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CHAPTER IV
NOMADIC TRAVEL ON LINES OF FLIGHT
The Point of Departure and the Point of Arrival Leaving London: the Suspicion of Imperialism
The sea voyage for Rachel and other characters in modernist travel writings, as David Adams suggests, begins with the anxiety and discontent with British imperial discourse. Because “the home offers no fulfillment or refuge” (Adams 4), the travelers sail to the unfamiliar foreign colony for the answer to totality.49 In Chapter XVI, Terrence and Rachel climb to the top of the cliff as they join the small picnic trip with the tourists to Mont Rosa. They begin to meditate the vastness of the sea and its expansion in relation to human civilization. Infinite earth in sight connects with the sea floor, stretching from lands to cities, “and the race of men changed from dark savages to white civilized men, and back to dark savages again” (237). The observation between savages and civilization suggests their ambivalent attitude toward British imperialism. Although westerners tend to think themselves civilized, what they do to the colonized seems to bring them back to the savages. When Rachel and Terrence think about that, “their English blood makes this prospect
uncomfortably impersonal and hostile to them” (237). They then turn their faces from the land to the sea again.
Even though they do not seem to be willing to probe into the situation about colonization that has just pierced into their minds, imperialism seems to be a potential disturbance underneath their consciousness. Adams remarks that the suspicion of
49 Adams observes that characters like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India and Rachel in The Voyage Out all have their colonial odysseys, going out to distant places but end up dying on their journey. Adams considers their voyages to be a task that they try to find an answer to a world that is lost and chaotic. These characters‟ deaths show how literature responds to the attempt: in
“the absence of theology” (Adams 4), traveling to the exotic colony to search for the meaning of life is an illusion, and “the failure accounts for their Thanatos” (Adams 4).
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British imperialism is present in many of Woolf‟s works. He notes that “Woolf‟s growing skepticism about England‟s ties to Greece coincide with her increasingly critical view of England‟s right to rule in the other regions of the world” (Adams 183).
While leaving London, the Greek scholar Mr. Pepper delivers a topic about “a
disquisition upon the proper method of making roads” (22), which should be inherited from Greek, Roman, to England. The tie to tradition and past is now getting more and more distant since Euphrosyne is taking them to be “free of roads, free of mankind”
(23). As Adams suggests, the voyage out to South America helps Rachel no longer walk “on the road of civilization” (Adams 193). The point of departure for Rachel is a journey that sails away from the empire and discursive center, heading for an exotic land.
Where does Rachel Sail to?
Responding to Rachel‟s questions: “What is the truth? What‟s the truth of it all?”
(136) and “Would there ever be a time when the world was one and indivisible?”
(345), Adams asserts that Rachel‟s voyage is to search for the answer of the lost totality. “Rachel‟s association of „truth‟ with „all‟ implies that truth must be grasped not piecemeal but in its entirety, and not as a truth but as the truth” (Adams 199;
emphasis original). Her death “is the final attempt to recover „the meaning of it all‟
and make the world „one and indivisible‟” (Adams 209). Rachel “travels across the globe as a way of traversing all time and space in search of an answer that she never finds” (Adams 5).
The voyage out of Rachel can be seen as a protest and suspicion of imperialism, but it remains a question if her course to the faraway colony is to search for an answer to the lost theological totality. The first question, “What is the truth? What‟s the truth of it all?” (136), comes from Henrik Ibsen‟s play that Rachel reads. Comfortably
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sitting in her own room of the villa in Santa Marina, Rachel is “speaking partly herself, and partly as the heroine of the play she had just read” (136). Rachel‟s question is not so much about wanting an answer from the world in this exotic land. Rather, it
expresses her excitement about the adventures she had just participated in and the possible acquaintance with the people she is about to meet. Helen and Rachel have just gone to peep at the evening party in the English hotel, and Ridley has just promised to take them to visit the tourists. Indeed Rachel wants to know “the truth”
(136), but “the truth” is related to the truth of knowing the unknown other.
