The Voyage Out (4 page)

Woolf wrote, to some extent, about life in a parallel dimension, one ruled by female spirits. Things were not necessarily better there—she was nothing so simple as a Utopian—but it held in highest esteem virtues very different from those embraced by the world in which masculine gods ruled.

Helen’s acme, her great scene, takes place late in the book, in the jungle, where Terence and Rachel finally declare their love for each other. When the party arrives in the rain forest Helen seats herself on a fallen tree, opens her parasol, and looks out over the river. Exhorted by the others to explore, she says, “Oh, no, one’s only got to use one’s eye. There’s everything here—everything. What will you gain by walking?” And so she sits, with St. John at her side (literally in her shade), as Rachel and Terence wander off together.

It is by way of Helen and the jungle that the book reaches its most strange and archetypal interlude, the moment that might be called its climax. Terence and Rachel are strolling in the long grass, talking about their love (their love is made up almost entirely of talk), when Helen pounces on them.

It is not only the book’s strangest moment; it is also the book’s only scene of (implied) sexual congress, and it involves three people. For whatever it’s worth—I’m truly not sure how much it is or isn’t worth—Woolf spent most of her life bound up in threesomes, most prominently herself, Vanessa, and Vanessa’s husband, Clive Bell, and, some years later, herself, Leonard, and Vita Sackville-West.

Although in her work Woolf ignored sex to the greatest possible degree, and was skeptical of mysticism, she believed in an immense connectedness. As a writer she was deeply concerned not only with the kinship of people (she became friendly with E. M. Forster, who gave us the phrase “only connect”), but with simultaneity; with the fact that the world is made up of beings, human and animal, all living at once; that all are both related and utterly strange to one another; and that what connects them, most importantly, is the medium of time—the plain fact of finding themselves alive at the same moment; and then, somewhat altered, at the next moment; and the next and the next. She stringently rejected religion but flirted all her life with the notion of the soul or, if not the soul, a certain
beingness
that emanated from living and inanimate things; even from the earth itself. She made it her business to try to account not only for the movements of her characters’ flesh but the existence and interactions of their spirits in a world that also possessed a life of its own.

Here is Clarissa Dalloway one night on the
Euphrosyne:

If
The Voyage Out
is filled with early evidence of Woolf’s style and vision it is also full of the conflicts that would mark her life and work until the year both ended. Always, there is the question of whether women can survive, as intellectual and emotional beings, in society generally and in marriage in particular. If relatively few
of Woolf’s women are unambiguously destroyed by marriage not one of them clearly benefits from it, and while she was too conscientious to simply present her women as the victims of tyrannical men they are often subject to a kind of erosion as their mates refuse, year after year, to take them quite fully seriously. In
The Voyage Out
Susan Warrington—not exactly young and less than beautiful, consecrated to the care of her ancient aunt—is rescued by Arthur Venning’s marriage proposal, and while the fate she’s escaped is clearly a grim one there’s no strong sense that the fate she’s headed for—a respectable little house outside London, a child or two—is a significant improvement.

Even the gentle, idealistic Terence, who is
The Voyage Out
’s most outspoken defender of women’s rights, is suspect. On one hand he says to Rachel, while he is courting her:

On the other hand, after he and Rachel are engaged, he begins to tease her, tellingly, about her piano-playing, and to urge her to get busy answering the congratulatory notes they’ve received. When she complains about the blandness of the notes, he lectures her on the virtues of the various women they know:

And he adds,

Men, it seems, even the most conscientious of them, are still prone to praise women as trees or rivers, and to report only on the careers of other men.

The Voyage Out
is saturated with the tension between Woolf’s own desire to record the pure sensation of living, her desire to tell a story, and her desire to use her fiction to make potent arguments about serious questions. It is hard to find twenty consecutive pages in
The Voyage Out
that don’t contain some discussion between two or more characters on an issue of great import. She would in her later books more seamlessly manage the combination of art and argument.
Jacob’s Room
, her elegy for her brother Thoby, is by implication an antiwar novel, as is
Mrs. Dalloway. Mrs. Dalloway
, the first of her great books, began in Woolf’s mind not only as the story of a society woman who would die, either by accident or her own hand, and as a novel about the aftermath of World War I, but as a general indictment of medical science and of the English social and political systems. The Prime Minister was to be a prominent (and, we assume, less than attractive) character, and the ham-fisted doctors were to play significantly larger parts. It is a testament to Woolf as an artist that her interest in humanness, and her respect for the ambiguity of human existence, always won out, and the finished books are about complex people who consider themselves the heroes of their own stories. Still, it is rare to find in her work any instance of an intelligent, humane politician, a competent doctor, or an adherent of religion who is not at least slightly deranged. Woolf lived, after all, through the devastation of World War I, which she called “a preposterous masculine fiction.”
¹²
She lived at a time when doctors treated mental disorders by extracting teeth (she herself
had several pulled), in the belief that an infection of the teeth could somehow poison the brain.

