the voyage out sparknotes

• The Voyage Out Summary

by Virginia Woolf

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Written by Kienyen Chen

It all starts out in London in the early twentieth century, following the life of Helen Ambrose and her husband Ridley. They are preparing for a long journey ahead, to an unnamed location off the coast of South America. There they are planning to stay for the whole of winter, leaving their two young children behind. She is a little downcast as she walks around with a sense of sadness and a touch of depressing emotions. There isn’t much light at the beginning of this tale.

However, the time draws near to depart. Helen and Ridley are taking the ship named Euphrosyne , owned and sailed by Willoughby Vinrace , Helen’s brother-in-law. The plan is to drop off the Ambroses and from there Vinrace will continue on towards the Congo for exploration. Also on board is Vinrace’s daughter, Rachel. Rachel is not a very remarkable person, quite uninspiring and confined to the normalities of her day and age. She is nothing special, nothing unique, and besides her gift in piano, she shows little emotion or delight in anything. Helen considers her and thinks that Rachel has the potential to be amusing and funny if only she would let her feelings out a little more. Rachel plans on continuing on the cruise with her father to the Congo, but Helen steps in with a brighter idea. She suggests that Rachel stay with her and Ridley at the unnamed resort to tag along and hopefully break out of her confinements a little. Rachel isn’t quick to agree, but eventually, with some reluctance, she decides to take Helen up on the offer and join her aunt and uncle. Rachel’s father, Willoughby, is actually quite relieved. He believes that Helen, his dead wife’s sister, will be able to bring Rachel out of her shell and make a “real woman” out of her. In reality though, behind the pretty words and explanation, he wants Rachel to become somewhat of a “Tory hostess” to be an entertainer for when he has guests over for political discussions. Helen however, has a slightly different idea. She wants to help Rachel become her own individual thinker, a person with temperament and uniqueness. The “voyage out” is both literal and mental, with the actual ship’s voyage lasting four weeks, and with Rachel finding herself outside of what she has always known.

After some time at sea, Helen, Ridley, and Rachel arrive at the resort. They have their own villa and settle in. As time goes by, Helen and Rachel make acquaintances and then good friends with several people in the resort. There are two of utmost importance: St. John Hirst , a student from Oxford University, and his good friend and companion Terrence Hewet , an aspiring author and novelist. Hirst is full of rather sexist views and confines to the idea that women are more objects than anything else. However, after talking much with Helen, Hirst finds a surprising amount of delight and enjoyment in her. But in Rachel, he finds nothing but what he calls annoying stagnation and utter dullness. He proceeds to call her rather unpleasant and insulting names and doesn’t see her as anything but worthless in terms of intellectuality. But Hewet sees Rachel much differently. Instead of judging her solely off of intellectual thinking, he connects to her on a personal and spiritual level. He sees that no, she is not just an idol object but much more so a living, thriving, unique human being. He defends her vigorously in front of Hirst and helps Rachel see herself from an objective standpoint, showing her the value and uniqueness she possesses. Hewet and Rachel share a bond while Hirst and Helen share a bond of their own. The four become quite close and intimate with one another.

Eventually, the four of them, plus a couple staying at the villa next door, go on a little “expedition” to the nearby village. Rachel and Hewet take a stroll in the woods alone, leaving the rest of the group behind for a while. For the entirety of the novel, the two are very fond of each other, but neither is brave enough to tell the other. However, with them being completely alone with just the other for company in a wild place, they find it appropriate and even a touch thrilling to confess their feelings to each other. Hewet proposes and they are betrothed, planning to get married soon. However, when they get married and become very comfortable with each other, Rachel becomes very ill. Her condition proceeds to worsen. There is no good doctor in the area that they are in. Hewet doesn’t want to admit that Rachel is in a very bad situation, her condition becoming very dangerous. He argues with Helen, trying to convince himself that this isn’t as bad as it seems. However, Rachel soon starts to hallucinate and it becomes the last straw for Hewet. He runs to the neighboring area and retrieves a much more competent doctor. The doctor rushes to Rachel and is distraught when he discovers the severity of her condition. With anguish, he informs the group that there is nothing he can do for her. Hewet stays by her bedside as she peacefully dies in her sleep.

Though starting off with Helen, the story really has its focus and attention on Rachel. Rachel, being the main character and revolving topic of this novel, goes through an internal voyage of self-discovery. There is not much action within its pages, but relies heavily on deep conversations and well thought out responses. There is much conflict, tension, as well as resolution within the pages of this tale.

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Study Guide for The Voyage Out

The Voyage Out study guide contains a biography of Virginia Woolf, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Voyage Out
• Character List

Wikipedia Entries for The Voyage Out

• Introduction
• Development and first draft
• Critical reception
• Woolf's review copies for USA publication

Mrs Dalloway’s First Outing: The Voyage Out

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library , Dr Oliver Tearle considers Virginia Woolf’s first foray into the novel

A sure-fire way to set the ‘klaxons’ off on the popular BBC panel show QI – where panellists have to avoid giving the obvious-but-wrong answer to interesting questions – is to ask, ‘Which Virginia Woolf novel first featured Mrs Dalloway?’ Of course, the question already feels like a trap, and Alan Davies would be right to be wary. For Mrs Dalloway (1925), perhaps Virginia Woolf’s best-known novel, came ten years after Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915). And it is in The Voyage Out that we first find Clarissa Dalloway, albeit in a slightly different form from her later, more introspective party-throwing incarnation.

