In 1906 Virginia and her sister Vanessa travelled to Greece with their friend Violet Dickinson, where they were joined by Adrian and Thoby Stephen. Upon their return to England, Thoby died from malaria and shortly thereafter Woolf began writing her first novel, which eventually became The Voyage Out. Although it is generally conceded that Woolf memorialized her brother in Jacob's Room and The Waves, I would like to take up Harvena Richter's claim that Woolf wrote her first novel as an attempt to come to terms with Thoby's death, and suggest how this loss was experienced as the death of a part of the young author. In so doing, I want to explore the effects of empire on the psyche of Rachel Vinrace, the heroine of the novel whose affinities with her creator have been commented on by her biographers. More specifically, I shall focus on how the relations between the sexes in a patriarchal society are brought into strong relief through the experience of travel, a factor suggestive of Woolf's 1906 journey and her interest in the power of women in pre-Olympian Greece, for she was appalled by modern Greece. While drawing on Woolf's letters and early diaries, I shall examine Rachel Vinrace's experience of travelling into the dark world of racial, class, and gender violence that she discovers on her voyage out of upper-middle-class England, and which results in her sudden death.
It is worth noting that critics have compared this novel to Joseph Conrad's indictment of British colonialism, Heart of Darkness, despite the fact that the South America Woolf describes is much more "civilized" (i.e., colonized) than Conrad's Congo. For instance, Michael Tratner, in Modernism and Mass Politics, points out that when Woolf's travellers embark on their river journey into the interior jungle, "they do not see an incomprehensible mystery, but rather the origins of Elizabethan style" (84), thus referring us back to the early days of England's colonial project.
Like Conrad's novel, The Voyage Out can also be read as an inward journey. In depicting a young woman's sexual awakening, Woolf reveals that this experience can prove particularly disturbing, since it awakens repressed elements of the heroine's unconscious, as evidenced in her nightmares. Tratner, however, argues that "the movement into unknown areas of the self is presented overtly as a journey to the south into 'dark,' tribal cultures" (85), traces of which he links to the rise of the masses in early twentieth-century England and the loss of nineteenth-century individualism. As a consequence, Tratner urges that we consider Rachel's voyage in social terms, rather than merely individual ones. Moreover, in terms of modernism's appropriation of the primitive, I think we need to consider Rachel's sexual awakening as antithetical to her distinctly Victorian upbringing, and her final disintegration as the result of her awakening to the dark underside of empire, as well as to aspects of her repressed female sexuality that are considered unacceptable to the English upper class and its patriarchal code of femininity.
Significantly, Rachel's introduction to sexuality begins with an unsolicited kiss at the end of her conversation about imperialism with the conservative, English politician, Mr. Dalloway, who boards the ship with his wife for part of the journey. However, the pleasure and excitement this kiss arouses is contaminated by Rachel's sense of guilt, for Dalloway makes it clear that, while men enjoy the double standard, women are responsible for men's sexual conduct. (To further complicate matters, Woolf implies that Rachel's father, a widower, may have abused his daughter.) Finally understanding what the women of Picadilly represent, Rachel quickly learns that female sexuality leads to degradation. Not only does Rachel's sexual awakening confirm that women as a class are oppressed under patriarchy, but Woolf goes on to demonstrate that class and racial oppression are also integral to imperialism. Unable to identify with the lower-class masses or the colonial locals, whose labours support the British Empire, the only option available to Rachel is to marry, to which she half-heartedly complies. But shortly after agreeing to marry Terence Hewet, whose ambiguous sexuality nevertheless poses a threat, Rachel is overcome by a mysterious illness and dies, thereby escaping the traditional-middle-class-marriage plot of the Victorian novel at an awesome price, while leaving the structure of society intact.
A synopsis of the novel will be included.
The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and
employer.
© Regents of the University of Minnesota, 1997.