by Virginia Woolf
novel
published 26 March 1915
reading journal: 50 | 100 | 150 | 200 | 250 | 300 | 350 | 363
This is the first Virginia Woolf novel that I've read! I mean, I read A Room of One's Own while I was in college, or at least it was taught in a class that I was in (I'm pretty embarrassed by how lightly I treated most of my college lit courses). I have taken my sweet time in delving into "modernist" classical authors, but it's been worth the wait thus far.
The Voyage Out is on its face a very simple novel. Helen Ambrose is slated for a boat trip that she really doesn't want to go on, but she goes with her husband, and she meets a niece of hers, Rachel Vinrace, for the first time. She eventually learns enough about her to want to take her under her wing and takes her to a South American British colony. There, Rachel eventually connects with one Terence Hewet, a young man who is staying at the hotel where the majority of the well-to-do British visitors are rooming. The two fall in love, get engaged, and then--two weeks into their engagement--Rachel becomes mortally ill and dies.
This story is considerably more substantial than Rachel and Terence's love story. It is a weave of the trivialities that make up everyday life--at least, for the social class that Rachel belongs to--and features numerous interactions between British travelers. This sort of interplay begins with the appearance of the Dalloways while Rachel is on the ship and feels sort of manageable. Once we are introduced into the hotel, however, there are an astounding number of personages introduced at once. The exactness of the interpersonal dynamics aren't crucial to the novel but it may leave readers feeling bewildered. We get a very good picture of Terence and St. John Hirst given that the first is Rachel's love interest and the second is the former's best friend, and we get a better feel for some ancillary characters like Evelyn Murgatroyd, but the range of the other personages at the hotel feel less precise, as befits Rachel's limited time with them.
The main theme of The Voyage Out as it is expressed in this procession of personal encounters is the difficulty of truly knowing any person other than ourselves. This core conceit is overtly mentioned multiple times through the novel in one way or another, perhaps best summed up during an exchange between Terence and St. John shortly after they are introduced to the reader:
'You can't see my bubble; I can't see yours; all we see of each other is a speck, like the wick in the middle of that flame. The flame goes about with us everywhere; it's not ourselves exactly, but what we feel; the world is short, or people mainly; all kinds of people.'
Terence's description sounds bleak, but the way that the novel (and Rachel) deals with this supposition is that, while you may never be able to "truly" know another human being, that does not imply that it is not worth trying to get to know them. As Terence follows up:
'And supposing my bubble could run into some one else's bubble--'
'And they both burst?' put in Hirst.
'Then--then--then--' pondered Hewet, as if to himself, 'it would be an e--nor--mous world,' he said, stretching his arms to their full width, as though even so they could hardly clasp the billowing universe, for when he was with Hirst he always felt unusually sanguine and vague.
This is the central to the story's emotional conflict, the appeal of that "e--nor--mous world". Early on, Rachel is enthralled with the idea of being her own person; it is a stunning emotional revelation when Helen describes this to her. When she meets Terence, however, she is struck by the desire to connect with him, and indeed falls in love and becomes engaged. Woolf's prose gives us a variety of examples of women existing within Rachel's social class and I appreciate that Woolf portrays them all as equally valid if for no other reason than they are adapted to the particular circumstances that governed what life choices they have. Woolf even goes so far as to comment on prostitution several times, with Helen disparaging the gentleman who has a local woman suspected of prostitution kicked out of the hotel. Some of these women are married; some are not; some are old; some are young; and they all feel as though they are not judged.
Rachel takes a very different path than any of the other women represented in the novel. All through The Voyage Out, she is dogged by the specter of sex. It's the logical end of her engagement to Terence and symbolically the fulfillment of two people, two separate worlds, becoming one "e--nor--mous world". Much earlier on in the novel, Woolf anthropomorphizes the ship that Rachel and Helen are sailing on:
But, on the other hand, an immense dignity had descended upon her; she was an inhabitant of the great world, which has so few inhabitants, travelling all day across an empty universe, with veils drawn before her and behind. She was more lonely than the caravan crossing the desert; she was infinitely more mysterious, moving by her own power and sustained by her own resources. The sea might give her death or some unexampled joy, and none would know of it. She was a bride going forth to her husband, a virgin unknown of men; in her vigour and purity she might be likened to all beautiful things, for as a ship she had a life of her own.
Significantly, when Rachel has the first headache that hints at her illness, Terence is reading from John Milton's masque, Comus. As described in the associated footnote, "in this section the lady is trapped and her virtue endangered by Comus, but she is rescued by the water nymph Sabrina."
Here, at the climax of the story, Woolf dispenses with subtlety. Rachel is caught in a war of impulses, between wanting to remain her sole, individual person, symbolized by virginity, and wanting to expand her inner world, to combine her bubble with Terence's. The text seems to suggest that this combination of worlds that results in Rachel's perception of destruction through metamorphosis is distinctly gendered, or at least has vastly different implications for the women versus the men in a heterosexual pairing. Symbolic and perhaps as a result of this emotional turmoil, Rachel contracts typhoid fever and dies before she marries Terrence, but not before experiencing a procession of fever dreams that are borrowed from Woolf's own mental breakdown, imagining that
she fell into a deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head. She saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head. While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea. There she lay, sometimes seeing darkness, sometimes light, while every now and then some one turned her over at the bottom of the sea.
One may read tragedy into Rachel's fate--it's clearly written as such from Terence's point of view--but the real tragedy that Woolf appears to illustrate is the nature of female and male relations in her social class at the time of her writing. Rachel is clearly interested in male companionship, but the expectations regarding male companionship in polite society requires surrendering too much of her essential being, with both the literal and figurative consummation of this relationship terrifying her, it would seem to her death.
The South American colony of Santa Marina is a brilliant synthesis of the gender themes of the novel on a macro level, drawing comparisons of male / female relations to colonization and prostitution. It gives Woolf a chance to explore the exploitation of women without having to embody it within Rachel's polite society bubble, which while not impossible may have been difficult to achieve, especially given how The Voyage Out was apparently toned down from some of its initial drafts, back when it was Melymbrosia. Having loved this novel, and being a fan of publications of in utero texts, I am more than a little intrigued in checking out this constructed draft.
Some sporadic notes: I loved Rachel's self-discovery on the boat and the description of the simultaneous delight in, not to speak of her as being vain, but being seen by men who she finds attractive versus the unease of being seen by men she does not:
She felt herself pursued, so that she got up and actually locked her door. A voice moaned for her; eyes desired her. All night long barbarian men harassed the ship; they came scuffling down the passages, and stopped to snuffle at her door. She could not sleep again.
An echo of the "death or some unexampled joy", perhaps. The passage where Helen tries to tease out Rachel's feelings regarding her dalliance with Mr. Dalloway that prefigures the restless night is excellent. I loved Rachel and Helen as characters and I appreciated Rachel's parade of social calls in the hotel and St. John's intellectual awkwardness. I was sad for Terence given the story's ending, and Woolf writes his grief with compassion, but it's difficult to imagine the story as being thematically complete without her death, as much as it seems to be an exploration of how Woolf's own life might have turned out... or not, as it were. It is not lost on me that the author plotted out the death of her semi-autobiographical character and then envisioned the reactions of her various acquaintances.