As you’d expect from a first novel, The Voyage Out , in terms of its form, style, and structure, is markedly less modernist than Woolf’s later works: it is generally accepted that her third novel Jacob’s Room (1922) represented the turning point in her novel-writing career. The trademark Woolfian style – the somewhat misnamed stream of consciousness, above all else – which she perfected to a fine pitch in later works such as To the Lighthouse and The Waves , is largely absent here. However, just because The Voyage Out is not typically modernist, that does not mean that it is not a modern novel. The novel does contain many elements which we find in her more out-and-out modernist work – use of free indirect style, experimenting with narrative perspective, and interest in dream-states and problems of vision – and it shows Woolf already attempting to write something different from other writers, especially her Edwardian forebears, the trinity of Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells whom she famously rubbished in her 1919 essay ‘Modern Fiction’.

‘I want to write a novel about Silence,’ he said; ‘the things people don’t say. But the difficulty is immense.’ He sighed. ‘However, you don’t care,’ he continued. He looked at her almost severely. ‘Nobody cares. All you read a novel for is to see what sort of person the writer is, and, if you know him, which of his friends he’s put in. As for the novel itself, the whole conception, the way one’s seen the thing, felt about it, made it stand in relation to other things, not one in a million cares for that. And yet I sometimes wonder whether there’s anything else in the whole world worth doing. These other people,’ he indicated the hotel, ‘are always wanting something they can’t get. But there’s an extraordinary satisfaction in writing, even in the attempt to write. What you said just now is true: one doesn’t want to be things; one wants merely to be allowed to see them.’

Woolf had set out to write something different from her contemporaries, and so, for all its formal conventionality, The Voyage Out might be seen as (to borrow Christine Froula’s phrase) ‘a Woolf in sheep’s clothing’, as something other than what it purports to be. It may seem less radically different and experimental than her later novels, but there are still key ways in which it departs from conventional narrative: its emphasis on the everyday, on meaningless conversations, on the difference between what people think and what they say.

It is worth considering what Woolf’s attitude to fiction was, the better to place The Voyage Out within its context. Woolf’s friend Lytton Strachey greeted the novel as ‘very, very unvictorian!’ but Woolf was reacting against a ‘foe’ closer to home: the Edwardians. The Voyage Out was published in 1915, which immediately places it after the Edwardian era, which was dominated, for Woolf, by novelists like H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and Arnold Bennett (who is the only novelist I know to have a famous omelette named after him). The Voyage Out had been gestating for a number of years before its publication, however: it started life in a slightly earlier proto-form as the earlier work Melymbrosia , completed in 1912 but begun when the fiction market was dominated by those Edwardians whom Woolf found so unsatisfying as writers. In her essay ‘ Modern Fiction ’ (1919), Woolf put forward her views on these Edwardian writers along with some ideas about how fiction can move forward. By then, she had begun to see more clearly how her own fiction might move in new, more daringly experimental directions. The Voyage Out may be a tentative step in the right direction, but it was a step. And every journey, or voyage out, must begin with the first step.

4 thoughts on “Mrs Dalloway’s First Outing: The Voyage Out”

Fascinating stuff. I’m in the midst of reading “To The Lighthouse” for the first time, so it’s interesting to see the stepping stones that lead her to it.

Thanks! And To the Lighthouse is one of my favourites :)

Her use of language is breathtaking, as is her grasp of human psychology.

Nice. Per the modernist style, which you aptly refer to as the “somewhat misnamed stream of consciousness,” I’ve often directed people to Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.” If you’ll permit an allusion to Goldilocks, in Faulkner it’s too heavy, in Joyce it’s too confusing, but in Woolf it sparkles and flows just right :) My latest blog on Woolf is here: https://shakemyheadhollow.wordpress.com/2020/02/24/gender-in-virginia-woolfs-to-the-lighthouse/

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The Voyage Out

May 30, 2015 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Voyage Out was Virginia Woolf’s first full length novel. It was written and re-written many times between (probably) 1907 and its eventual publication by Duckworth in 1915 (the publishing house run by her step-brother Gerald Duckworth). It was originally called Melymbrosia , and an earlier version was completed in 1912. This alternative version was published with that title in 1962. But when her own publishing house the Hogarth Press produced a Uniform Edition of Woolf’s works in 1929, it was the later 1915 version that was used as the definitive text.

first edition 1915

The Voyage Out – critical comment

The principal theme

Virginia Woolf was to devote a great deal of her career as a novelist and essayist to issues of women’s education and their position in society – from her earliest story Phyllis and Rosamond (1906) to her epoch-making attack on patriarchy Three Guineas (1938). Her first novel is no exception – as an exploration of a young woman who has received no formal education and who has been brought up at home in a manner which does not prepare her for any sort of independent adult life.

there was no subject in the world which she knew accurately. Her mind was in the state of an intelligent man’s in the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth; she would believe practically anything she was told. invent reasons for anything she said. The shape of the earth, the history of the world, how trains worked, or money was invested, what laws were in force, which people wanted what, and why they wanted it, the most elementary idea of a system in modern life—none of this had been imparted to her by any of her professors or mistresses

Rachel is intensely conscious of her lack of formal education, her powerlessness in society, and her exclusion from the male-dominated world of governance and decision-making. Her one consolation is that she has been left undisturbed to develop her artistic flair for piano-playing.

