The writing of The Voyage Out revolved around the issue of sexual politics in the early twentieth century. Virginia Woolf began writing her first novel Melymbrosia in 1907 (published as The Voyage Out in 1915)51 when Clive Bell was her most
51 In a letter to Violet Dickinson in October 1907, Woolf mentioned that she was engaged in writing a novel. Nigel Nicolson noted that “that could be the first record about Woolf’s writing of her novel”
(Letters I 315).
intimate confidant, both literary and personal. But when Woolf sent the early drafts (only the beginning seven chapters then) to Bell for criticism in the following year, Bell’s comments about Woolf’s “sharp & marked contrasts” between men and women in the novel52 provoked Woolf’s solemn defense in her subsequent reply. Here is Woolf’s sonorous reply:
Your objection, that my prejudice against men makes me didactic “not to say priggish,” has not quite the same force with me; I don’t remember what I said that suggests the remark; I daresay it came out, without my knowledge: but I will bear it in mind. I never meant to preach, & agree that like God, one shouldn’t. Possibly, for psychological reasons which seem to me very interesting, a man, in the present state of the world, is not a very good judge of his sex; and a “creation” may seem to him
“didactic.” I admit the justice of your hint that sometimes I have had an inkling of the way the book might be written by other people. It is very difficult to fight against it; as difficult as to ignore the opinion of one’s probable readers—I think I gather courage as I go on. The only possible reason for writing down all this, is that it represents roughly a view of one’s own. My boldness terrifies me. I feel I have so few of the gifts that make novels amusing. (Woolf, Letters I 383; Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf:
A Biography I 211).
52 In the letter responding to Woolf’s early drafts in 1909, Bell wrote that “I must tell you again that I think the first part too didactic, not to say priggish. Our views about men & women are doubtless quite different, and the difference doesn’t matter much; but to draw such sharp & marked contrasts between the subtle, sensitive, tactful, gracious, delicately perceptive, & perspicacious women, & the obtuse, vulgar, blind, florid, rude, tactless, emphatic, indelicate, vain, tyrannical, stupid men, is not only rather absurd, but rather bad art, I think. To sum up my animadversions, then; —I fell, in the first part, that to give more “humanity” to your work, you have sacrificed the “inhuman,”—the super-natural—the magic which I thought as beautiful as anything that had been written these hundred years; in so far as the book is purely Virginia, Virginia’s view of the world is perfectly artistic, but isn’t there some danger that she may forget that an artist, like God, should create without coming to conclusions” (Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography I 209).
Woolf clearly indicates in her reply that she had been conscious of her essential difference from men who lived “in the present state of the world” like Bell, and that their differences were not just in their views, but also in their different states of being which constituted those different views. “Didactic” as she had admitted her
unconscious “prejudice against men” might seem, her “creation” thus was no more objectionable than a man’s nonchalant criticism on a woman writer’s “view.” In fact, since her creation “came out without my knowledge” from her “view,” which in turn was constituted by the patriarchal order of her time, her resentment or prejudice against men was passively made by the social structure. And yet, though surviving in such an unfair world which favored only a half of the two sexes, she felt compelled to express her personal “view” candidly on behalf of her sex without considering any possibility of reconciliation. And, since the impulse to express occurred to her as a divine mission which summoned her to “gather courage as I go on,” she was grave to announce her “view” in the novel without considering the possibility of making it
“amusing.”
Woolf’s concern with sexual politics in her first novel was also found in her letter to Lytton Strachey where she expressed her attempt “to give voice to some of the perplexities of her sex" (Letters I 381) in the novel. Moreover, if we read how Woolf reviewed the novel in her own diary five years after its first publication in the following passage, we would agree that the attempt to make the novel a feministic manifesto against men’s depreciation of the other sex had always been the overall plan of the novel.
