Crisis has been a term used to describe modern British literature. “Crisis is not merely a perception of change….Crisis is expressed as the fracturing or dismantling of personal relations, of social institutions, of civilisation” (Literature of Crisis). Crisis is demonstrated throughout literature during this time period and it affects a person’s personal, political and/or spirituality in a novel. Crisis disrupts what is familiar and causes the characters to confront different ideas or situations they would not ordinarily face. While modern British literature has been categorized as having elements of crisis, it is also important to note that Jean Rhys’s novels focus on this aspect as well. “The scope of the breakdown may be individual, national, cultural or cosmic, extending from sexual intercourse to the extinction of the species” (Literature of Crisis). Though Rhys’s novel, Voyage in the Dark, does not directly fall into these two categories, it does have several aspects that would give it an element of crisis.
“Jean Rhys’s novel portrays marginal women, exiled both culturally and sexually. Displaced from their native Caribbean, outsiders to women’s traditional domestic world,[…]they walk the streets, not quite prostitutes, yet living on the edges of respectability, sanity and dignity” (Emery 418). Through the quote it becomes evident that Rhys’s characters in her novels basically fall into the same personas. Her novels are centered on a female that undergoes a lot of obstacles along her way. The individual becomes distant and sort of ends up tackling the crisis on her own, while still having other elements of crisis given to her. “Rhys’s novels seem to present an intensely personal rather than social vision; however, these precisely wrought narratives dissect the ways and means of power, money and sex” (Emery 418). This is seen in Voyage in the Dark with the main female character, Anna. “In Voyage in the Dark, Rhys suggests that her heroine...