The experimental novel

Virginia Woolf is rightly celebrated as one of the most talented innovators of the modernist period for the work she produced between Jacob’s Room in 1922 and The Waves in 1932. For that reason her earlier first novel The Voyage Out (1915) is often classified as ‘traditional’ or ‘conventional’. That is partly because its main subject is a young woman’s ‘coming of age’, partly because the narrative follows a linear chronology, and partly because the book contains a substantial proportion of well-observed middle-class social life which could have come from any number of nineteenth century novels – from Jane Austen to George Meredith.

But the novel is far from conventional – for a number of reasons. First, it does not have a ‘plot’ as such. A group of people go on a cruise from London to Latin America. Whilst there, they organise an expedition into the interior, and when they get back one of them dies of fever. There is no mystery to be solved; there are no surprising coincidences or revelations; the one serious romance between the characters is abruptly terminated by Rachel’s death; and the narrative is even denied any structural closure. There is no return journey to the starting point:.

Instead we are presented with what Rachel Vinrace calls for during the events of the novel – “Why don’t people write about the things they do feel?” . Despite all the symbolism of a first journey away from home, a first love affair, and the dawning of mature consciousness which Rachel experiences, the bulk of the novel is taken up with what people say and think about each other. This was a bold alternative to the plot-driven novels of the late Victorian era.

[In fact Woolf’s next novel, Night and Day (1919) is far more conventional. Another young middle-class woman, Katharine Hilbery, is facing the limited social choices offered to her in life – but the novel is grounded in a family saga and a rather complex love quadrangle.]

Point of view

The other major innovation Woolf developed in this novel is what might be called the floating or roaming point of view. Novelists very often choose to relay their narratives from the point of view of a single character or a narrator who might be a character or a surrogate for the author. Woolf uses a combination of a reasonably objective third person narrative mode with passages in which the point of view switches from one character to another. She does this in order to explore three separate issues which she developed even further in her later novels.

The first of these issues is what might be called the relativity of human perception – how one person perceives another, and how this perception might change from one moment to the next. The second is to explore the distance which separates human beings, even when they feel that they closely understand each other. The third is to explore the differences between what a person does and what is said – or to point directly at internal contradictions in the human psyche. Very often people say things they do not mean, or they make statements about themselves which are contradicted by their behaviour.

The novel begins in London, then moves via a very convincing storm at sea to Portugal, where the Dalloways join the ship. This part of the narrative is quite credible, and is possibly based on a journey at sea Virginia Woolf made to Portugal with her younger brother Adrian in 1905. But after the Dalloways are dropped off (almost parenthetically) in North Africa the location switches with virtually no transition to the fictitious Santa Marina.

The implication is that this is located somewhere near the mouth of a ‘great river’ – presumably the Amazon. But despite adding historical background details of European colonialism in the region, and a sprinkling of exotic vegetation which Woolf adds to the narrative, the topography of the story never becomes really convincing.

It is significant that one feature of the indigenous vegetation that she mentions repeatedly is cypress trees – ‘at intervals cypresses striped the hill with black bars’ – which are characteristic of the Mediterranean but certainly not of tropical Latin-American vegetation. This might be ignored were it not for the fact that she was to do something very similar in later novels.

The background events of Jacob’s Room (1922) concerning Betty Flanders are supposed to be set in Scarborough, on the East coast of Yorkshire, but these scenes are never as convincing as the others set in Cambridge and London. And nobody in their right mind can read To the Lighthouse (1927) without visualising its setting as St Ives and the Godrevy Lighthouse where Woolf spent many summer holidays in her childhood. Yet the novel is supposed to be set in the Hebrides. This remains completely unconvincing throughout the whole of the novel.

There are a number of minor characters who are written into the story line of The Voyage Out , but who then disappear from the text as if they have been forgotten. Mrs Chairley the Cockney housekeeper; Mr Grice the self-educated steward; the briefly identified Hughling Elliot; and even a major figure such as Willoughby Vinrace, captain of the Euphrosyne , owner of the shipping line, and Rachel’s own father who disappears half way through the narrative, never to reappear.

It is not clear from the structure or the logic of the novel why Rachel has to die. There are no practical or thematic links to what has gone on before in the events of the narrative; nobody else is affected by the ‘fever’; and the conclusion of the novel (‘woman dies suddenly’) is not related to any of the previous events.

It is true that Woolf was surrounded by many unexpected deaths amongst her own friends and relatives (her mother, her brother, her friend Lytton Strachey) but this biographical connection does not provide a justification for the lack of a satisfactory resolution to the narrative.

The Voyage Out – study resources

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition

The Voyage Out – plot summary

Chapter I . Ridley Ambrose and his wife Helen are leaving London to join their ship, the Euphrosyne which is due to take them on a cruise to South America. They join their niece, Rachel Vinrace, whose father owns the ship. A fellow traveller, Mr Pepper reminisces critically with Ambrose about their contemporaries at Cambridge. They are then joined by the captain Willoughby Vinrace.

