The Voyage Out Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    A hand dropped abrupt as iron on Rachel’s shoulder; it might have been a bolt from heaven. She fell beneath it, and the grass whipped across her eyes and filled her mouth and ears. Through the waving stems she saw a figure, large and shapeless against the sky. Helen was upon her. Rolled this way and that, now seeing only forests of green, and now the high blue heaven, she was speechless and almost without sense. At last she lay still, all the grasses shaken round her and before her by her panting. Over her loomed two great heads, the heads of a man and woman, of Terence and Helen.
    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:
    She then fell into a sleep, which was as usual extremely sound and refreshing, but visited by fantastic dreams of great Greek letters talking round the room, when she woke and laughed to herself, remembering where she was and that the Greek letters were real people, lying asleep not many yards away. Then, thinking of the black sea outside tossing beneath the moon, she shuddered, and thought of her husband and the others as companions on the voyage. The dreams were not confined to her indeed, but went from one brain to another. They all dreamt of each other that night, as was natural, considering how thin the partitions were between them, and how strangely they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each other in mid-ocean, and see every detail of each others’ faces, and hear whatever they chanced to say.
    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 fewof 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