Giddy

‘Why are you leaving me out?’ I drank half the glass and then I felt very giddy. I said, ‘I’m going to lie down. I feel so damned giddy.’ I lay down. As long as I kept my eyes open it wasn’t so bad”(123). Throughout the text we see Anna say she is giddy when she drinks and near the end when she becomes weak because of all of the blood she had lost with having the improper abortion. Somehow it seems as if this feeling was not just a dizzy feeling but more so of an unconscious feeling. She felt this feeling when she was trying to ignore her surroundings and the uncomfortableness she felt at times in London. According to an article I found it is said that Anna often feels giddy because she has “lost her rhythm for life” (Atherton,12). I feel that it has a lot to do with her feeling of displacement. With Anna moving to London she has lost her identity. Before leaving the West Indies, she was unable to find it, and as we see towards the end she still doesn’t, and it is unsure if she will get another chance at finding it. The article also brings up a good point about her trying to escape her sense of feeling giddy when she runs from apartment to apartment, from man to man (relationships), and then when she sits there and compares the differences of London and her West Indian country. This explains why Anna made the decisions she made throughout the text. Although some of them were bad decisions that could’ve ended her life it was apart of the process of finding herself/identity. Anna perhaps were hoping to find the rhythm for life.

Atherton, Karen. STAGING THE SELF: GENDER, DIFFERENCE, AND PERFORMANCE IN JEAN RHYS’S “VOYAGE IN THE DARK”. June 2003, www-jstor-org.york.ezproxy.cuny.edu/stable/41274218?seq=12#metadata_info_tab_contents.

Rhys, Jean, and Carole Angier. Voyage in the Dark. Penguin Books, 2007.