, though this intention is never made explicit.
Themes
