The Voyage Out (3 page)
Authors: Virginia Woolf
On publication,
The Voyage Out
was well received. A critic at the
Observer
wrote that it was “done with something startlingly like genius … among ordinary novels it is a wild swan among good grey geese.”
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E. M. Forster wrote, “Here at last is a book which attains unity as surely as
Wuthering Heights
, though by a different path, a book which, while written by a woman and presumably from a woman’s point of view, soars straight out of local questionings into the intellectual day.”
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Still, Woolf was never fully satisfied with
The Voyage Out.
For the American edition, published by George H. Duran in 1920, she not only corrected typographical errors in the Duckworth edition but excised a number of sections, most of which she subsequently reinstated when
The Voyage Out
was included in the 1929 Uniform Edition of her novels, published by the Hogarth Press. That version is the one presented here.
Shortly after
The Voyage Out
first appeared in 1915, she and Leonard bought the printing press that would eventually lead to the forming of the Hogarth Press. Following the appearance of her second novel,
Night and Day
, which was also published by Duckworth & Co., Woolf would for the rest of her writing life publish herself, and it is not coincidence that she then began producing her truly experimental work, the stories “The Mark on the Wall” and “Kew Gardens,” among others, and the novel
Jacob’s Room.
That is when she discovered, “all in a flash, as if flying,” a free-form, organic approach to fiction that, she wrote, “… showed me how I could embody all my deposit of experience in a shape that fitted it.…”
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She had become, she said, “the only woman in England free to write what I like.”
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If she felt her freedom restricted when she wrote
The Voyage Out
, she managed nevertheless to abundantly demonstrate early versions of the gifts she took to transcendent extremes in her later work. Woolf was then and remains today unparalleled in her ability to convey the sensations and complexities of the experience known as being alive. Any number of writers manage the big moments beautifully; few do as much with what it feels like to live through an ordinary hour on a usual day. As she said when speaking to a reading group, “In the course of your daily life this week … you have overheard scraps of talk that filled you with amazement. You have gone to bed at night bewildered by the complexity of your feelings. In one day thousands of ideas have coursed through your brains; thousands of emotions have met, collided, and disappeared in astonishing disorder.”
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She was revolutionary in her shunning of the outwardly dramatic (most famously when she dispatched Mrs. Ramsay in a single sentence in
To the Lighthouse)
, and her insistence on the inwardly dramatic—her implied conviction that what’s important in a life, what remains at its end, is less likely to be its supposed climaxes than its unexpected moments of awareness, often arising out of unremarkable experience, so deeply personal they can rarely be explained.
If this belief seems only slightly unusual today it was almost scandalous early in the century, when serious writers were expected to write about large and “serious” subjects. The generation of writers that immediately preceded Woolf—prominent Edwardians like Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and H. G. Wells—tended to scorn the younger Georgians—like Woolf, Joyce, and T. S. Eliot—for what they considered inadequate attention to the histories and circumstances of their characters and for a more general lack of mythic scope and scale; a lack of “greatness,” if you will. Woolf countered by insisting that everything one needed to know about human life was contained in every human action. It was contained, for instance, in two old women gossiping over their tea or in a sad young man wandering through London, more or less the
way the blueprint for an entire organism is contained in each of its cells. The trick was to see those two women or that young man completely, and then to see the invisible lines that connected them to other people, and then others, until you had at least in theory the whole of existence laid out before you.
So Woolf was drawn, throughout her career, to unexceptional lives (barring
Orlando
, which she wrote for the exceptional Vita Sackville-West), the better to see the enormity contained in them without the distractions of battle, quest, or heroic romance. Her artists are never successful; her scholars and politicians have never gone as far as they’d hoped. She said in her 1924 lecture “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” about the experience of sharing a railway carriage with an elderly stranger:
The elderly lady … whom I will call Mrs. Brown … was one of those clean, threadbare old ladies whose extreme tidiness—everything buttoned, fastened, tied together, mended and brushed up—suggests more extreme poverty than rags and dirt. There was something pinched about her—a look of suffering, of apprehension, and, in addition, she was extremely small. Her feet, in their clean little boots, scarcely touched the floor. I felt that she had nobody to support her; that she had to make up her mind for herself; that, having been deserted, or left a widow, years ago, she had led an anxious, harried life, bringing up an only son, perhaps, who, as likely as not, was by this time beginning to go to the bad.…
Myriads of irrelevant and incongruous ideas crowd into one’s head on such occasions; one sees the person, one sees Mrs. Brown, in the centre of all sorts of different scenes. I thought of her in a seaside house, among queer ornaments; sea-urchins, models of ships in glass cases. Her husband’s medals were on the mantelpiece. She popped in and out of the room, perching on the edges of chairs, picking meals outof saucers, indulging in long, silent stares.… There she sits in the corner of the carriage—that carriage which is travelling, not from Richmond to Waterloo, but from one age of English literature to the next, for Mrs. Brown is eternal, Mrs. Brown is human nature, Mrs. Brown changes only on the surface, it is the novelists who get in and out—there she sits and not one of the Edwardian writers has so much as
looked at her. They have looked very powerfully, searchingly, and sympathetically out of the window; at factories, at Utopias, even at the decoration and upholstery of the carriage; but never at her, never at life, never at human nature.…
I asked (the Edwardians)—they are my elders and betters—How shall I begin to describe this woman’s character? And they said: “Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe—” But I cried: “Stop! Stop!” And I regret to say that I threw that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool out of the window, for I knew that if I began describing the cancer and the calico, my Mrs. Brown, that vision to which I cling though I know no way of imparting it to you, would have been dulled and tarnished and vanished forever.