A couple days before Rachel sits in her room reading, she and Helen had an exciting small trip walking in the streets with the locals selling goods and practicing religious rituals. In the first contact with the local people, Rachel comes up with a conclusion that she shall never understand them. She seems to suggest that British people like her shall not obtain any answers here since these two cultures are uniquely different. If the illusion about seeking an answer in the colony is broken here, putting the heroine into death at the end as the final search for a lost totality does not seem to be so imperative.
A similar question is addressed when Rachel and Terrence are discussing marital life in London. Thinking about London, she begins to feel herself surrounded by a “vague sense of dissatisfaction” (351). She then complains about the unchanged color of the blue in Santa Marina because what she wants is to see the depth of things.
In doing so, Rachel repeatedly uses “see” to express the way she wants to know the world.50 Even though she wants to know “what‟s going on behind it” (352), what she really wants, perhaps, is to “see” the world rather than looking for some “truth” that is
50 When Rachel says “I want to know what‟s going behind it,” she also expresses a regret about not being able to “see the Dalloways and a hope ”that she wants to “see England” (352). From this passage where she reveals her love for the rest of the world (later Rachel admits that she wants many more things than the love of one human beings, including the sea and the sky), it appears that the thing that attracts Rachel is the way of seeing and knowing the other.
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“all” (136).
The other question Adams quotes, “Would there ever be a time when the world was one and indivisible?” (345), is not the longing for totality, either. It is thought inwardly when Rachel senses the great distance between her and the rest of the world.
While replying the congratulations on her engagement, Rachel suddenly puts down her pen and looks up to see everything around her. She is “amazed at the gulf which lied between all that and her sheet of paper” (345). Feeling distanced, she asks the question about whether there would be “a time when the world was one and
indivisible” (345). This exclamation in her mind is a reaction when she suddenly feels being away from Terrence, who is physically near her: “Even with Terrence
himself—how far apart they could be, how little she knew was passing in his brain now!” (345). She is not literally asking a world that is one and indivisible. It is rather a question that reflects Rachel‟s frustration when she finds herself being distant from her fiancé,
If The Voyage Out is not so much about searching for an answer in the colony, then, in this sea voyage, where does Rachel sail to? Does she have a purpose to fulfill?
What is her destination? Being identical with the ship that takes the crew to be “free of road, free of mankind” (23), Rachel seems to be going into the middle of the sea.
At first, when people are on the ship, as the narration describes, England
appears to them “to be an island, and a very small island, but it was a shrinking island in which people were imprisoned” (29). Although England is the homeland of these sea voyagers, it appears to be a prison that restrains them. That is why when
Euphrosyne is sailing away from the port, the narration says people are “free of mankind” (23). Swimming with imagination, the narration calls the shrinking of the land infected with “disease”(29). Even though it is impossible to see other continents
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within the passage from England to South America, the shrinking of the islands spread like “disease” that leads Euphrosyne completely alone with the “world” (29), a place that is synonymous with the smoothness of the sea. The ship becomes a lonely but dignified female traveler who is one of the “few inhabitants of the great world”
(29). Rachel, who is comparable to Euphrosyne, is one of the few travelers that voyages on sea.
Unlike Terrence, England is not the place Rachel feels familiar with and close to.
She tosses her sight to the vast sea when Terrence refers to the home-like feelings of London. Following the course of thoughts that the sea in Santa Marina would “flow up to the mouth of the Thames; and the Thames washed the roots of the city of
London(237),” Terrence exclaims that “I‟d like to be in England” (237). Upon hearing this, Rachel pushes the long grass away and moves to the edge to see the water. After thinking for a while, she asks “What d‟you want with England?” (238). England is not that desirable for her. It is the sea that brings her calmness and peace. When Terrence claims that he suspects Rachel would throw him into the sea if they stood on a rock, Rachel begins to imagine being “flung into the sea” and the idea of being “washed hither and thither” is “incoherently delightful” (347). She even pretends to be a mermaid and moves her body as if the water is passing her.
