The Voyage Out (5 page)

Still, it seems pertinent to at least briefly discuss Woolf and class,
particularly in regard to her first novel, where her strengths do not yet so entirely overwhelm her weaknesses. In
The Voyage Out
, the only novel in which she would attempt to set the action in a place she had never been, the South Americans are not characters at all, and the only one with any role to speak of is a murderously incompetent local doctor. If she was much concerned with questions of empire and subjugation while she wrote the book, she didn’t noticeably address herself to the reactions of those most affected. There is, at least to this North American reader, a surprisingly unquestioned torpor to the lives and acts of the complacently fortunate English people in the book. What, after all, are they all
doing
there, not for days or weeks but months, sitting on verandahs and complaining about one thing or another, arguing about the issues of the day over meals prepared and served by invisible servers? What are they resting from, or preparing for, that justifies such an enormous span of leisure?

Woolf’s nephew Quentin Bell wrote, in his biography of her, that:

Woolf, however, was nothing if not self-aware, painfully and sometimes even debilitatingly so. She could be hard on others, but she worried over almost everything it was possible to worry over in her own character. She knew she was a snob; she admitted she was a snob. She did not consider it one of her worst or most interesting failings.

Late in her life she did, in fact, deliver a humorous lecture on the subject, “Am I a Snob?,” to the Memoir Club, in which she said:

And so, there she stands.

Woolf’s work is also criticized for a certain tea-table delicacy, for veering away from all matters concerning the flesh, even though it was written during a period when sex was considered, for the first time in centuries, a permissible subject. While Woolf was fully aware of the power of sexuality she had little interest in going into its particulars.
The Voyage Out
does contain an implied rape, in the form of a kiss forced on Rachel by Richard Dalloway, but Woolf would never again venture even that far into the physically violent possibilities between women and men. She would later depict a kiss, one with very different consequences, in
Mrs. Dalloway
, when Sally Seton surprises the young Clarissa by kissing her, suddenly and unexpectedly, only once, while they are briefly separated from the incessant company of men. These are the two major sexual episodes in Woolf’s entire body of work, and each involves one of the Dalloways, those emblems of all that Woolf found terrible and compelling in English society. Richard assaults Rachel, and Clarissa, in the later book, is assaulted, more kindly, by Sally. Interestingly, it is Clarissa who is more undone by the experience of being kissed.

Woolf did appreciate the complexity of sex—its risks and marvels, its capacity to transform lives. Her characters’ sexuality is always
highly idiosyncratic and deeply personal; she understood, more fully than many authors who were far more explicit on the subject, that everyone possesses a sexual geography as particular to him or her as a fingerprint. Richard Dalloway’s kiss excites Rachel even as it humiliates and terrifies her, and Sally Seton’s kiss implies for Clarissa in
Mrs. Dalloway
a fleeting promise, lost almost as soon as found, that runs to depths far greater than those implied by questions of hetero- versus homosexuality.

What there is of sexuality in
The Voyage Out
feels somewhat more rudimentary than the submerged sexuality in Woolf’s later work. St. John worships Helen without a trace of lust, and when Rachel falls in love with Terence their courtship consists almost entirely of ardent, romantic talk. While they wander through the jungle—the kind of symbol often favored by first novelists—it is difficult to determine what if anything occurs between them bodily, and of course Woolf kills Rachel before any of the messier acts can be practiced upon her.

Rachel and Terence are physically unprepossessing. Rachel is not beautiful, “except in some dresses, in some lights,” and Terence is “inclined to be stout.” It feels, simultaneously, like part of Woolf’s sexual reticence to insist so on the homeliness of her romantic protagonists and like part of her heroism, to insist that it is not only the outwardly beautiful who are transformed by love.

Again, there she stands.

Since
The Voyage Out
appeared, eighty-five years prior to this writing, Woolf’s reputation has risen and fallen and risen again. While she lived she became a best-selling author. The money she earned from the surprising success of her 1937 novel,
The Years
, enabled her to buy the fur coat into the pocket of which she would, four years later, put a stone and drown herself. Her picture appeared in
Vogue
in 1926, and her likeness can still be seen in a mosaic on the floor of the foyer of the National Gallery in London, holding a pen and wearing a toga amid a gathering of gods, goddesses, and muses.

After her death in 1941 she fell out of fashion, until her work was taken up by feminist scholars in the 1960s. She quickly became, in
the popular imagination, at least as much a personality as she was an artist. Edward Albee’s 1962 play,
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, and the 1966 movie starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, made her name familiar to many people who had not only never read a word of hers but weren’t entirely sure whether or not she was a real person and, if so, what she had done to become famous enough to have a play and a movie named after her. For those who
had
read her, a cottage industry of sorts grew up, composed mainly of essays and books that claimed that her work, her character, her genius, and her suicide could only be understood in light of her lesbianism, her enslavement to Leonard, her mental disorder, her oppression as a woman, and/or the fact that she had survived incest. Few figures have inspired such possessiveness, such rampant subjectivity. Those of us who care for her have always tended to do so ferociously. Monk’s House, her country house, which is open to the public six months of the year, is usually full of people, many of them as hushed and attentive as if visiting a shrine. If one walks from Monk’s House to the River Ouse, where Woolf drowned herself, one usually passes others either coming or going.

Woolf’s reputation as an artist is somewhat difficult to parse from the popular romance that has grown up out of her life and death. In addition to the aforementioned quarrels about her focus on the upper classes and her reticence in matters of sex, she is widely known as a “difficult” writer; and while that may be true, the word “difficult” is often applied in a dismissive tone that differs noticeably from the tone the same word takes on when applied to a writer like Joyce. There is often a sense, even among serious readers, that Joyce is bracingly difficult and Woolf merely irritatingly difficult. As someone who has written about Woolf I find myself hearing from a number of people, generally in tones of pride or annoyance, that they simply can’t read her. We are all, of course, entitled to our disinclinations, but I can’t help wondering if these people would proclaim with the same righteous indignation their inability to read authors like Joyce, Kafka, or Faulkner. I tend to feel that an inability to read Woolf should be presented as a problem with the reader, not the writer, though that opinion is by no means universal.

Some of the barriers set up against Woolf’s full standing as a major artist arise not from her innovation or her difficulty, it seems, but from the fact that she was innovative, difficult, and a woman; a woman whose narratives tended to arise out of domestic situations; who insisted that domestic situations were at least as important to those who inhabited them as foreign wars and the deaths of kings. Clearly the battle Woolf took up has not yet been won, at least not at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although she detested criticism I suspect she would not mind knowing that she remains a figure of controversy—better that than hallowed and forgotten. Unlike many venerated authors, she is still read and discussed.

Great art contains not only its own questions but its own answers, and one of its more satisfying aspects is its way of outliving its detractors; of marching into time with all its beauties, excesses, subtleties, insights, and deficiencies in full view. Battles lost or battles won, Woolf’s work, from
The Voyage Out
which launched her, to
Between the Acts
which helped to kill her, is very much alive. Generations of readers come and go, fashions change, but we have Woolf’s books, and will always have them. We have a passage like this, from
The Voyage Out:

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS:
I relied for information about Virginia Woolf’s life and work on two biographies:
Virginia Woolf: A Biography
, by Quentin Bell (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972); and
Virginia Woolf
, by Hermione Lee (New York: Knopf, 1997).

M
ICHAEL
C
UNNINGHAM’S
novel
The Hours
, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s
Mrs. Dalloway
, won the PEN/Faulkner Award and Pulitzer Prize in 1999. His other novels include
A Home at the End of the World
and
Flesh and Blood.
He teaches at Columbia University, and lives in New York City.