'Give Me a Chance Big City': Negotiating Identity, Belonging and Home in Jean Rhys' 'Voyage in the Dark', Sam Selvon's 'The Lonely Londoners' and Beryl Gilroy's 'Boy-Sandwich'

This thesis considers how contemporary British literature helps us understand the effect that a reductionist vision of Englishness has had in individuals who were born in the West Indian colonies and at some point decided to claim the source of their education, the "motherland," as their home(land). England understood itself as a relatively homogenous white society and reacted badly when commonwealth citizens began to immigrate during the 20th century. This thesis particularly examines how colonial immigrants who settled in London found ways to negotiate their identities in the face of hostility in their "mother country." Chapter One analyzes Jean Rhys' Voyage in the Dark. This novel explores the difficulties that a white young Creole woman, Anna Morgan, has in feeling at home in England. I argue that the melancholy Anna experiences while in London is not a pathological disposition, as Freud understood it to be; instead, her condition is less individual than social. Chapter Two looks at how Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners depicts ways West Indian immigrants found to endure life in post-war England. I argue that while working class migrants find ways to survive, they do not realize a structured group identity or develop any sense of proactive meaningful resistance, even against their individual situations. Chapter Three examines Beryl Gilroy's Boy-Sandwich. Gilroy's novel indicates how second-generation migrants negotiate ways of being English via their heritage and immediate family. In the Afterword, I argue that living in a city does not make it much easier to find other forms of identity, other kinds of belonging---cities do not necessarily contradict the logic of the nation.