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It is pure Woolf, then—it could be Woolf herself speaking—when Rachel says of her elderly aunts, who are still living their uneventful lives in England as she sails to South America:
“And there’s a sort of beauty in it—there they are at Richmond at this very moment building things up. They’re all wrong, perhaps, but there’s a sort of beauty in it.… It’s so unconscious, so modest. And yet they feel things. They do mind if people die. Old spinsters are always doing things. I don’t quite know what they do. Only that was what I felt when I lived with them. It was very real.”
Rachel appreciates the commonplace. She is intelligent (but not spectacularly so), perceptive (but not incisive). She is so naïve as to be practically blank. In part because she is so guileless, Rachel is open to the forces of revelation that lay dormant almost everywhere. As she wanders along a river the day after a party—the first truly exciting party to which she’s ever been—she passes flowering trees “which Helen had said were worth the voyage out merely to see. April had burst their buds, and they bore large blossoms among their glossy leaves with petals of a thick wax-like substance
coloured an exquisite cream or pink or deep crimson.” Most writers would be content with this: a girl walks among beautiful trees and thinks about her first real party, which has offered the possibility of love. Woolf, however, takes it considerably further:
So she might have walked until she had lost all knowledge of her way, had it not been for the interruption of a tree, which, although it did not grow across her path, stopped her as effectively as if the branches had struck her in the face. It was an ordinary tree, but to her it appeared so strange that it might have been the only tree in the world. Dark was the trunk in the middle, and the branches sprang here and there, leaving jagged intervals of light between them as distinctly as if it had but that second risen from the ground. Having seen a sight that would last her for a lifetime, and for a lifetime would preserve that second, the tree once more sank into the ordinary ranks of trees, and she was able to seat herself in its shade and to pick the red flowers with the thin green leaves which were growing beneath it.
Parties pale—love itself pales—beside a glimpse of the ineffable, what Flannery O’Connor would call “the very heart of mystery,”
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and which O’Connor found, variously, in grandmothers, murderers, a stain on a ceiling, and a sty full of pigs.
If O’Connor was a Catholic visionary, Woolf was a secular one. She searched for the quintessential; she strove to know (or invent) the world’s secret names for itself. And so Rachel, her first heroine, is not so much a woman of actions or qualities as she is an engine of perception. At a picnic, early in the book, when Terence asks Rachel what she is looking at so intently, she answers, “Human beings.” She is simple enough, strange enough, to say something like that; something so direct and wise yet so insufficient. It is part of the novel’s business to keep showing her these human beings, and these singular and eternal trees, until she begins not only to see them but to take them in. The effort will ultimately kill her.
As Rachel moves through the book she has Helen as confidante
and counterpoint: Helen who is worldly where Rachel is ignorant, weary where Rachel is untried. It could be argued that they are the truly central couple in the book. Helen is, to me, the book’s most interesting character by far, and is one of the strongest women Woolf ever created. If, during the course of the narrative, Rachel progresses from innocence to the beginnings of experience, Helen progresses from the comic to the tragic. She enters as a clown, and exists a deity.
The book opens with her, making her way with her husband to the dock where the ship is waiting. When we are introduced to her she could easily be one of the silly, colorful minor figures out of Fielding, Austen, or Dickens:
As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist, lawyers’ clerks will have to make flying leaps into the mud; young lady typists will have to fidget behind you. In the streets of London where beauty goes unregarded, eccentricity must pay the penalty, and it is better not to be very tall, to wear a long blue cloak, or to beat the air with your left hand.
The captivating, rather dreadful Clarissa Dalloway, who with her husband, Richard, boards late in the voyage and disembarks early, and who could not more clearly embody the life-quenching, anti-intellectual propriety of Victorian England, says of Helen and her husband:
“It’s what I’ve always said about literary people—they’re far the hardest of any to get on with.… These people … might have been, one feels, just like everybody else, if they hadn’t got swallowed up by Oxford or Cambridge or some such place, and been made cranks of. The man’s really delightful (if he’d cut his nails), and the woman has quite a fine face, only she dresses, of course, in a potato sack, and wears her hair like a Liberty shopgirl’s. They talk about art, and think us such poops for dressing in the evening. However, I can’t help that; I’d rather die than come in to dinner without changing—wouldn’t you? It matters ever so much more than the soup.”
As the book goes on Helen moves steadily toward its center of gravity, just as the book moves deeper and deeper into a realm of women and young, womanly men. The husbands and fathers—the forces of putative authority—are discarded, one by one. First Richard Dalloway gathers up his wife and leaves the ship when it reaches the coast of North Africa, then Helen and Ridley take Rachel with them while Rachel’s father continues up the Amazon, and finally Ridley disappears into his bottomless, vaguely delineated work. They are replaced by a cadre of women, some of whom are at least as forceful as the men. Among them are Miss Allan, who is about to complete a
Primer of English Literature
, from Beowulf to Swinburne; the beautiful Evelyn Murgatroyd, a malcontent and thwarted revolutionary; and Mrs. Flushing, vital and vulgar, a voracious art collector who proclaims loudly, “Nothin’ that’s more than twenty years old interests me.”
They are replaced, also, by two men of a sort very different from the Ridleys and Richards: the fey and brittle St. John Hirst, and the fey and almost painfully sincere Terence Hewet.
In Santa Marina Helen becomes Rachel’s mentor and she also becomes, by degrees, the book’s moral core, a voice of straightforward, profound unknowing on the subjects of love, art, vision, and how life might be most fully lived—all subjects the vanished men have, at one time or another, picked up from some dusty corner, looked at idly, and pronounced too trivial to contemplate. She becomes the advocate for and protector of life; she comes to resemble, in spirit at least, the nurse Woolf would invent some ten years later, knitting on a bench in Regent’s Park beside the sleeping Peter Walsh in
Mrs. Dalloway:
In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveller, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of great hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride.
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