Conclusion
Recently, Woolf studies have focused not only on feminist themes but also postcolonial issues in her works. Likewise, my thesis incorporates both feminist and postcolonial perspectives. Primarily, I explore the significance of exotic spaces in The Voyage Out and Orlando. In the aspect of feminist themes and concerns, I argue that
Woolf’s deployment of exotic spaces in the two novels influentially challenges the western binary opposition between men and women. I have proved that exotic spaces serve as a land of liberation in which traveling women can learn the truth of female self and thereby resist the institution of marriage. In addition, exotic spaces serve another function; that is, to empower traveling women to confront gender ideology at homeland. On the other hand, I adopt postcolonial perspective and theory to examine Woolf’s depiction of colonial activities in the foreign lands; I argue that read as travel narrative Woolf’s novels significantly revise the tradition of men’s travel writings but do not strongly critique colonialism.
In the first chapter, my reading of The Voyage Out focuses on how Woolf exposes the operation of underlying gender ideology of English social space and dislocates female maturating process to the exotic land to facilitate Rachel’s resistance to her female gender role. I rely on Pollock’s observation on the bourgeois ideology of the separated spheres to examine Rachel’s early life at Richmond. Moreover, my reading draws upon Shoemaker’s idea about the male and female gender roles in the institution of marriage. In this chapter, I argue that the unusual experience of female growth in the exotic land endows Rachel with a fresh perspective to examine the sexual and gender system of English society and leads to her ultimate resistance to the institution of marriage.
I first indicate that Rachel’s early life at Richmond is highly regulated by the
ideology of separated spheres. It is the gender and spatial divisions that result in Rachel’s extreme isolation from the outside world and her ignorance of the importance of marriage for women in society. At Richmond, Rachel is restricted within the spaces of femininity that aim to nurture her feminine qualities; that is to say, Rachel is expected to be a virtuous and respectable middle-class woman. Living under the ideology of the separated spheres, Rachel is over-protected and has few chances to experience the social readity outside. In addition, the lack of a mother results in Rachel’s inability to play her female gender role well and her ignorance of the relation between men and women. All Rachel can do is being submissive to her patriarchal father. At home, Rachel is neither capable of independent-thinking nor aware of the constraints of patriarchy. Therefore, when first on the social occasions, Rachel is fascinated by the Dalloway couple and terrified by a men’s sudden kiss. She is not able to respond to the social reality properly.
It is in the exotic land that Rachel begins her maturing process and learns more about the gender and sexual system of the English society. I have explored Rachel’s sojourn in South America, especially her isolation in the local villa and her later interaction with the English community in the hotel. I suggest that the spatial arrangements of the villa are much different from those of Richmond. In the villa, Rachel is hardly restricted by the ideology of separated spheres, so that she is not forced to meet the demands of womanhood. Rachel attains spatial mobility to some extent and develops her own character while being isolated in the villa. I argue that Rachel in the exotic space is not as ignorant as she was at Richmond, for she then learns how to think independently. Due to her independent-thinking, she is no longer timid but avidly explores her surroundings. The courtship process enables her to learn the relation between men and woman and leads to her willing incorporation into the English community. Rachel is completely changed in the exotic land.
However, Rachel resists her incorporation into English society soon after she learns the hypocrisy of the English social values and its patriarchal structure’s exploitation of middle-class women. I indicate that Rachel learns English hypocrisy during the religious sermons. Hereafter, Rachel grows reluctant to interact with the English community in the hotel. Even though she is engaged to Hewet Terence, Rachel realizes she cannot evade playing her female gender role in the institution of marriage. Similar to her early life at Richmond, her expected married life will also be regulated by the strict division of public and private spheres. Rachel completes the quest for the truth of her female self in the foreign land. Yet being powerless to challenge the gender binary oppositions of English society, Rachel demonstrates passive resistance to her female gender role through death. I conclude that the travel to the foreign land liberates, though temporarily, Rachel from the imprisonment of domestic spaces and makes possible her resistance. If Rachel’s maturing development was not set in the exotic space, she might never have learnt that women are socially and sexually exploited and rejected her domestic duties.
While the exotic space in The Voyage Out serves as a site of resistance, I suggest that the exotic space in Orlando should be seen as a site of empowerment; that is, a site to empower white women with androgynous experience to transgress the gender and spatial divisions. In the second chapter, Piehler’s study of pictorial spaces helps to illuminate my understanding of the imaginary space in Orlando. I regard the exotic space in the novel as an emotional outlet for women to escape the societal constraints of gender. In addition, building on Walkowitz’s observations on the late
nineteen-century London city, I propose that the unusual experience of traveling in exotic spaces helps women contest the restrictions of female gender role and
challenge the ideology of the separated spheres. In this chapter, I argue that the exotic spaces enable escape from English gender ideology and then empower the female
Orlando with androgynous experience to transgress the division of gender roles and acquire visibility in the public sphere.
