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Updated July 14, 1997
Created July 14, 1997
Black, Naomi. "Virginia Woolf and the Women's Movement." Virginia Woolf:
A Feminist
Slant. Ed. Jane Marcus. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska
Press, 1983. 180-97. Black notes
that though Woolf rejected the word, "feminist" in her
Three Guineas, she was actively
involved with several organizations, including an "'adult
suffrage' group . . . the Women's
Co-operative Guild, the British Labour party . . . and
the Valley Institute of Rodmell"
(183-84). This author also differentiates between social
and political feminism, concluding
that in spite of the fact the Virginia Woolf "pushed
the ideas of the social feminists to their
natural conclusion, the transformation not just of women's
roles, but also of society and
finally of men," her (Woolf's) "feminism was political
because it responded to notions about
power and social structure "(194). All of the above notions
are evidenced in The Voyage
Out, as well as Woolf's other novels.
Bishop, E. L. "Toward the Far Side of Language: The Voyage Out." Modern
Critical Views:
Virginia Woolf. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea
House, 1986. 153-67. The author
asserts that through "Rachel's restive questioning of
the functions of language, Woolf
introduces what will become a persistent theme in all
of her works: the problem of how
words can encompass and communicate human experience"
(153). Bishop states that
reading involves both rational and perceptual cognition
(155) and that "it is the act of reading
rather than the meaning of the words that triggers Rachel's
experience" (155). This author
discusses, using the character of Rachel Vinrace, how
she (Rachel) and other of Woolf's
characters' progress takes shape around 'moments of
being'--instants of almost visionary
insight--in which her understanding of life is sharply,
and somewhat disconcertingly,
enhanced" (154) through language perception.
Blain, Virginia. "Narrative Voice and the Female Perspective in Virginia
Woolf's Early Novels."
Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays. Ed. Patricia
Clements and Isobel Grundy. London:
Barnes and Noble, 1983. 115-36. Though Woolf argues
for "an androgynous ideal" (116) in
A Room of One's Own, states the critic, her novels
"show a radical awareness of feminist
issues . . . from a perspective which is unashamed to
be female" (117). Woolf's novels try to
break " through the barriers of inherited male conventions
towards the expression of an
authentic woman's voice; not the voice of Everywoman
so much as the voice of Virginia Woolf
as subject-of-consciousness" (118). Blain discusses and
explores those ideas of critics who
make too keen an association between Woolf and Rachel
Vinrace, the heroine of The Voyage
Out (119). The author asserts that Woolf "can . .
. persuade many readers to accept her
female perspective as the norm" (135).
Davis-Clapper, Laura. "Why Did Rachel Vinrace Die? Tracing the Clues from
Melymbrosia to
The Voyage Out." Ed. Mark Hussey and Vara Neverow-Turk.
Virginia Woolf Miscellanies:
Proceedings of the First Annual Conference on Virginia
Woolf. New York: Pace University
Press, 1992. 225-227. In a very short, but very compact
paper, Davis-Clapper presents the
thought that through the allusions to Kenilworth
written by Sir Walter Scott that "Woolf is
signalling [sic] that her own novel will end with the
death of Rachel Vinrace, but also
suggesting that the views in The Voyage Out on
the relations between women and men
parallel those in Scott's novel" (226). This allusion
is left out of the first American edition, but
appears in the 1929 English edition. Whether or not the
allusion is "in" or "out" will determine
the answer to the title question (226-227).
DeSalvo, Louise. "‘In the Beginning There was the Nursery’" in
Virginia Woolf: The Impact of
Child Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work. Boston: Beacon,
1989. 162-168. DeSalvo
includes in the sixth chapter of her book a close reading
from The Voyage Out. The close
reading focuses on the beginning of the novel and discusses
issues the Woolf is challenging in
the patriarchal society. She discusses Helen’s
relationship with her children and how Rachel
has been shaped by her environment.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. "Spatialization, Narrative Theory, and Virginia
Woolf's The Voyage
Out." Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology
& Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out. Ed.
Kathy Mezei. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina, 1996.
109-135. The Voyage Out is
founded on a basic contradiction (109). It is the narration
of a journey that fails written by an
author whose journey is a resounding success. Friedman
uses Freud, Kristeva, and Bakhtin to
demonstrate a way of a using graphic organizer to follow
the intertextuality of The Voyage
Out. The "novel uses constant dialogue with other
literary texts" (123) and readers bring their
own history and knowledge to the text; therefore, it
is necessary to unweave the strands of the
novel to understand it. A vertical and horizontal axis
arrangement provides the basis for this
extraordinary article. The most valuable aspect of the
article is that the method described by
Ms. Friedman could be transferred to use on another
novel as intricately written as The Voyage
Out.
---. "Virginia Woolf's Pedagogical Scenes of Reading: The Voyage Out,
The Common
Reader, and Her 'Common Readers." Modern Fiction
Studies. 38:1 (1992): 101-25. Friedman compares the
reading of a Woolf novel with the viewing/reading/hearing the "startling
juxtapositions" (102) found in modern multimedia
presentations. She is looking for appropriate
pedagogical approaches to Woolf. She proposes that one
level of looking at The Voyage Out
is to see it as "Woolf's first voyage in and out of literary
convention"(105). Another point that
she addresses is that in The Voyage Out, almost
every one is reading something. However,
what appears to be the most important point is that the
novel is also a book about the
difference in the way men and women read life.
"Women . . . excel in reading the book of life;
men . . . control the production and interpretation of
the printed word" (106). The focus is that
while Rachel can read books, she cannot read life in such
a way as to ensure her survival. Her misreading of and "miseducation"
about life are some of the reasons for her death. Friedman
writes for teachers that they are responsible for finding
ways to teach the "common
student-readers" a way to interact with all books.