Chapter II . The story switches between Helen’s reflections on Rachel, Mr Pepper’s bachelor interests and habits, and Mrs Chairley’s rage against the ship’s linens. It then covers Rachel’s lack of formal education, her talent for music, and her upbringing by aunts. She searches for coherence and meaning whilst she is critical of the adults who surround her.

Chapter III . In Portugal, Richard and Clarissa Dalloway are taken on board as extra passengers. At dinner there is conversation on the arts and politics, after which Clarissa writes a satirical letter criticising the other guests. Her husband joins her, and they both feel superior but sympathetic towards their fellow travellers.

Chapter IV . Clarissa meets Mr Grice, the self-educated steward, and then shares confidences with Rachel after breakfast. They read Jane Austen on deck, and Rachel discusses political philosophy with Richard Dalloway, who reveals his traditional and deep-seated male chauvinism.

Chapter V . The ship encounters a stormy passage at sea, which lays everybody low for two days. Helen comforts Mrs Dalloway with champagne. Meanwhile Richard Dalloway follows Rachel into her cabin and kisses her impulsively. That night Rachel has disturbing dreams.

Chapter VI . The Dalloways leave the ship. Rachel confides her mixed feelings about the incident to Helen, who advises her about Men and The Facts of Life. The two women agree to be friends, and Helen invites Rachel to stay at their villa whilst the captain sails up the Amazon, to which her father agrees for slightly selfish reasons.

Chapter VII . The ship reaches Santa Marina. Its colonial history is described. The Ambrose villa San Gervasio is dilapidated. After a week Mr Pepper decamps to a local hotel because he thinks the vegetables are not properly cooked at dinner.

Chapter VIII . Three months pass. Helen reflects on the inadequate education of young women. Helen and Rachel post letters then walk through the town to the hotel where they encounter guests playing cards. They are observed by Hirst and Hewet.

Chapter IX . In the hotel, people are preparing for the night. Hirst and Hewet discuss the possibility of organising a party excursion. Next day there is desultory chat over tea until Ridley Ambrose joins with Hirst and Hewet.

Chapter X . Rachel is reading modern literature and reflecting philosophically about the nature of life. She and Helen receive an invitation to Hewet’s expedition. The outing presents the radical young figure of Evelyn Murgatroyd, and Helen meets Terence Hewet,

Chapter XI . The party splits up at the top of the climb. Arthur declares his love to Susan. Their embraces are observed by Hewet and Rachel: she recoils ambivalently from the spectacle. They are joined by Hirst and Helen, whereupon they all agree to tell each other about themselves. The party then returns to town amidst a display of fireworks.

Chapter XII . A dance is held to celebrate Susan’s engagement to Arthur. Rachel is patronised then insulted by Hirst, whereupon Hewet makes excuses for him. Hirst then goes on to unburden himself to a sympathetic Helen. At dawn Hirst and Hewet walk back to the villa with Helen and Rachel.

Chapter XIII . Next day Rachel takes books by Balzac and Gibbon into the countryside to read, her mind full of impressions from the dance. She feels strangely moved by reading Gibbon, as if on the verge of some exciting discovery, and she thinks a lot about Hirst and Hewet.

Chapter XIV . Guests at the hotel read letters from friends and relatives back home. Susan is obsessed with the subject of marriage. Hewet can’t stop thinking about Rachel, and he goes up to the villa where he overhears her talking to Helen about her dead mother. He goes back to the hotel in a state of excitement, and is then quizzed by Evelyn about her flirtatious entanglements. Last thing at night he sees a woman coming out of someone’s bedroom.

Chapter XV . Some days later Helen and Ridley are visited by Mrs Flushing who is on a ‘collecting’ trip with her nouveau riche husband. They are joined by Hirst, Hewet, and Rachel who has tired of reading Gibbon. When Rachel and Hewet go for a walk, it leaves Hirst free to engage Helen in an intimate conversation, during which he reveals his fears and weaknesses, as well as expressing his admiration for her.

Chapter XVI . On their excursion Rachel and Hewet discuss the life of the typical unmarried middle-class girl (and its limitations) plus the issues raised by women’s suffrage. As he tells her about his literary ambitions she feels romantically attracted to him. He is excited yet dissatisfied by their intimacy and the tension between them.

Chapter XVII . Rachel is powerfully disturbed by her feelings for Hewet, and a distance grows between her and Helen. One Sunday there is a service in the hotel chapel. Rachel is distressed by the absence of any genuine religious belief, and she objects to the spirit in which the service is held. When Mrs Flushing invites her to lunch, she erupts into a criticism of the sermon. Mrs Flushing proposes a river trip to visit a traditional native village. Hirst and Hewet argue over religion, literature, and Rachel.

Chapter XVIII . Hewet realises that he is in love with Rachel, but he is in doubt about the idea of marriage. He wonders what her feelings are and cannot make up his mind about what to do.

