Abstract
Woolf’s criticism of a great many novelists — and particularly women — centres upon the fact that they use their writing as a vehicle for confessional autobiography. A writer is, perhaps, particularly likely to use the first novel to unburden personal obsessions and experiences. Given that this is the case, the ‘objective’ tone of Woolf’s own first novel is the more remarkable. In writing The Voyage Out Woolf did, of course, draw upon the details of her own life. One thinks, for example, of her mental instability, her sister Vanessa’s illness and brother Thoby’s death from typhoid, her voyage to Spain and Portugal with her younger brother Adrian in the spring of 1905, and, particularly, her interest in feminism.1 In the novel, though, these personal experiences are transformed from autobiography into fiction.2 The emphasis in The Voyage Out falls not upon Woolf the private individual, but upon her fictional characters. It is primarily the lives of these latter, rather than that of the author, which sustain our interest.3
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Notes
The young men’s argument about where the Portsmouth Road becomes macadamised (The Voyage Out, pp. 417–18) is based on a quarrel which started between Thoby and Adrian Stephen in a hotel in Greece, while Vanessa lay ill in bed upstairs (see Bell’s Virginia Woolf, i, p. 109). (Hereafter, all references to The Voyage Out appear parenthetically within the text.) In a letter to Violet Dickinson of 27 November 1910, Woolf asks: ‘Do you think it would be indecent to put Aunt Minna upon the stage, and Aunt Fisher, and the Quaker? Such riches as we have in our relations it seems a pity to neglect’ (Letters, i, p. 440). The autobiographical elements are, however, dramatised in the novel, becoming aspects of the lives of Woolf’s fictional characters. As John Bayley remarks, the hero and heroine of The Voyage Out ‘have, as it were, forgotten that they are Clive Bell and the author’ (John Bayley, ‘Diminishment of Consciousness: a Paradox in the Art of Virginia Woolf’, Virginia Woolf: A Centenary Perspective, ed. Eric Warner (London: Macmillan, 1984) p. 69).
Kate Millett praises Meredith’s The Egoist (London: Kegan, Paul, 1879) for the same reason: The surprising parallels to Meredith’s own life are unmistakable. Clara Middleton is his own first wife, Mary Nicolls. Her irresponsible epicurean parent is Thomas Love Peacock, Meredith’s former father-in-law. Willoughby jilted is Meredith deserted after some seven years of bitter cohabitation, when Mary left him for Henry Wallis the painter. What is astonishing is that the book is not the revenge one would inevitably expect, but is instead a careful analysis of incompatability. (Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (London: Hart-Davis, 1971) p. 135)
CE, i, p. 252. That feminist ideas are more powerful when they are fictionalised was recognised by Caroline Norton (the model for Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways) who remarked in her account of her struggle to gain custody of her children in the mid-nineteenth century: I really lost my young children — craved for them, struggled for them, was barred from them — and came too late to see one that had died … except in his coffin. I really have gone through much that, if it were invented, would move you; but being of your everyday world, you are willing it should sweep past like a heap of dead leaves on the stream of time and take its place with other things that have gone drifting down. (Ray Strachey, The Cause (London: Bell, 1928) pp. 39–40)
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983; 1st edn 1949) p. 70.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: Johnson, 1792) p. 47.
Carolyn Heilbrun, Towards Androgyny (London: Gollancz, 1979) p. xiv.
Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (London: University of Chicago Press, 1984) p. 6.
Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago, 1983) p. 30.
Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives’ Tale (London: Chapman & Hall, 1908) p. 36. (Hereafter all references to this novel appear parenthetically within the text.)
D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (London: Methuen, 1915) pp. 336–7.
A man might — as Woolf recognised — exploit the ideal of ‘womanliness’ in order to dominate not only his daughters but also his wife. Mr Shelby, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, responds to his wife’s argument that she will earn some money to buy Tom’s liberty — and thereby become an independent moral agent — with the comment that to do so would be to degrade herself (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981; 1st edn 1852) p. 373).
