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July 16, 1997
Dear Tonya,
Your delightful letter really brought up some interesting questions and issues concerning The Voyage Out. I’ll just respond as thoughts occur to me as I reread your letter.
How interesting that you noticed the rings! I know that many people who are married do not wear wedding rings, but I would feel naked without mine. I’ve been wearing them for almost 29 years! I think though that Virginia Woolf would think that my attachment (literally and figuratively) to my rings would be sentimental or silly, don’t you? She probably would be one of the non-wearing group, and now I wonder if she did wear a wedding ring. I’ll have to look more closely at some of the pictures of her.
Your question about what the impact of being single, motherless, and childless has on Rachel is fascinating. I do think that hearing Mrs. Dalloway and Helen discuss their children strongly affects Rachel -- both because it makes her lack of a mother harder to bear and because it lets her know that these women have something about which they’re passionate, other people who matter desperately to them. The closest thing to a passion for Rachel is her music, which has nothing to do with another person, and Rachel is beginning to realize how little she knows of life and other people and how much she needs to know to function well in the world.
I hesitate to say that Woolf is trying to tell the reader that she too hates being motherless and childless. After learning the little I have about Virginia Woolf, although I realize that losing her mother affected her deeply and forever, I just can’t see her longing to have a child, mainly because she is possessed by both her passion to write and her passion to be freer than she’s ever able to be because she’s a woman. I can’t imagine that she would wish for a child to restrict her even further. Rather, I think that where VW can be seen in Rachel is in Rachel’s intense desire actually to see and to become a part of the world. She seems such a lost soul in many ways, as when she says, "I am lonely . . . I want ---" She did not know what she wanted, so that she could not finish the sentence ..." (62). Maybe what she wants includes having children, but I don’t think so. I think that Rachel is too afraid of the world to think that having children would be desirable.
I didn’t know that Woolf agreed "to refrain from having children," and I wonder why she did that. Could it possibly be, at least in part, because of her mental illness -- either because she didn’t feel that she could care for a child or because she feared that her child too might be mentally unbalanced? There’s no way to know for sure. At any rate, I just can’t believe that VW wanted "the chance to experience motherhood through the nurturing of her own children just as much as she wanted a room of her own." I see her longing to experience motherhood as longing to be the child who is nurtured as she felt she never was rather than as having the desire to nurture a child herself. She, like Rachel, would probably not know how to nurture a child.
I don’t know if I’ve adquately addressed any of your points or not, Tonya, but it’s been interesting to contemplate them. I think that being a wife and mother and still having my mother makes it difficult for me to understand someone who is single, childless, and motherless might view the world; on the other hand, Virginia Stephen’s being single, motherless, and childless certainly must have given her deep insight into Rachel’s situation.
Betty
P.S. One June 23, 1929, Virginia Woolf wrote in her Diary: "ther is nothing -- nothing for any of us. Work, reading, writing are all disguises; and relations with people. Yes, even having children would be useless."
Tonya's Letter