Abstract
This chapter examines travel as geographical and sociocultural displacement in Virginia Woolf’s debut novel The Voyage Out. The analysis focuses on the heroine’s journey of self-discovery and the extent to which the narrative of her development is bound up with patriarchal ideas of women, empire and the nation. A comparison between the novel and Woolf’s early journals shows how travel mediates her renegotiation of “home” and the national imaginary. The Voyage Out echoes these early texts, as in the image of England as a prison-like island, central to its exploration of gender and national identity. As the novel takes Rachel away from the rooms of the imperial capital, it also reasserts women’s difficulty in positioning themselves within or without the framework provided by patriarchal discourses.
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Acknowledgements
A version of this chapter features in my monograph Virginia Woolf’s Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan 2018). I am grateful to the editors and Palgrave Macmillan for granting me permission to reproduce this work.
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Zink, S. (2018). Renegotiating Home and Away in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out. In: Orgis, R., Heim, M. (eds) Fashioning England and the English. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92126-6_10
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