The mornings from 12 to 1 I spend reading the Voyage Out. I’ve not read it since July 1913. And if you ask me what I think I must reply that I don’t know—such a harlequinade as it is—such an assortment of patches—here simple & severe—here frivolous & shallow—here like
God’s truth—here strong & free flowing as I could wish. What to make of it, Heaven knows. The failures are ghastly enough to make my cheeks burn--& then a turn of the sentence, a direct look ahead of me, makes them burn in a different way. On the whole I like the young woman’s mind considerably. How gallantly she takes her fences--& my word, what a gift for pen & ink! I can do little to amend; & must go down to posterity the author of cheap witticisms, smart satires & even, I find,
vulgarisms—crudities rather—that will never cease to rankle in the grave.
Yet I see how people prefer it to N. & D.—I don’t say admire it more, but find it a more gallant & inspiriting spectacle. (Diary II 17)53
Clearly, the “young woman’s” gallantry that Woolf reflected in the “gallant &
inspiriting spectacle” in her diary was the boldness that had prompted her to “take her fences” against the unfair sexual discrimination in her novel years earlier, as we have also seen in her correspondence with Clive Bell. “A harlequinade” as it might seem to her five years after the novel’s publication, she thus “can do little to amend” it and would rather leave it “to posterity” without caring what criticisms it might incur. And though Louise DeSalvo had still identified several distinct revisions of the text,54 which somehow betrayed Woolf’s consideration of the novel’s reception by the society to a certain degree anyway, she suggested reading all the reworkings,
additions, and suppressions of the revised novel as the author’s coded reflection of her own sexual and cultural abuses since her childhood. To see how the novel reflected all these abuses which eventually incited the author’s gallantry, here I will recount the story in more details.
53 Diary is my short for The Diary of Virginia Woolf.
54 See Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making and Melymbrosia, the earliest version of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out reconstructed by DeSalvo based on the authors manuscripts.
“In the glass she wore an expression of tense melancholy.”55
The novel opens with a party of English people aboard the Euphrosyne, the cargo ship owned by Willoughby Vinrace, bound for South America. The party was generally composed of relatives and friends, including the owner Willoughby, his 24-year-old daughter Rachel, the young lady’s aunt and uncle Helen and Ridley Ambrose, Willoughby’s old friend Mr. Pepper, and the ship’s crew. They talked intermittently aboard the ship, and the theme of sexual inequality was naturally brought into the text. Here is an example showing how Ridley and Mr. Pepper
indulged in their Cantabrigian subjects, regardless of Helen and Rachel’s presence. In the eyes of the men, women thus were just like an immovable background. It was always only when they asked to be excused from their sight that the women’s presence were perceived by the men.
Each of the ladies, being after the fashion of their sex, highly trained in promoting men’s talk without listening to it, could
think—about the education of children, about the use of fog sirens in an opera—without betraying herself. Only it struck Helen that Rachel was perhaps too still for a hostess, and that she might have done something with her hands.
“Perhaps--?” she said at length, upon which they rose and left, vaguely to the surprise of the gentlemen, who had either thought them attentive or had forgotten their presence.
“Ah, one could tell strange stories of the old days,” they heard Ridley say, as he sank into his chair again. Glancing back, at the doorway, they saw Mr. Pepper as though he had suddenly loosened his clothes, and
55 The Voyage Out 39.
had become a vivacious and malicious old ape. (12)
The party was temporarily joined by Richard and Clarissa Dalloway in Lisbon, Portugal. Once a Member of Parliament and the daughter of a peer, the strange couple’s special background not just caused a certain undulation among the crew, but also created new subjects for their daily conversations aboard. From their discussions or even debates over sexual equality, women’s franchise, politics and art, we gather their personalities and views: Rachel was self-conscious and diffident about her plain look when she looked at her own reflection in the mirror with the strangers’ presence in mind (39-40); while Helen could be somehow exceptional, most people aboard the ship, both male and female, believed that men were superior to women and thus worth more wages, privileges and political power (41-42); and finally, the party could be roughly divided into two lines, one practical, like Willoughby, Clarissa and Richard Dalloway, the other “emotional,” “queer” and “literary,” like Rachel, Mr. Pepper, Helen and Ridley Ambrose, who in Clarissa’s reflection had been “swallowed up by Oxford or Cambridge or some such place, and been made cranks of” (42-50).