Chapter XIX . Evelyn complains to Rachel about two men with whom she is romantically involved. Then she becomes enthusiastic about social reform – including the rescue of prostitutes. Rachel feels oppressed by her appeal to intimacy. She then meets Mrs Allan who invites her to her room and asks her to help her get dressed for tea. Rachel feels oppressed by this appeal too, and escapes into the garden, but she is irritated by the chatter and the discussion of plans for the excursion, and she then quarrells with Helen.

Chapter XX . The Flushings, along with Hewet and Hirst plus Rachel and Helen go on the expedition. They sail upstream in a small ship. Hewet is very conscious of Rachel’s presence. They go on a walk together in to the forest – to declare their love for each other. When they return to the ship they feel detached from their companions.

Chapter XXI . The expedition continues. Hewet and Rachel try to discuss the consequences of their love – which seem to lead inevitably towards marriage, about which neither of them is sure. The expedition reaches the native village. Hewet and Rachel are completely absorbed in each other. At night, back on the ship, they ask Helen for advice. She reassures them that they will be happy.

Chapter XXII . Hewet and Rachel become engaged. Whilst she plays the piano, he writes notes for his novel – on women, which reveal his traditional chauvinism. They plan their future and get to know about each other’s past lives. They become very nostalgic for England – both the countryside and London.

Chapter XXIII . Rachel is annoyed by people’s inquisitiveness now that she is engaged. A message from home brings news of the suicide of a housemaid. A ‘prostitute’ is expelled from the hotel. Hirst admits to himself that he is unhappy, but he brings himself to congratulate Hewet and Rachel.

Chapter XXIV . Sitting in the hotel, Rachel comes to an appreciation of her independent identity, even though she is joining herself to Hewet for the rest of her life. Miss Allan finishes her book on the English poets. Evelyn envies Susan and Rachel for being engaged, but she herself dreams of becoming a revolutionary.

Chapter XXV . Rachel develops a headache and is confined to her room. The headache gets worse and she becomes delirious. ‘Dr’ Rodriguez reassures them it is nothing serious, but Rachel gets steadily worse. Hirst is despatched in search of another doctor and returns with Dr Lesage. He confirms that Rachel is seriously ill – probably with fever. Hewet, Helen, and Hirst wait anxiously for days. Rachel starts to hallucinate, then eventually she dies.

Chapter XXVI . News of Rachel’s death quickly reaches the hotel. It is thought she was unwise to go on the expedition where she has caught the fever. Mr Perrot makes a final appeal to Evelyn, but she turns him down,, as she is leaving for Moscow.

Chapter XXVII . Life returns to normal at the hotel. There is a tropical thunderstorm, and people prepare to return home.

OUP World Classics edition

The Voyage Out – characters

Virginia woolf’s writing.

“I feel certain that I am going mad again.”

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf – web links

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The Voyage Out

by Anthony Domestico

Virginia Woolf began her first novel sometime during the summer of 1906 or the fall of 1907 , and did not finish it until nearly nine years later in the first year of World War I on March 26, 1915 . [1] Originally entitled “Melymbrosia,” the work underwent a number of technical and thematic changes during its long gestation, as Woolf pruned away autobiographical parallels and struggled to find a voice and style that would balance social critique and a nuanced portrayal of the vicissitudes of consciousness.

Many parallels exist between this, Woolf’s apprentice novel, and her later, mature works, at the level of character, scene, and style. When Woolf describes Ridley, the classical scholar and poet, as similar to “a commander surveying a field of battle, or a martyr watching the flames lick his toes” (98), one cannot help but think of the domineering, self-pitying intellectual nature of Mr. Ramsay from To the Lighthouse . [2] The great scene in which Rachel, Hewet, and the other picnic goers direct the frenzied ants’ movements in God-like implacability (134) seems to presage Lily Briscoe similarly ordering and disordering the microworld of insects by “rais[ing] a little mountain for the ants to climb over” (197), “reduc[ing] them to a frenzy of indecision by this interference in their cosmogony” (197-198). Finally, the temporary unity wrought of disparate people and forces at the picnic, the ordered but necessarily transient sense of community and communication that exists between the aloof Hirst, the romantic and temperamental Evelyn, the prissy Mrs. Eliot, and others (134), reminds one of Mrs. Dalloway’s triumphant dinner and Mrs. Ramsay’s ability to bring together the many strands of her social existence into brief coherence at a meal. From the beginning, Woolf displayed the preoccupations – the need of the masculine intellect to subjugate all in its path, the creation and dissolution of order and form in both social and aesthetic existence – that she would more fully develop in her later works.

