Back to Virginia Woolf Seminar Home Page
July 11, 1997
Dear Jackie,
I don't know about you, but the last four years in graduate school at UAH has been a Voyage of Discovery. And that this course comes at the end of it is amazing. It too will be a voyage of discovery. As I sit and read The Voyage Out, I wonder what it must have been like to find myself (thinking as Rachel), an abused child/woman . . . (but not necessarily knowing that fact), locked into a situation where the only way out was to find someone else to become a part of.
Rachel is twenty-four and still living with her father. He sees an opportunity to have her "trained" to be a better hostess for him: "I should want Rachel to be able to take more part in things . . . if you could see your way to helping my girl, bringing her out" (77). When this happens, the world opens to her. But what a world it must have been. St. John makes an condescending effort to educate her after he decides that there is the "difficulty of talking to girls who had no experience" (140). When she finds herself with other people who have experienced more than she does, she finds herself in a voyage of discovery and she "changes her view every day" (148). However, this is a voyage that does not end the way I think voyages of discovery should end.
The Voyage Out is not only the basic story of Rachel and her aunt and uncle and the other passengers on the ship. I believe it is also the story of Rachel's coming out, not as a debutant, but as a member of a flawed society which causes young women to chose to die rather than become a part of it. I cannot decide at this moment whether Rachel was not strong enough to survive or whether she was strong enough to will herself to die. I thought this when I first read it, and this feeling is stronger now. I had an older neighbor who found herself less able to keep house and to take care of daily life. A bright, thoughtful, energetic woman of 75 who fell and began ever so slightly to deteriorate physically. She knew it and fought against it. But it was inevitable; she traveled and picked out an apartment in another city to be near her son. She made arrangements to have her house and yard spruced up for sale. Then one early morning, she took the trash out, picked up her paper, turned on her TV set to the news channel she loved so much, closed her eyes and departed this earth. Did she choose to die? I don't know. We talked over the mailbox, at an occasional lunch, hanging over the fence. I know she didn't want to leave her home. I know she felt her daughter-in-law was not fond of her. I know that her son ignored her, except when she was sick. Did she choose to die? I know she didn't want to leave.
Which brings me back to the original question? Did Rachel choose to die; "She seemed vaguely conscious of his [Terence's] presence, but it seemed to disturb her, and she turned, so that she lay with her back to him" (322). Was this a way of not becoming a part of a society which allowed the abuse of children and women? Did she see this as a way of passive resistance to what she saw as a future with only prescribed behaviors, controlled by a husband instead of a father?
No answers obviously to those questions, but it seems to me that a voyage should be one of discovery, of wonderful adventures, of new knowledge, and yet Rachel seemed to realize she wasn't going to find those things. Rachel says "'The lives of these people . . .'the aimlessness, the way they live. One goes from one to another, and it's all the same. One never gets what one wants out of any of them'" (248). She speaking of the natives, but I believe she is referring to her own people as well. She looked at the Dalloways, the Ambroses, and the Thornburys. What would the end of the voyage bring for her?
Finally, three things in The Voyage Out are the focus points for me. First, the relationship between father and daughter is abusive, even though the relationship is only implied; "she sometime looked like a victim dropped from the claws of a bird of prey" (29). Remember there is no mother. Second, the hypocrisy of the system that allows the father and Richard Dalloway to behave the way they do with only repercussions for the young women. Finally, Rachel's attitude at the time of her death, I believe, is of hopelessness. I think she feels like the "deformed women" (313) she dreams about. I don't think she felt she had any choices left. These three problems are the ones I want to think about when I read the novel at a time I have more leisure.
Sincerely,
Pat
Jackie's Reply