When she lands on the small town of South America, she expresses a sense of excitement about the unknown place rather than expecting to see something that is authentically Santa Marina. She appreciates the beauty of the river, joins the picnic trip to overlook the sea from the cliff, participates in the river expedition, and watches the local women weaving the extraordinarily beautiful cloth. Rachel embraces the unknown without any pre-designed routes. Her journey is nomadic, which is
directional rather than intentional (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 380). The journey of a
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nomadic traveler is “the circulation in the middle, dwelling in the multiplicity of the in-between,” and it “has no beginning nor any end” (Islam 60).51 Her voyage out is not with any purpose to fulfill. Moving from one point to another is what a nomad does, and he or she is defined by the force of speed rather than by spatial territories.
The references to sea for Rachel are always exciting and attractive. When she and Terrence happily talk and walk together, Rachel begins to imagine them
surrounded by the waters: “Voices crying behind them never reached through the waters in which they were now sunk” (330). When she suffers from fever, she also imagines herself pushed by the waves of the sea. The vastness of the sea renders her a smooth space to explore, where she turns into all kinds of natural objects and
continues her lonely voyage as the narration has indicated at the beginning.52 In her detailed discussion on The Voyage Out, Christine Froula also points out that Rachel
“identify[ies] with the nature rather than culture” (63). Departing from England, Rachel travels as a nomad in the smooth space of the sea. Even if she lands on Santa Marina, the way she perceives the world falls onto the supple line of travel. The smooth space exists in the borderless virtual where Rachel unknowingly glides
through. In the novel, if there is a place indicating her last destination, perhaps it is not the termination that death represents but the winding smooth space of continuity that the sea symbolizes.
The moment when Terrence holds Rachel‟s hand by her bed, Rachel does not live simultaneously in the same dimension of time as that of Terrence. The world
51 In The Ethics of Travel, based on Deleuze and Guattari‟s discussion in A Thousand Plateaus, Islam observes that the nomadic traveler is taking the lines of flight. The trajectory of a nomadic body is “a line direction that ultimately takes one beyond the threshold, to the line of flight, towards
becoming-other” (60).
52 The narration observes that Rachel and Euphrosyne are identical as being traveling alone: “She was more lonely than the caravan crossing the dessert” (29). The last depiction of Rachel‟s illusory consciousness is that she does not wish to be disturbed and she wishes “to be alone” (405). The first description of Rachel being a traveler is parallel to that of the last one. Perhaps the voyage out for Rachel is to sail into the sea where she finds peace and comfort and can really travel alone.
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Terrence and her friends live in is no longer a place where she wishes to have anything to do with.53 She “ceased to breath” (412) in order to reach the sea, the smooth space where she can break the limit of space and infuse her soul into the mountain and the little flying creature. Reading Rachel in terms of the concept of Deleuzian ontology, it is possible to see that her uniqueness paves a new road for her to know the world. Her creative autonomy and nomadic attitude open a realm for her to communicate with the other. Even though she dies in the end, the spirit of her love for the world shall continue with her and with the readers.
Rachel‟s Death A Tragic End or an Extension of Her Sea Voyage?
There are various interpretations of Rachel‟s death. Louise DeSalvo remarks that the child rearing in English society at the time of Rachel caused the youth strong psychological trauma. She notices that the distance between children and parents separates Rachel from the connection with feelings and love. In addition, in private, Richard Dalloway also reveals his wretched childhood to Rachel that “it‟s a fallacy to think that children are happy. . . . I‟ve never suffered so much as I did when I was a child” (71). DeSalvo observes that “the contact between parents and children is minimized, while that father‟s control of child-rearing practices is retained” (DeSalvo 1989: 164). This phenomenon is the manifestation of patriarchy that “without children present, male behavior can continue to be infantile, self-absorbed, and narcissistic;
and men can be the center of female attention” (DeSalvo 1989: 165). The separation between Helen and her sons is considered to be the example of Richard Ambrose‟s
“male privilege” (DeSalvo 1989: 164). Rachel‟s and even Mr. Dalloway‟s childhood
53 After expressing that she wishes “to be alone,” Rachel‟s final word is that she “wish[es] for nothing else in the world” (405).