One is reminded of Hewet’s imaginary description of the Hirst household in The Voyage Out (which in turn echoes the argument of A Room): ‘“Can’t you imagine the family conclaves, and the sister told to run out and feed the rabbits because St John must have the school-room to himself — ‘St John’s working,’ ‘St John wants his tea brought to him.’ Don’t you know the kind of thing?”’ (p. 253). Sylvia Townsend Warner uses the same image in Lolly Willowes to represent the suppression of women. Mrs Willowes remarks to her sons: ‘Now play nicely with Laura. She has fed your rabbits every day while you have been at school’ (Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes: or the Loving Huntsman (London: Chatto & Windus, 1926) p. 14). Both these examples recall the incident in The Mill on the Floss in which Maggie lets her brother Tom’s rabbits die while he is away at school (George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1860) i, pp. 57ff).
J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1869) p. 523; quoted in Millett’s Sexual Politics, p. 103.
In this respect Willougby Vinrace resembles Mr Wilcox in E. M. Forster’s Howards End. His attitude also brings to mind Kurtz’s treatment of his absent fiancée in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ — a novella, incidentally, whose influence is felt throughout The Voyage Out (Joseph Conrad, ‘Heart of Darkness’, in Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories (Edinburgh, Blackwood, 1902) pp. 49–182).
Compare Huxley’s comments on Burlap’s feelings for his dead wife in Point Counter Point: ‘These agonies which Burlap, by a process of intense concentration on the idea of his loss and grief, had succeeded in churning up within himself were in no way proportionate or even related to his feelings for the living Susan’ (Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (London: Chatto & Windus, 1928) p. 231).
Carolyn Heilbrun draws attention to Simone de Beauvoir’s argument that men have found in women more complicity than the oppressor usually finds in the oppressed (Heilbrun, Towards Androgyny, p. xi). In a more recent book, Heilbrun notes that ‘public opinion polls show that a higher proportion of women than men oppose passage of the Equal Rights Amendment’ (Carolyn Heilbrun, Reinventing Womanhood (London: Victor Gollancz, 1979) p. 88).
This willingness to vilify their own sex in order to gain acceptance within the establishment is a characteristic of many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women. We find it, for example, in Q. D. Leavis’s spiteful and emotive review of Woolf’s Three Guineas in Scrutiny, vol. vii, no. 2 (September 1938) pp. 203–14. In this review, Leavis adopts a ‘masculine’ voice, at once hostile to her own sex and conciliatory towards the male establishment of Oxbridge.
Terence’s remarks recall the objections to history voiced by Austen’s Catherine Morland and Anne Elliott: ‘The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all — it is very tiresome’ (Jane Austen, ‘Northanger Abbey’ and ‘Persuasion’ (London: Murray, 1818) i, pp. 255–6). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar draw attention to Austen’sonly attempt at history, a parody of Goldsmith’s History of England, written in her youth and signed as the work of ‘a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant Historian’. What is conveyed in this early joke is precisely Catherine’s sense of the irrationality, cruelty, and irrelevance of history, as well as the partisan spleen of most so-called objective historians. Until she can place herself, and two friends, in the company of Mary Queen of Scots, historical events seem as absurdly distant from Austen’s common concerns as they do to Charlotte Brontë in Shirley, George Eliot in Middlemarch, or Virginia Woolf in The Years, writers who self-consciously display the ways in which history and historical narration only indirectly affect women because they deal with public events never experienced at first hand in the privatized lives of women…. like Woolf, Austen asserts that women see male-dominated history from the disillusioned and disaffected perspective of the outsider. (Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, pp. 132–3, 134)
In this respect both Helen and Mrs Ramsay resemble Woolf’s own mother, of whom Leslie Stephen remarked: I used sometimes I must confess (as indeed I confessed to her) to profess a rather exaggerated self-depreciation in order to extort some of her delicious compliments. They were delicious, for even if I could not accept her critical judgement as correct, I could feel that it was distorted mainly by her tender love. Although she could perceive that I was ‘fishing for a compliment’ she could not find it in her heart to refuse me. Again and again she would tell me that it was unworthy of me to complain of my want of popular success — which, as you have seen, was not my serious complaint, though I sometimes put it in that way. She assured me that she was a better judge of writing, of my own writing at least, than I was. (Sir Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book, ed. Alan Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) p. 93)
Margaret Kirkham, however, questions the reading of Emma which sees Knightley as a ‘reliable’ narrator, and ‘the belief that Emma is a novel of education in which all the learning is done by the heroine, all the instruction provided by the hero’ (see Margaret Kirkham, Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction (Brighton: Harvester, 1983) p. 133). In contrast, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar feel that the male protagonists in Austen’s novels are ‘older and wiser’, ‘the representatives of authority’ (see Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 154).
