Cosmopolitan Vision of Home, Subjectivity 71(2005), a novel set in early twentieth-century New York, we witness
the increasing emotional instability of the protagonist’s Bahamas-
born father, whose debilitating job as a barber in segregated America
appears to take its toll on the character’s mental health. Similarly,
in In the Falling Snow (2009), the protagonist’s father, a Caribbean-
born black Briton, succumbs to alcoholism and mental illness and
spends his old age secluded in a care facility. However, these pic-
tures of psychological trauma depart from Dorothy’s experience in
one crucial way: in each of these narratives (and this also applies to
those in The Nature of Blood ), the characters’ emotional problems
can be attributed to their negative experiences of ethnic discrimina-
tion, often compounded by the disorienting effects of immigration.
But A Distant Shore presents the psychological decline of a character
who remains situated in the same area as her place of birth, and who
is a member of the privileged ethnic majority. Furthermore, Phillips
appears to suggest that this social and geographical immutability is
implicated in Dorothy’s psychological illness.
Coming approximately halfway through the narrative, Dorothy
finally reveals the suppressed trauma she bears after witnessing and
willfully ignoring her father’s prolonged sexual abuse of her youn-
ger sister. One effect Phillips creates by waiting so long to reveal the
character’s tortured past is that it forces us to consider the extent to
which the experience informs her blinkered, conformist worldview.
We reexamine her seemingly sentimental references to her father,
made earlier in the narrative, seeing their significance to her psycho-
logical state in a harrowingly new light. Her habit of regularly evok-
ing her father as she pursues her mundane day-to-day tasks therefore
adds a layer of hitherto unseen emotional distress to her voice and
appears all the more disturbing by its restraint. The village’s physical
space also comes to take on a more sinister bearing as it is a reposi-
tory for the character’s most painful memories.
When we more closely examine the character and beliefs of
the man himself, we gain an important insight into the origins of
Dorothy’s vaguely xenophobic attitudes: “Dad,” she tells us, “has
some opinions about coloureds” (p. 64). Shortly after this recol-
lection, she pictures her father reacting to the news of her friend-
ship with Solomon: “Dad has his one ugly word, and I could have