Woolf’s representation of consciousness within her first novel is certainly less audacious than in her later work; it was arguably not until Jacob’s Room that Woolf would so expertly track, as Auerbach writes, “the flow and the play of consciousness adrift in the current of changing impressions.” [3] Even within The Voyage Out , however, we can see Woolf begin to experiment – with narrative perspective, with dream-states in which the mind is in inexorable flux, and, most importantly, with free indirect style – in ways that foreshadow her later nonpareil tracing of the mind in thought. In particular, perspective and distance play a great role in the representation of character and mind throughout the novel. As Rachel’s ship moves away towards South America, the passengers take a far different view of England and the urban life than when they were in its midst: “Not only did it appear to them to be an island, and a small island, but it was a shrinking island in which people were imprisoned” (32). Distance gives a new perspective; we can see the destabilizing tendencies of modernism – its questioning of Europe as the essential center of world culture, its interest in how a certain angle of vision shapes subjectivity – begin to appear. Similarly, while thinking in South America of the Cambridge intellectuals that he oftentimes finds so spiritually desiccated and loathsome, Hirst thinks, “Far away on the other side of the world as they were, in smoky rooms, and grey medieval courts, they appeared remarkable figures, free-spoken men with whom one could be at ease; incomparably more subtle in emotion than the people here” (208). Hirst’s fellow scholars can be admired only at a remove: it is precisely because their image is smoky, grey, unclear, that they appear clever, sophisticated, delightful. As Lily Briscoe later thinks in To The Lighthouse , “So much depends…upon distance.” [4] Woolf realized the perspectival nature of reality even within her comparatively conservative first effort.

Despite this connection, the sharp distinction between Woolf’s early and late stages can be seen in the end of the novel’s second chapter, after Helen Ambrose has seen Rachel lying, dreaming, in an apparently inviting and vulnerable position within her room on the ship: “The sight gave rise to reflections. Mrs. Ambrose stood thinking for at least two minutes. She then smiled, turned noiselessly and went, lest the sleeper should waken, and there should be the awkwardness of speech between them” (37). Thought is blaringly announced rather than quietly portrayed; two minutes of thinking are condensed and elided rather than expanded and exposed. The closest we get to stream-of-consciousness, as critic James Wood points out, is when another character, Clarissa Dalloway, begins to think of Pascal and her husband before drifting off to sleep: “She then fell into a sleep, which was as usual extremely sound and refreshing; but, visited by fantastic dreams of great Greek letters stalking round the room, she woke up and laughed to herself, remembering where she was and that the Greek letters were real people, lying asleep not many yards away” (52). Again, thought is not given free play but is stringently reined in; as Wood writes, “Random thought, at this stage in Woolf’s career, can only exist as drowsiness or as dream. It is not yet daydreaming. In this first novel, if you forget yourself, you must fall asleep” (113). Untrammeled thought as falling within the province of sleep and liminal psychic space rather than everyday reality: this is a far cry from Mrs. Ramsay’s mind traveling over expansive spaces while performing the most mundane of tasks.

Where Woolf seems boldest, however, and where we can see signs of the technical mastery that is to come, is in Woolf’s occasional use of free indirect style. Sometimes she uses this technique as a Flaubertian tool of irony, exposing the distance between her characters’ thoughts and her own, as when describing the Emma Bovary-like romantic dreams of Evelyn: “‘D’you think Garibaldi was ever up here?’ she asked Mr. Hirst. Oh, if she had been his bride! If, instead of a picnic party, this was a party of patriots, and she, red-shirted like the rest, had lain among grim men, flat on the turf, aiming her gun at the white turrets beneath them, screening her eyes to pierce through the smoke” (130). More complexly, Woolf sometimes uses free indirect style to render the voice of the community and its standards, what Roland Barthes called the reference code. Here, we see the recently engaged Susan thinking: “Marriage, marriage, that was the right thing, the only thing, the solution required by every one she knew…” (179). This is Woolf’s subtlest melding of different voices within the novel. Woolf writes in the authorial third person, but the words appear to be Susan’s. Perhaps more accurately, the words seem to be those of the community and culture from which Susan comes. We thus have the language of the community filtered through Susan filtered through Woolf. Franco Moretti describes Jane Austen’s use of free indirect style as “the composed, slightly resigned voice of the well-socialized individual,” a language “halfway between social doxa and the individual voice.” [5] Even at this early stage, Woolf was accomplishing this balancing act between the voice of the community and the voice of the character. Her intermingling of voices would only become bolder in her future writing.

• ↑ Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), p. 215.
• ↑ Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out )New York, Harcourt, Inc., 1920), p. 98. All subsequent references are to this edition.
• ↑ Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 535.
• ↑ Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1927), p. 191.
• ↑ Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (New York: Verso, 2005), p. 82.

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The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf

Ernest dempsey gives a feminist analysis of virginia woolf’s first novel..

“You can never know women,” says Lenehen to his friend Corley in ‘Two Gallants’, one of James Joyce’s stories in his acclaimed Dubliners . Straightforwardly but not brusquely, the man is demonstrating the rift across which some unknowable species lives. To Joyce’s men a great deal of knowledge seems matter of fact, so thinking that woman is knowable would have exacted unimaginable pains. A careful look can readily grasp that more is at work in Lenehen’s adage: the implication is that woman is not worth knowing, and hence there’s no need to bother about trying to cross the eternal rift. But what the proclaimed unknowable figure has on her mind is rather complex; as explored in Virginia Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out (1915).

It can hardly be a coincidence that the first third of The Voyage Out has an ‘immobile’ plot. We get to know about Rachel Vinrace, who sets out on a voyage with the Ambroses, her uncle and aunt, and is introduced to a few people without much interaction. Rachel’s character at twenty-four is little described beyond that of a ‘person’, having virtually no knowledge of men and the temptations of entering into a relationship with one. Rachel Vinrace is simply not a woman yet. The initial lack of any stimulating interaction with men seems to be Woolf’s deliberate attempt to preserve the person of Rachel, lest she turn into a ‘woman’, an inevitability which the author allows to subsequently happen.

