In Jean Rhys' novel Voyage in the Dark, the main character Anna goes through the challenge of dealing both with the world and its unfairness towards women, and her own mental health.
This novel is about Anna Morgan, a girl of about 19 years old, who moved from the West Indies to England with her stepmother after her father passed away. After she leaves school, her stepmother Hester isn't able to support her financially anymore so Anna tries to make her way with a choir. She meets an older guy -- way older guy -- named Walter and becomes involved with him. It's a very weird relationship, where the guy kind of likes her and pays her -- not specifically for the sex, but in general -- and takes care of her financially and just about nothing else. Anna is happy with him, sometimes, but most of the time, she isn't happy at all. With him and without him. After Walter comes back from a trip to New York in America, he breaks up with Anna, and she starts spiraling. Her mental health declines, and we go through her life with her being miserable and more miserable every day; trying to survive both the world and herself.
This book made me so, so sad. Throughout maybe half the book I've wanted to cry. My heart hurts for Anna. So much. She is dealing with her brain and doesn't really have a support system for it. Her stepmother, as much as she pretends to care about Anna, doesn't really give a shit because Anna is a drain to her wallet, and God forbid she spends her money on her late husband's kid from the West Indies. Anna doesn't really have any friends either; all the girls she knows are from her choir group and they're all kind of dicks to her because of her age, and I suspect that also because she isn't strictly/purely white, since she's from the West Indies. Anna doesn't have any siblings to share the burden of living with, and after Walter left her, she really ended up with no one there to hold her hand and stroke her head when she got sick. She was utterly and truly alone, and she damn well felt it, "a sad, a lonely feeling, a hopeless feeling" (74). I felt it too.
"It's unlucky to know you're happy; it's unlucky to say you're happy. Touch wood. Cross my fingers. Spit" (80).
Mental Health in the 20th Century
Through Anna and her struggle, we see what it would be like to be a woman with -- what I think was -- Major Depressive Disorder, during the 20th century, where the concept of mental health and psychological illnesses wasn't a completely set concept. The only thing they did know about was PTSD, A.K.A. shell shock. And despite their general knowledge of mental illnesses, women weren't really ever institutionalized for them, but mainly for trying to leave their husbands or wanting to be relatively independent. It was bullshit. And depression itself was not ladylike at all, and not really accepted that a woman could suffer from it since it was unbecoming for them to do so.
"... when I was unwell for the first time it as she who explained it to me, so that it seemed quite all right... But I began to feel awfully miserable, as if everything were shutting up around me and I couldn't breathe. I wanted to die" (68).
This is a very hard post for me to write, because despite me not having depression, so many parts of Anna overthinking were so absolutely relatable. It was easy for me to be able to say, "Shit, I feel you. It sucks that you're feeling like this and it sucks that I understand how you feel." I didn't know how to go about this book because my brain kind of snagged on every mention and description of her downward spirals, causing me to focus entirely on her mental health and wanting to just grab her and give her a much-needed hug.
So, I always knew that my brain was a little harder to deal with than that of the -- let's say, average person for the sake of argument -- average person. As time went on, and my interest in psychology grew, the books I'd read in my free time ended up being those that involved a character with some kind of psychological illness, like All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven, Turtles All the Way Down by John Green, or Thanks for the Trouble by Tommy Wallach, etc. I'd find myself reading these books and relating to some aspects of the character, which of course led me down an internet rabbit hole. And so I'd find myself reading psych journals in my spare time, and ended up diagnosing myself with anxiety and OCD. I went to an actual psychologist around junior year in high school, and lucky me, my iffy diagnosis of myself was confirmed. To say I freaked out would be the least. One thing is to suspect, and another is to have it confirmed by someone who actually knows their shit. And so, with Anna, a girl who really has no idea what she's dealing with, in concrete terms, but knows she is dealing with something, is something I can relate to, to some extent.
Back then, when mental health awareness wasn't big, and women were mostly institutionalized for wanting to leave their husbands or to study something, God forbid, what Anna dealt with was not something that even the psych wards would really know what to do with.
Anna lead a difficult, complicated life, but she never had a big traumatic experience to account for her depression and her iffy brain. Anna didn't have the traumatic experience that we saw with Chris in Return of the Soldier or Clifford in Lady Chatterley's Lover. Without that one event that allows us to pinpoint the cataclysm that caused Anna's constant downward spirals, it does give us a clearer image into Anna's psyche and the hardships it caused her. From Jean Rhys' life and its similarities to Anna's, it would be easy to assume that Rhys struggled much in the same way that Anna did. I cannot even imagine what it would be like to deal with a brain like that without the support of friends, or even family. Anna didn't really have friends, or siblings, or a family to turn to. The guy she thought she had, she never really did, and then she lost him. So she had no hand to hold on to as she fell through the rabbit hole, and no choice but to keep falling. Hitting rock bottom is never a pretty thing.
Through the dealing of her own brain and her sex and gender during the 20th century, we see Anna's entrapment in her life.
"Three quarters of me was in a prison, wandering round and round in a circle." (76)
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