Transients as Mr. and Mrs. Dalloway were for the people aboard, they made an indelible impression on them, and especially on Rachel personally, after a secret incident involving Richard and Rachel’s ambiguous relationship to which we might apply the ambiguous term “seduction” in the broader sense of the Freudian term. To take a closer look at the incident and see how it had obsessed the inexperienced young lady, creating an ambivalent attitude toward men in her mind, here I will extract some key passages from the text:
“What solitary icebergs we are, Miss Vinrace! How little we can communicate! There are lots of things I should like to tell you about—to hear your opinion of. Have you ever read Burke?”
“Burke?” she repeated. “Who was Burke?”
“No? Well, then, I shall make a point of sending you a copy. The Speech
on the French Revolution—The American Rebellion? Which shall it be, I
wonder?” He noted something in his pocket-book. “And then you must write and tell me what you think of it. This reticence—thisisolation—that’s what’s the matter with modern life! Now tell me about yourself. What are your interests and occupations? I should imagine that you were a person with very strong interests. Of course you are! Good God! When I think of the age we live in, with its opportunities and possibilities, the mass of things to be done and enjoyed—why haven’t we ten lives instead of one? But about yourself?”
“You see, I’m a woman,” said Rachel.
“I know—I know,” said Richard, throwing his head back, and drawing his fingers across his eyes.
“How strange to be a woman! A young and beautiful woman,” he continued sententiously, “has the whole world at her feet. That’s true, Miss Vinrace. You have an inestimable power—for good or for evil.
What couldn’t you do—” he broke off.
“What?” asked Rachel.
“You have beauty,” he said. The ship lurched. Rachel fell slightly forward. Richard took her in his arms and kissed her. Holding her tight, he kissed her passionately, so that she felt the hardness of his body and the roughness of his cheek printed upon hers. She felt back in her chair, with tremendous beats of the heart, each of which sent black waves across her eyes. He clasped his forehead in his hands.
“You tempt me,” he said. The tone of his voice was terrifying. He seemed choked with fight. They were both trembling. Rachel stood up
and went. Her head was cold, her knees shaking, and the physical pain of the emotion was so great that she could only keep herself moving above the great leaps of her heart. She leant upon the rail of the ship, and gradually ceased to feel, for a chill of body and mind crept over her. Far out between the waves little black and white sea-birds were riding. Rising and falling with smooth and graceful movements in the hollows of the waves they seemed singularly detached and unconcerned. (79-80 my emphasis)
It is worth pondering that while Mr. Dalloway accused Rachel’s tempting beauty and youth of prompting his uncontrollable kiss, he could be the seducer who initiated the erotic relationship with the inexperienced young lady in the eyes of some feminist critics (Fisher; Gallop; Herman). In fact, he had kept talking and luring Rachel into the domain of knowledge on which he was undoubtedly an authority, though he said that he had attempted to understand more about Rachel and would like to hear more of her opinions; Rachel, contrarily, was just passively seduced, unable to articulate her own feelings and thoughts. Perhaps it was true for the man that the reticent young woman indeed had “an inestimable power” over him. But it was also true that the thought of being tempted by the woman might just be a pretext that concealed the man’s active desire for her. Mr. Dalloway’s claim that Rachel seduced him, in other words, could be merely an unconscious defense mechanism functioning to justify his brutal act and male desire, even if it might victimize again, on another level, the victim of his irresponsible violence. This image of Rachel as an unprotected victim recalls Helen’s reflection on her niece after seeing the young lady lying in her deep sleep, itself a reference to Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan”: “lying unprotected she looked somehow like a victim dropped from the claws of a bird of prey” (35).