As the voyage proceeds, Rachel’s own transformation towards becoming a woman progresses on a minutely conscious level. The symbolic voyage of the book’s title starts an inevitable clock going, every tick of which pushes Rachel a little out of her ‘person’. Rachel’s meeting with Evelyn and Terence Hewet make the transformative clock tick louder and faster. Evelyn is a woman, conscious of her femininity as well as of the opposite gender, living in whose circle is not her pleasure. The gender issue is explicitly put forth in her words about men: “they’ve nothing but their beastly passions and their brute strength! We’ve too much self-respect; we’re infinitely finer than they are.” Evelyn’s ideas about men are surely not meant to stop Rachel’s voyage of her changing being. Rather, they play two conflicting roles in careening the twenty-four year old’s ‘existential boat’, first as Rachel the ‘person’ travels towards Terence Hewet. On the other hand, Evelyn’s approval of Terence drives Rachel further on towards the ‘woman’ she is going to be. It is significant that while driving her onwards, Evelyn some times masks Terence’s gender with her own. Approving of Rachel’s budding love for Terence, she remarks, “There’s something of a woman in him.” As a woman, Evelyn allows Rachel’s transformation from neutral to her gender, even though she knows that it is, speaking in radical feminist terms, servile – becoming woman for a man!

The transition of Rachel’s being towards womanhood is, as hinted, driven by Terence Hewet, the ‘man’ of the piece, as a manifest necessity. In the first instance, the burden of change is placed on the female. Letting ‘man’ remain a silent, stable spectator, Woolf pities the woman’s position and her lack of permanence. Explaining things on Rachel’s behalf, Woolf appeals to the experience of the emotions which sets her on the track of transformation. Of Rachel we read, “She had always found that the ordinary person had so little emotions in his life that the scent of it in the lives of others was like the scent of blood in the nostrils of a bloodhound.” The bias in this bit of information about Rachel is not invisible: in showing the plasticity of the female, Woolf shows she resents that the woman be the one to step out of (or into) herself, merely to experience emotions which are servilely associated with men. Rachel knows the power of emotions and has kept herself distant from them by remaining just a ‘person’. Now, at the sight of Terence, she is ready to compromise her good sense and step into the slavish ranks of ‘womanhood’.

Whether Virginia Woolf was attempting to preserve her respect for herself in particular, or for the second sex in general, she interferes with Rachel’s degrading transformation. Before Rachel can take the final step in yielding to the man she desires, we read of a sudden indisposition which confines Rachel to her room. The plot’s epitasis comes into play. Rachel’s recovery would mean the triumph of the anti-female force, bent on making her a ‘woman’, for it is her conversion which can sate the male instinct, ‘woman’ meaning ‘slave’ in a patriarchal world. Conversely, if Rachel dies, her death will be the triumph of her femininity: true womanhood requires her to be what she is, and not flow into the mold of patriarchal expectations. It is natural for Woolf to subject her heroine to this second option. Rachel Vinrace dies.

What physically causes Rachel’s death is not the point. The important thing in Woolf’s narrative is that she dies in the conflict of patriarchal and feminist forces. As the death scene approaches, the story sees its climax in the thirty-fifth chapter, in the visit of a woman with a candle to the ailing Rachel: “Rachel kept her eyes fixed upon the peaked shadow on the ceiling and all her energy was concentrated upon the desire that this shadow should move. But the shadow and the woman seemed to be eternally fixed above her.” Then she dies.

The symbolism employed here is doubly complex. That the visitor is a woman with light (the candle) is a fairly comprehensible symbol. She is there to ensure that Rachel dies with the dignity of a self-respecting woman, or at least, as a person not yet corrupted beyond recovery. She represents her gender, present to show Rachel the way ‘into the light’. Her presence would have achieved its goal if Rachel’s last thought was that of resentment over her attempted conversion. If she felt sorry for the foray into the darkness, she would have passed away in the light. But the fact that she does not fix her stare on the woman but on the “peaked shadow” betrays the simplicity of the symbolism. If the woman with the candle represents the feminine spirit, her dark shadow on the ceiling represents nothing less than the despotic patriarch. It is worth noticing that the shadow is “peaked” and is the focus of Rachel’s attention – masculine values are dominant and they charm the woman grovelling after them.

That Rachel has become patriarchally possessed is clear enough. What makes her character still dubious is our lack of knowledge about her last thought. It is conveyed that she desired that the shadow should move, though it did not. If only Woolf had spared another adjective to specify just how Rachel wanted the shadow to move, eg ‘towards’ her! The woman with the light failed in her purpose, since she could not take Rachel’s mind off the patriarch’s charm. But then her light indirectly works its effect. By showing the patriarchal force in the form of a shadow to a lady who cannot move, the light has switched the roles of the lady and her idol: now she is not moving towards the idol, rather she is demanding it to flow to her, to make it her subject. Alternatively, Rachel’s desire that the shadow should move cogently reveals her potential emancipation at the hands of her savior angel. In any case, Rachel’s death ends her transience for good.