Beginning with discussion on Orlando’s early years in Elizabethan England, I assert that the English social space is masculine in history and the male Orlando is a representative of this masculine world. Initially, the male Orlando is proud of the adventure and literary tradition. However, Orlando gets exhausted by the convention of courtship and frustrated by his unrequited love for Sasha the racial other. At that time, the English social space rejects the presence of otherness, for its implication of androgyny challenges the English social values such as racial homogeneity and heterosexual respectability. I suggest that Woolf’s representation of Elizabethan England illuminates the fact the English social space is primarily dominated by men and implies the need of other spaces for women.
After exploring Woolf’s representation of Elizabethan England, I move forward to investigate the significance of exotic space. I argue that the major function of exotic space is that it makes Orlando’s mysterious sex change possible. As such, I propose that Orlando acquires androgynous experience in the exotic space through the sex change. In addition, I indicate that Turkish clothing and the contact with the gypsy tribe all contribute to Orlando’s experience of androgyny. Orlando’s sex change, I assert, only can take place in the exotic land, for Turkey is a land not ordered by English gender ideology. It is the sex change in the exotic space that endows Orlando with both feminine and masculine qualities; that is, strength of a man and grace of a woman. After the sex change, the female Orlando puts on Turkish clothing and starts to accumulate androgynous experience. First, Turkish clothing helps Orlando to conceal her gender identity. It suggests that gender identity may be constructed by dressing. Second, the sojourn with the gypsy tribe leads Orlando to know the fact that in some society women are not much different from men. In the exotic space, the
female Orlando has never thought of the significance of female gender role. It is not until she decides to return that the female Orlando begins to examine the gender and sexual system of England.
In examining the female Orlando’s reaction to English society, I assert that androgynous experience inspires Orlando to contest the ideology of separated spheres.
With the androgynous mind, Orlando knows well what both men and women think about. At the very beginning, Orlando challenges the convention of courtship and rejects marriage by playing a trick on her male suitor. Later on, Orlando finds out that the male public figures are nothing but self-important persons, thereby discarding her female servicing role. The cross-dressing Orlando learns during her sojourn in the exotic space helps her transgress the boundary between domestic space and public space to some extent. Owing to the cross-dressing, the female Orlando can walk freely at night without any fear of sexual harassment. Being a female, Orlando, on the other hand, displays her sympathy for the prostitutes. With the help of androgynous experience, Orlando can either be a male or a female. However, the fact that Orlando is a woman cannot be denied. In the Victorian Age, the female Orlando increasingly desires for marriage. I suggest that Orlando’s consummation with Shelmerdine does not follow the convention of the institution of marriage. This is because Orlando’s husband is not masculine in nature but possesses both masculine and feminine qualities. The female Orlando does have to fulfill her domestic duties in her married life. However, after marriage, the female Orlando acquires visibility in the public sphere with the publication of her literary work. The androgynous experience also inspires Orlando to complete her poem, so that Orlando as a woman writer challenges the ideology of separated spheres.
In the first two chapters of my thesis, I focus on the significance of exotic spaces to explore feminist themes of novels. The deployment of exotic spaces is significant
because it involves feminist concerns. Rachel’s travel to South America suggests that Rachel obtain liberation from the imprisonment of domestic spaces in England. In the exotic land, Rachel develops her true female self, thereby critically examining the gender and sexual system of English society. Without the voyage out of England, Rachel would not have ever questioned the ideology of separated spheres that governs her early life or even resisted her female gender role expected by her society. On the other hand, Orlando’s travel to Turkey makes the mysterious sex change possible.
Energized and empowered in the exotic space, the female Orlando does not comply with English gender ideology. Instead, Orlando confronts the limitation on her female gender role with her androgynous experience. In the first two chapters, I conclude that Woolf’s deployment of exotic spaces serves white women’s need to critically examine English gender ideology and disturb the strict distinction between public and private spaces.