One must, then, question Hermione Lee’s argument that childless, fussy Mrs Elliot, absent-minded Mrs Thornbury, bovine Susan Warrington and her tyrannical old aunt, and the would-be liberated flirt, Evelyn M., are callous caricatures. There is little warmth even in the treatment of the kind academic spinster, Miss Allan, or of the jolly eccentric Mrs Flushing. The tone for the presentation of the minor characters is feebly satirical. (Hermione Lee, The Novels of Virginia Woolf (London: Methuen, 1977) p. 38) Indeed, it is difficult to see how we could know that Miss Allan is kind or Mrs Flushing jolly unless it is through Woolf’s sympathetic treatment of them. Jean Guiget’s description of the hotel visitors as ‘a set of grotesque and ungainly puppets’ is equally inappropriate (Jean Guiget, Virginia Woolf and her Works, trans. Jean Stewart (London: Hogarth Press, 1965) p. 202). To describe the novel’s minor characters in these terms is to make the mistake of accepting Rachel’s response to them as authoritative.
That Terence is the spokesman here for Woolf’s own views is clear if one thinks of the inspiration behind the originally unpublished ‘Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’, or the ‘Memoirs of a Novelist’ (CSF, pp. 33–62, 63–73), the projected ‘Lives of the Obscure’ ‘which is to tell the whole history of England in one obscure life after another’ (Diary, iii, p. 37), or the introductory letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davies’s Life as We Have Known It: By Co-operative Working Women (London: The Hogarth Press, 1931) pp. xv–xxxix). In this introduction Woolf remarks of the writings collected in Davies’s volume: ‘These pages are only fragments. These voices are beginning only now to emerge from silence into half articulate speech. These lives are still half hidden in profound obscurity. To express even what is expressed here has been a work of labour and difficulty. The writing has been done in kitchens, at odds and ends of leisure, in the midst of distractions and obstacles’ (ibid., p. xxxix).
This is not, however, to agree with Herbert Marder’s view that: Terence Hewet seems at times to be little more than a mouthpiece. The young aspiring novelist is especially interested, we are told, in the prosaic day-to-day lives of women, the portion of experience that has never yet been recorded. This is a subject that fascinated Virginia Woolf, but she was not altogether convincing when she attributed the same interest to a young man. (Marder, Feminism and Art, p. 68) There seems no obvious reason why a young man should not be interested in such things. It is instructive to compare Woolf’s treatment of Terence with the method of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novel Lolly Willowes. Warner introduces the fantastic figure of ‘the Devil’ into her narrative as an audience for a number of monologues on the subject of woman’s subservient position in society (Warner, Lolly Willowes, pp. 234–6). Her narrative is considerably less persuasive than Woolf’s because she makes no obvious attempt to conceal the fact that she has a palpable design upon her readers. (Whereas Terence Hewet’s long speech to Rachel on the theme of the status of women seems ‘natural’ in the context of the novel as a whole, Laura Willowes’s extremely similar speech does not.) The same argument applies to Rebecca West’s novel The Judge which-like Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers — deals with the way in which a woman who is neglected by her husband may form an over-possessive relationship with her son. The melodramatic events which conclude West’s novel have the effect of the drawing attention to the author’s didactic purpose. Olive Schreiner’s novels also throw an interesting light upon the question of didacticism and fiction. The least persuasive parts of her novels are probably those in which she obviously betrays a narrow didactic purpose. One thinks, for example, of Part Two, Chapter Four, of The Story of an African Farm in which, in what is essentially a monologue. Lyndall expounds her ideas on feminism to Waldo (see Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (London: Chapman and Hall, 1883) ii, pp. 25–68). More generally, the novel’s events become ‘unrealistic’ and melodramatic when Schreiner is using them specifically to illustrate a feminist point. Thus Lyndall’s ‘elopement’ and subsequent death in exile is the weakest part of the book. The section in From Man to Man dealing with Bertie’s departure for England with a Jew and their subsequent life together in Bloomsbury is, similarly, lacking in conviction (see Schreiner, From Man to Man, pp. 348–410).