Rachel, of course, could have defended her purity in the incident in question or
even charged against Mr. Dalloway’s seduction and further victimization. But she remained passively reticent about what had occurred to her as ever. Retreating to the rail of the ship alone, she could only recompose herself from the shock and tumult gradually by ceasing to feel and letting a chill of body and mind creep over her. Her self-consciousness soon dissolved in the Nature. And while she became peaceful again, she was “possessed with a strange exultation” (80) which made her confront herself calmly and readily.
But the incident indeed made a great impact on her. That night, she then dreamt about walking down a long tunnel, at the end of which she found herself trapped in a closed vault, alone with a little deformed man with an animal’s face. Shocked by the covetousness of the man’s desiring eyes, Rachel woke up from the dream sleeplessly.
But the horror had kept haunting her mind thenceforth. After the Dalloways left the ship, she thus told Helen about her fear apprehensively: “I became terrified” (85).
To take a closer look at Rachel’s terror and see how it was related to sexual politics or constituted by the social structure of a larger scale, we may look further into her dream in more details. The damp and dark physical environment of the dream may remind us of a woman’s womb. And the apparition of a beast-like man in the closed vault, in turn, may suggest a man’s violent trespass, with his masculine culture and order, in a woman’s private territory both physically and psychically. Perhaps, infringed by the intruder in her private territory, Rachel was once shocked by the violence of the intrusion at the first few moments. But from the depth of her heart, she must have also felt devastatingly guilty of her sin, of letting a man take advantage of her, without knowing that the sense of guilt resulting from her ambiguous relationship with the man was exactly the aftereffect of the sexual and cultural abuse, and that this time, by blaming herself for being reckless and impure from the perspective of patriarchal order, she had become the inflictor of her own pain. The predicament
where Rachel found herself was stuck in the dream, taken from this view, can be studied as a reflection of her own unconscious of her real life in which she was a multiple victim of the male-centered value system in many ways.
For more evidence of Rachel’s multiple victimizations inflicted by the patriarchal order, we may continue to take a look at another dialogue between two women as follows. Having being remorseful for laying herself unreserved for a man’s infringement, Rachel once asked Helen abruptly,
“What are those women in Piccadilly?”
“In Piccadilly? They are prostitutes,” said Helen.
“It is terrifying—it is disgusting,” Rachel asserted, as if she included Helen in her hatred. (86 Woolf’s emphasis)
Rachel’s ambivalent anger and pain, apparently, came from her abomination of the nastiness of “those women in Piccadilly” who degenerately traded their bodies and virtues for money. But perhaps more profoundly or even unconsciously, due to her similar experience, she was also sympathetic with “those women” who were helpless for what had occurred to them and bore their names as “prostitutes” only passively in the society. Her hatred in that case thus was directed not just against “those women in Piccadilly,” but also against the patriarchal value system which favored only a half of the two sexes, or even against those fosterers and cohorts of the value system, among them including herself (and perhaps also including Helen)56 in her feeling
“disgusting” of “those women.”
Woolf: “I have always remembered the other face in the glass.”
56 Helen’s attitude toward “those women in Piccadilly” was never expressed explicitly in the novel.
Her contempt of “those women” might just be Rachel’s subjective projection.
Through Rachel’s unconscious objection to the patriarchal value system under which she became the inflictor of her own pain, Woolf was obviously examining the function of the reflecting structure that had produced such reflections in mirrors, in minds, or even in dreams, as we have reviewed in the novel: Rachel’s reflection of her plain look in the mirror (39-40); Helen’s reflection of her niece as “a victim dropped from the claws of a bird of prey” (35); Clarissa’s reflection of the people aboard as
“emotional,” “literary,” “cranky,” “queer” and “odd” (47-50); and finally, Rachel’s dream about her predicament in a womb-like vault alone with a despicable man with
“emotional,” “literary,” “cranky,” “queer” and “odd” (47-50); and finally, Rachel’s dream about her predicament in a womb-like vault alone with a despicable man with