Froula, Christine. "Out of the Chrysalis: Female Initiation and Female Authority
in Virginia
Woolf’s The Voyage Out." Tulsa Studies
in Women’s Literature. 5.1 (1982):
63-90. Froula says that The Voyage Out is the
initiation story of a "female artist-figure" and
that the death of this figure "represents not only the
power of female initiation structures to
overwhelm female desire when it ventures to imagine a
diffenent future, but also the difficulties
that Woolf confronted in her first attempt to imagine
an alternative to the female initiation plot"
(136). Froula compares male initiation rites ("performed
collectively") and female initiation rites
(more individualized). Female initiation rites promote
"idealization of marriage and motherhood
as a daughter’s highest calling" (137). Froula says
that The Voyage Out "both represents and
transcends the paradigms of female initiation" (142).
Froula also discusses Dalloway’s kiss and
maintains that the kiss is a violent action, but it does
serve to awaken Rachel’s sexuality (146).
The article also contains an interesting comparison of
Rachel’s nightmare with Christina
Rossetti’s "Goblin Market," and discusses Woolf’s
butterfly and moth imagery.
Moore, Madeline. "Some Female Versions of Pastoral: The Voyage Out and
Matriarchal
Mythologies." New Feminist Essays on Virginia
Woolf. Ed. Jane Marcus. Lincoln: U of
Nebraska P, 1981. 82-104. Deals with VW’s struggle
to resolve her complex personal
relationships through fictional characterizations. The
article is particularly concerned with
VW’s ambivalent feelings toward her mother and her
relationship with Clive and Vanessa Bell.
Moore discusses Jane Harrison’s influence on VW
with regard to the myths of the ‘Lady of
the Wild Things’ and Mother and Maiden. Mother
and Maiden are seen as either the older
and younger versions of the same person, or "the woman
mature and the woman before
maturity" (89). Moore extends the myth of Mother and
Maiden to Demeter and Persephone.
In the dualistic world of The Voyage Out, Demeter
(Helen) represents the physical and
Persephone (Rachel) represents the spiritual.
Robbins, Dorothy-Dodge. "Virginia Woolf and Sigmund Freud Diverge on What
a Woman
Wants." East Lansing, MI: The Centennial
Review 39:1 (1995): 129-45. Focuses
on the variety of interpretations of Rachel Vinrace’s
reaction to Richard Dalloway’s
passionate kiss. Specifically, Robbins compares Freud’s
analysis of his fourteen-year-old
female patient’s response to a kiss from an
older, married man in Dora, an Analysis of a
Case of Hysteria, to Woolf’s description
of Rachel’s reaction following Dalloway’s kiss.
Robbins argues that both Dora and Rachel "reject their
assigned roles in the social
construction" imposed on them by the patriarchy by responding
to such kisses with disgust.
The article points out that literary critics interpret
The Voyage Out, almost exclusively in
Freudian terms. In contrast, Woolf refuses to impose
any definitive interpretation on Rachel’s
reaction.
Swanson, Diana L. "‘My Boldness Terrifies Me’: Sexual Abuse and
Female Subjectivity in The
Voyage Out." Twentieth Century Literature
41.4 (1995): 284-309. Swanson says that
Woolf writes about sexual abuse as a means of survival
and that her writing "constitutes, in its
form as well as content, both a symptom of her abuse
and a social history of female
subjectivity" (285). Swanson says that Woolf censored
her own writing by using "indirect
methods of expression" (284). Swanson also explores "how
sexual abuse is a major obstacle
to the development of the female subject" (285). The
article has some discussion of
Dalloway’s kiss as a violation and as a "synecdoche
for rape and sexual assault of women in
general" (295).
Tvordi, Jessica. "Female Intimacies and the Lesbian Continuum." Virginia
Woolf: Themes & Variations. Ed. Vara Neverow-Turk
and Mark Hussey. New York: Pace U P, 1993. 226-37.
Argues that Woolf writes a lesbian subtext into The Voyage Out
that "disrupts and
undermines the heterosexual text" (236). Rachel is seen
as symbolic of "the possibility of
escaping the sexual confines of a patriarchal society"
(226). Tvordi believes Woolf wrote in as
bold of terms as she dared about the homosexual
nature of Rachel’s relationships with Helen
Ambrose and Evelyn Murgatroyd. Tvordi compares passages
appearing in Melymbrosia with
Woolf’s revisions in The Voyage Out
to support her argument.
Vlasopolos, Anca. "Shelley's Triumph of Death in Virginia Woolf's Voyage
Out." Modern
Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History
47:2 (1985): 130-53.
Vlasopolos argues that Woolf has "a strong affinity for
Romanticism" and that "aspects of
Shelley's life and death, and Keat's as they are transfigured
in Adonais . . . [and] Victorian
views of Shelley as man and poet" (131) allow the reader
to understand the "conflict between
artist and society at a time when she [Woolf] was about
to expose herself as an artist"
(131-2). The Dalloways provide an anti-art diatribe and
causes "Rachel . . . to feel inferior"
(139). Vlasopolos's major theses is " that Shelley and
his famous elegy, embedded as they are
in the Dalloways' social discourse, gave Woolf a nexus
of imagery and themes, as well as a
structure and a philosophical standpoint" (131). She argues
that Rachel's imagination and
desire for more to life presents a Romantic view of the
past and the "sacrifice of Rachel to her
'monsters,' [was a] creative act resonating of Shelley
sacrifice of Keats to his monsters in
Adonais" (152).