If, in Woolf’s fictive world, everyone is directly threatened by politics, religion, and medicine, and women additionally threatened by men who want them to be charming idiots, there exists as well, and perhaps most threateningly for all, the real possibility of a misspent life. When she was young Woolf lived at a time of almost frantic productivity (most members of the Bloomsbury group report working every day of the week), in a world clearly in need of urgent attention.
Ennui
and a sense of futility, though they can’t have been unknown, were not much acknowledged; not at a time when women were fighting for the vote, the class system was drastically changing, and the Great War was about to begin. The question was not
whether
to do but
what
to do. Woolf was, by her own estimation, almost as much concerned with politics as she was with art. She determined to do whatever she could to curtail suffering, especially that of women. Leonard was himself a ferociously political animal, and their accords and arguments—their respect for each other’s adamant, deeply considered views—were essential parts of their companionable, asexual marriage.

Woolf worried, especially early on, over the question of a life spent creating versus one spent organizing. The minds of artists and philosophers were the minds she most respected, but good fiction often deals in ambiguities that are not much use in accomplishing social change. If it is the activist’s responsibility to depose the tyrant it is the novelist’s responsibility to understand and record what it’s like to
be
the tyrant. What, then, of an artist’s desire to change the world not only over time, by accretion, but now, as soon as possible, for living people who are in pain?

In
The Voyage Out
Woolf stacks the deck, perhaps unconsciously, by putting the arguments in favor of direct political action into the mouths of the least sympathetic figures, be they men or women. Richard Dalloway, a politician who is not only a prig but a mediocre and duplicitous prig, says to Helen of a book she’s reading:

A life of action is posed most vehemently, however, by the flirtatious, hysterical Evelyn Murgatroyd, who says to Rachel:

The Saturday Club bears a striking resemblance to the Friday Club, a London discussion group that put on occasional exhibitions and met to talk about art and politics. Woolf went sometimes but felt, as she so often did where any group or committee was concerned, that the fundamental aims were admirable but the results more bemusing than profound. She wrote, “One half of the Committee shriek Whistler and French Impressionists, and the other are stalwart British.”
¹³
She had, ineluctably, the soul and temperament of a writer, and always saw human frailty above anything else.

Midway through the writing of
The Voyage Out
Woolf tried teaching literature to working men and women at an evening institute set up by a local college, but it was not particularly successful and she lasted at it less than two years. While her intentions were
good her tendency toward social and intellectual snobbery interfered. She complained her students were incompetent or illiterate or both; she became exasperated by the stumbling efforts of foreigners who spoke only rudimentary English and what she called “anemic shop girls” who could manage very little writing during their one hour off for dinner. Woolf wrote in despair to her friend Violet Dickinson that her efforts were all but useless, given the material she had to work with. “I have an old Socialist of 50,” she wrote, “who thinks he must bring the Parasite (the Aristocrat) … into an Essay upon Autumn; and a Dutchman who thinks … I have been teaching him Arithmetic.”
¹⁴

As she matured Woolf would essentially separate the two activities, and along with her fiction write uncompromising and widely influential essays, among them “A Room of One’s Own” and “Three Guineas.” Her essays, of course, reflect her fiction, just as her fiction reflects her essays, but she dealt with the problem of art versus politics in the simplest and most direct possible manner, by dividing her efforts: by being alternately a writer of fiction and a writer of polemics. Her essays, as she would surely have wished, have proven to be as durable as her novels (especially “A Room of One’s Own”), though they have also proven, ironically, to be the less controversial of her two main bodies of work.

The right of Woolf’s novels to occupy the literary pantheon is undisputed. Still, there are to this day few major writers whose merits provoke so much argument. She is probably most widely criticized for being class-bound—for writing convincingly, and at length, only about members of the upper classes, the people she not only knew best but liked best. This is simply true—it would be foolish to try and deny it—though for those of us who admire her work what she did accomplish so far outstrips what she failed to accomplish that the failing sheds some of its weight. When the world produces a novelist able to write fully about everything and everyone, we will have no need of further novels.