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can be seen as the reflection of child rearing in their society. DeSalvo uses traditional Freudian psychoanalysis to explain the results between boys and girls who grow up in the same patriarchal system. Men are identified with the system as Mr. Dalloway does despite that he has received the same injustice as a child. Women, as DeSalvo points out, would either turn to be the believer of this system as Mrs. Dalloway or be traumatized as Rachel with psychological and physical symptoms of deliriums and fever. DeSalvo then concludes that Rachel‟s death is the “most terrifying insight that Woolf conveys” (DeSalvo 1989: 167) that “Rachel has been rendered unfit for life”
(DeSalvo 1989: 167). Rachel “has blocked off her memories” (DeSalvo 1989: 167) and the distance between her and the world is nowhere to be mended.54 DeSalvo asserts that the unhappy childhood is related to the contemporary society, and it is hard for Rachel to resist the culture. Based on Froula‟s reading of Rachel‟s voyage out, the young woman who is encouraged to explore the foreign land, is endowed “with a powerful desire to evade or to transcend this culturally determined destiny” (Froula 63). However, “the history of Woolf‟s heroine ends not in triumph but in death”
(Froula 63). Rachel‟s voyage is seen as being brutally cut off because the strength of the “cultural currents” (Froula 63) are too powerful to resist. Tragically, Rachel is considered “unfit for life” (DeSalvo 1989: 167) in the eyes of her author.55
Rachel might have sensed the cultural confinement she would have to face if going back to England. However, to conclude that this is the reason of her inevitable death and that the whole voyage “ends not in triumph but in death” seem to ignore the
54 DeSalvo believes that Rachel‟s death is connected with her sexual abuse, which includes the child rearing in patriarchal society, potential abuse of her father suggested by Helen, and the harassment of Mr. Dalloway that arouses terrible nightmare. The kiss of Mr. Dalloway is seen as the trigger that evokes the anxiety caused by her traumatized childhood.
55 In the “Epilogue” of Virginia Woolf: the Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work , DeSalvo quotes Woolf‟s statement from Letters about The Voyage Out during the time of the novel‟s first publish, in which Woolf expresses her notion of the relation between Rachel and the society she lives: “ painstaking woman who wished to treat life as she finds it, and to give voice to some of the perplexities of her sex, in plain English, has no chance at all” (qtd. in DeSalvo 1989: 167).
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exploration of feelings and imagination of Rachel. Lawrence believes that the final section of the novel is not “a breaking off of the trajectory of the narrative” but an
“extension of it” (Lawrence 170). With the particular image of drowning, Lawrence asserts that Woolf “riskily challenges herself to join the radical interiority caused by Rachel‟s illness and the radical exteriority of death” (Lawrence 178). Based on the insight of Garrett Stewart‟s study, Lawrence concludes that “Rachel returns to the
„realm of insentience‟ rather than to the mundane world, we witness the spectacle of identity reviewing itself. In these passages, the narrative reaches the limits of its own excursus” (Lawrence 178). In Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction, Garret Stewart observes that many of Woolf‟s characters carry the images of
drowning. Septimus Smith is a drowned sailor in Mrs. Dalloway, Rhoda in The Waves
“dreams of watery death in a leap from a precipice that would release her from time”(Stewart 257), and Rachel imagines herself “curled up at the bottom of the sea”
(398). According to Stewart,
Woolf‟ novels are steering their course into well-charted waters, yet sounding them to a new depth. As troped toward sheer psychology in some of the
Woolf‟ novels are steering their course into well-charted waters, yet sounding them to a new depth. As troped toward sheer psychology in some of the