The Legal and Social Attitudes to Abortion in England

Essay by jeanpabloB, April 2008

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Jean Rhys focuses on the topic discussing the truth about "lost women" because of the interest in the wave of feminism. The book Voyage in the Dark is a truthful book that speaks about the lonely travails of womanhood in the face of decisions and options in consideration with moral choices of abortion. She exposes the reality of abortion among all her works especially in the said novel.

In this work, the protagonist of the story by the name Anna Morgan is herself a passive victim too. The focus on women according to Rhys is that they are treated not as persons but only as sexual commodities. It is very saddening reality the way men look and value in using women. Men likewise share a certain loneliness and despair when they indulge in this kind of temporary fanfare. This is the prevailing atmosphere in the early era of the social attitude displayed by English men as attributed to women.

As such, Voyage in the Dark treads this perception by speaking about the reality of illegal abortion. It describes the incurable horror that goes with the procedure and the reality that abortion becomes anything that a woman should supposedly undergo after she is supposedly used and then abandoned by the abuses of a male buyer.

Moreover, women for Rhys carry the labels as mere “pieces”. Women are bought in the market according to the face value that carries with any transaction. Moreover, women are judged in a man's world by the surface. Men fall in to the trap of dignifying for themselves the sorry lot that entraps women to this kind of work and belief. It reduces women to pieces which they are actually not because they have the ability to decide and think. Rhys develops the book in the context...