Compare Mr Widdowson in Gissing’s The Odd Women who, ‘Like most men of his kind … viewed religion as a precious and powerful instrument for directing the female conscience’ (George Gissing, The Odd Women (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1893) ii, p. 39).
Some critics interpret Terence’s description of himself as a great lover as a pretence on his part. See, for example, Louise DeSalvo’s Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making (London: Macmillan, 1980) p. 46, and Mitchell Leaska, The Novels of Virginia Woolf: From Beginning to End (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977) p. 22.
E. M. Forster dramatises the double moral standard in Howards End. In the course of this novel, Margaret Wilcox finds herself called upon to forgive her husband for having had a mistress. Mr Wilcox himself, however, is unable to forgive Margaret’s sister for becoming pregnant by a married man. Forster weakens the effect of his novel, though, by inserting passages of didactic commentary in his own voice into the text, which destroy our ‘belief’ in his fictional characters. The way in which women are sexually exploited by men such as Mr Wilcox is far more persuasively illustrated in a novel like Ivan Turgenev’s On the Eve (trans. C. E. Turner (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1871)) or Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets (London: Collins, 1936) in which the reader is drawn to identify completely, and therefore to sympathise, with the heroine. For a discussion of didacticism in Howards End see Bayley’s The Uses of Division, pp. 27–35.
David Daiches comments: The Victorian novelist tended on the whole to produce a narrative art whose patterns were determined by a public sense of values. Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, sensitive to the decay of public values in her time, preferred the more exacting task of patterning events in terms of her personal vision, which meant that she had on her hands the additional technical job of discovering devices for convincing the reader, at least during his period of reading, of the significance and reality of this vision. (David Daiches, Virginia Woolf, 2nd edn (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1963; 1st edn 1942) p. 154)
Diary, iii, p. 339. Hillis Miller rightly argues: Though Woolf deals with extreme spiritual situations, her work would hardly give support, to a scheme of literary history which sees twentieth-century literature as more negative, more ‘nihilistic’ or more ‘ambiguous’ than nineteenth-century literature…. the possibility that the realm of death, in real life as in fiction, really exists, is more seriously entertained by Woolf than it is, for example, by Eliot, by Thackeray, or by Hardy. The possibility that repetition in narrative is the representation of a transcendent spiritual realm of reconciliation and preservation, a realm of the perpetual resurrection from the dead, is more straightforwardly proposed by Virginia Woolf than by most of her predecessors in English fiction. (J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982) pp. 201–2)
Both David Daiches (Virginia Woolf, p. 14) and Hermione Lee (Virginia Woolf, p. 50) argue that Rachel’s death is not sufficiently anticipated in the novel. But Alice van Buren Kelley is right to argue that in The Voyage Out, ‘Once the visionary aspect of death is revealed with Rachel’s actual dying, all earlier hints of tragedy take on a deeper significance’ (Alice van Buren Kelley, The Novels of Virginia Woolf: Fact and Vision (London: University of Chicago Press, 1973) p. 12).
Eric Warner makes this point when he remarks that ‘Rather than let Rachel fall into the end of banal routine and sacrificed spirit, [Woolf] kills the girl off with an unnamed tropical fever’. In contrast, in The Waves, the ‘contagion of the world’s slow stain’ feared in The Voyage Out is realised (see Eric Warner, ‘Some Aspects of Romanticism in the Work of Virginia Woolf’ (D. Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1980) pp. 119, 373). A remark which Alice van Buren Kelley makes about Woolf’s second novel links it with The Voyage Out: ‘Night and Day ends before the lovers can experience those blows to vision that life in the real world invariably inflicts upon those who look for unity’ (Kelley, Virginia Woolf, p. 62).
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© 1989 Jane Wheare
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Wheare, J. (1989). The Voyage Out. In: Virginia Woolf: Dramatic Novelist. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19684-5_2
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