The responsibility for Rachel’s loss of life might be thrown on the symbolized femininity which retaliated against her for trying to become a patriarch-charmed woman: a state of existence not worth living. One might well charge Rachel herself with the responsibility. After all, it was she who set out on the voyage. As Mr Flushing puts it in the thirty-sixth chapter, after Rachel’s death; “My wife feels that she was in some way responsible. She urged poor Miss Vinrace to come on the expedition… But she [Rachel] was set on going. She would have gone whether you asked her or not, Alice.”

Woolf’s mastery of symbolism does not end with Rachel’s death. Her feminine eye turns to the ‘first sex’, which in this case is represented by the character of Terence Hewet. The scanty treatment of Hewet as a character is in itself an attitude against the big HE which Woolf has attempted to show as cowardly and insignificant. The way Terence reacts to Rachel’s death is a slight against the ruling gender and its ‘support team’. Of Terence we read: “‘Rachel! Rachel!’ He shrieked, trying to rush back to her. But they prevented him, and pushed him down the passage and into a bedroom far from her room.” Terence’s attempt to get to Rachel’s dead body is a mockery of the futility of his masculine care for a woman who lost her life in trying to get to him. He did not budge until she had turned into a corpse, and then he realized he could move to her. Even then, there are the ‘they’ who make sure he keeps his distance: the patriarch-supporting ‘they’ drive Terence away from pursuing the woman who had died for him. ‘They’ will not save a woman; and ‘they’ will not let a man die.

The injustice of the case is again given voice in Evelyn’s words. Crying over Rachel’s death, she utters effusively, “It can’t only be an accident… Why should these things happen? Why should people suffer? I honestly believe (she went on lowering her voice slightly) that Rachel’s in heaven, but Terence…” Evelyn truncates her speech but what is unsaid is heard in full.

Rachel’s attempt to cross the intergender chasm is akin to a pilgrimage. Death means martyrdom to her sex. Her position is clear and honored. What is put to question is Man’s honesty. To keep his earthly existence, he cannot follow her. His interest sees little beyond the pleasures of his carnal self, for which he needs a female body. The truncation of Evelyn’s speech here is the final argument in Woolf’s case against gender inequality: A person dies, a gender lives – a gender that is not a Woman.

© Ernest Dempsey 2007

Ernest Dempsey is the author of The Biting Age and Islands of Illusion (World Audience Inc) and is working on a novel. His books can be found at www.powells.com .

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The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf (Book Analysis)

Detailed summary, analysis and reading guide.

This practical and insightful  reading guide  offers a  complete summary and analysis of The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf . It provides a thorough exploration of the novel’s plot, characters and main themes, including women’s position in society and the limitations of words as a mode of expression. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time.

This clear and detailed 54-page reading guide is structured as follows:

• Biography of Virginia Woolf
• Presentation of  The Voyage Out
• Summary of  The Voyage Out
• Rachel Vinrace
• Helen Ambrose
• Ridley Ambrose
• Terence Hewet
• St John Hirst
• Willoughby Vinrace
• An early modernist novel
• Imperialism
• A coming-of-age story and identity
• Music and literature: the difficulty of expressing something real

About  The Voyage Out

The Voyage Out  is Virginia Woolf’s first novel, published in 1915. It tells the story of Rachel Vinrace, a young woman who has previously led a sheltered life in the care of her aunts and knows very little about the world. This all changes on a trip to South America, when her other aunt, Helen, persuades her father to let her stay with her and her husband in Santa Marina. There, Rachel learns about the world and about herself, begins to assert her own identity and falls in love, before tragedy puts an abrupt end to her newfound happiness.

About Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was one of the most influential figures of interwar English literature. She was born in London in 1882 and died in Sussex in 1941. She was a pioneer of the literary movement of Modernism, wrote a variety of essays, short stories and novels, and founded her own publishing house with her husband in 1917. Her best-known works include Mrs Dalloway , To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves . She was plagued by mental health troubles throughout her life and committed suicide in 1941, at the age of 59.

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The Voyage Out

62 pages • 2 hours read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

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“But some enchantment had put both man and woman beyond the reach of malice and unpopularity. In his case one might guess from the moving lips that it was thought; and in hers from the eyes fixed stonily straight in front of her at a level above the eyes of most that it was sorrow. It was only by scorning all she met that she kept herself from tears, and the friction of people brushing past her was evidently painful.”

Despite their ostensibly unlikeable exteriors, Ridley and Helen Ambrose are characterized here through their more sympathetic qualities: Ridley’s deep intellect and Helen’s sorrow. Woolf doesn’t reveal the source of this sorrow, though the depth of her emotion signals an internal conflict that is both extremely private and important to her character development. Here, Woolf also reveals how, when people are struggling with internal conflict, they project their resentments onto the people around them. This heightens the stressful stimuli of the city, which also heightens the importance of Ridley and Helen’s sailing voyage.

“As for the mass of streets, squares, and public buildings which parted them, she only felt at this moment how little London had done to make her love it, although thirty of her forty years had been spent in a street. She knew how to read the people who were passing her; there were the rich who were running to and from each other’s houses at this hour; there were the bigoted workers driving in a straight line to their offices; there were the poor who were unhappy and rightly malignant.”

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