Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. “New girl in town, production.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1957. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/0729ba20-6d6c-0130-6de4-58d385a7b928

“Couldn’t they have got an English girl to do it? It was just because she had this soft, dirty way that foreign girls have. And she struck red curls on her black hair and she didn’t care a scrap… English girl wouldn’t have done that” (109).

This citation refers to the thought that Londoners did not associate with foreigners that as do you need this them as equal. Many Londoners would specify that different features and nature of a foreigner and imply that English people have a higher standard than since some foreigners do not know to act amongst the public eye. Although Anna herself is not British and she praises that she is from the West Indies, none of the English people around would show anything rudeness or disrespect towards her. I believe that the reason for this is because people of London do not see her as a foreigner or a person who lived in the West Indies.

One essay that suggested that Jean Rhys’ portrayed Anna not to be an outsider was in Mary Lou Emery’s “The Politics of Form: Jean Rhys’s Social Vision in Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea” when she said,

“Like most Rhys heroines, Anna lives in exile from her home in the
West Indies; unlike most descendants of slave owners and neo-
colonialists, however, she recognizes that the island belongs truly to its
natives; consequently, she longs to be black in an effort to feel at home
with the people she admires but who must, inevitably, distrust her. Her
ventures, away from this already precarious home, place her in the
midst of a truly alien culture, where the people and the climate share
the same lack of warmth and color. Anna seeks protection from men
who abandon her, leaving her sexually as well as cultural” (423)

Upon this quote, I believe Emery demonstrate that Anna might have stood up for the foreigners that her acquaintance would talk rudeness about because it seems to happen to her as Anna tried herself to feel like she was a part of the West Indies. Rhys has confirmed that Anna wanted to be black in order to feel more connect her to home as much as she could. Although, since Anna was never able to accomplish that goal when she came to Anna and developed a community of people that did not treat her like in the West Indies did. Anna like the respect that was getting and she would think about the memories and time that she spends in her home country. In addition, this refers back to the thesis of how the Londoners influence Anna as they treated her with more respect than the people in the West Indies.

Emery Lou Mary, “The Politics of Form: Jean Rhys’s Social Vision in Voyage in the Dark and Wide Sargasso Sea” Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Winter, 1982), pp. 418-430. Duke University Press. Accessed December 13, 2o18. 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/441252.pdfrefreqid=excelsior%3A663df46771088050da8656b82a9485b9

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