In the last chapter, I incorporate postcolonial perspective and theories to examine the significance of exotic spaces and Woolf’s traveling women in the exotic spaces. I rely on Mills’ ideas to illuminate my understanding of Woolf’s writings about colonial conditions in the foreign lands. According to Mills, white women are nothing like their male counterparts, for they hardly emphasize imperial rules but demonstrate female individuality and uniqueness. Based on Mills’ idea, I argue that Woolf’s travel writings revise the tradition of men’s travel writings and expose the uneven relation between men and women in the Empire. Besides, I look into the two heroines’
homecoming desire, and suggest that white women cannot fully abdicate Englishness which has exploited them to some extent. On the whole, I assert that Woolf’s
deployment of exotic spaces influentially challenges the travel tradition and
hegemony of patriarchy but Woolf’s attitude toward imperialism remains equivocal.
My analysis of The Voyage Out focuses on Woolf’s representation of English
travelers who embodies the male and female roles under colonial ideology. I argue that Woolf’s travel narrative is much different from her male counterparts’, for it is concerned with a female-growth experience in the exotic land. First, I indicate that Woolf represents the different roles that men and women play in the Empire. The couple, Richard and Clarissa Dalloways, is a salient example of the gender division in the Empire. As such, I assert that white men dominate the central power of colonial expansion whereas white women, though imperialist-minded, play merely supporting roles. Woolf’s travel writing first reveals the uneven relation between men and women.
In order to prove that Woolf’s travel writing is unconventional, I examine the narrative voices to make my point. Obviously, the narrator represents colonial conditions with a sarcastic overtone. It means the narrator or Woolf does not thoroughly endorse colonialism. Moreover, after she completes her maturation and builds her individuality, Rachel the traveling woman longs for a return-journey. The homecoming desire suggests that the traveling woman cannot abdicate their national identity even though she tends to show sympathy for the racial others.
Likewise, my reading of Orlando also focuses on Woolf’s revision of male travel writings in terms of setting Orlando’s sex change in the foreign land. I first suggest that Woolf’s representation of Elizabethan England makes clear that the English social space is dominated by men and Woolf’s title character a representative of the society.
Afterward, I examine Woolf’s depictions of Orlando’s traveling in the exotic space. I particularly look into the biographer’s perspective toward the imperial enterprise.
Like the narrator in The Voyage Out, the biographer does not fully support colonial activities but describes colonial conditions in a hilarious way. Underscoring the biographer’s sarcastic overtone, I suggest that Woolf does not align herself with male imperialists. However, Orlando’s desire for homecoming implies that the traveling woman cannot stay in the exotic land for the rest of her life. On the whole, I consider
that Woolf exploits exotic spaces to empower the traveling woman, who later come home to disturb the binary opposition between masculinity and femininity.
In my work, I recognize Virginia Woolf’s literary achievement in terms of her critique of the English middle classes and her deployment of exotic spaces. Most preeminently, the imaginary spaces in her works serve as an emotional outlet for middle-class women. Pollock and Piehler illuminate my understanding of The Voyage Out and Orlando by their observations on the ideology of separated spheres. Their
studies offer me insight into the way the spatial and gender divisions restrict middle-class women’s life. Woolf’s The Voyage Out and Orlando represent middle-class women’s domestic life and search for a solution to the problems of spatial and gender divisions. Rachel learns the fact that women are exploited by English gender ideology and resists the institution of marriage in the exotic space. On the other hand, Orlando, energized in the exotic space, returns to challenge English gender ideology and leads an unconventional married life. I assert that the
significance of exotic spaces lies in helping middle-class women resist female gender role and contest the division of the public and private spheres. Woolf’s two works are most admirable in challenging the western binary oppositions.
Given that Woolf’s deployment of exotic spaces mainly serves to realize middle-class women’s development of individuality, such representation of exotic spaces has its limitations. In terms of feminist concerns, exotic spaces are of vital importance to help white women out of their spatial confinements in England. In the light of postcolonial theories, Woolf’s feminist achievements, however, become open to contestation. I consider that Woolf’s travel writings contribute a lot to revising the tradition of travel but Woolf’s traveling women maintain a hierarchical relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. More specifically, Woolf’s device of exotic spaces merely serves white women’s need to contest the hegemony of English
patriarchy. White women take advantage of exotic spaces to establish their sense of individuality and challenge English gender ideology. By so deploying colonial space, Woolf shows her great concern for white women’s gender issue but hardly takes women of color into consideration. The distinction between the public and the private has been the central concern for middle-class women, but the ideology of separated spheres does not greatly affect color women’s life. There are other forms of
oppression over women who are neither middle-class nor white. Woolf may be seen as somewhat limited in dealing with only white women’s gender issue through the imaginary spaces in her novels. It is worthwhile for us to read Woolf’s works beyond an Eurocentric point of view.
