The Voyage Out Read Online Free PDF

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:
    “Just consider: It’s the beginning of the twentieth century, and until a few years ago no woman had ever come out by herself and said things at all. There it was going on in the background, for all those thousands of years, this curious silent unrepresented life. Of course we’re always writing about women—abusing them, or jeering at them, or worshiping them; but it’s never come from women themselves. I believe we still don’t know in the least how they live, or what they feel, or what they do Precisely.… If I were a woman I’d blow some one’s brains out. Don’t you laugh at us a great deal? Don’t you think it’s all a great humbug?”
    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 Mrs. Thornbury too; she’s got too many children I grant you, but if half-a-dozen of them had gone to the bad instead of rising infallibly to the tops of their trees—hasn’t she a kind of beauty—of elemental simplicity as Flushing would say? Isn’t she rather like a large old tree murmuring in the moonlight, or a river going on and on and on?”
    And he adds,
    “By the way, Ralph’s been made governor of the Carroway Islands—the youngest governor in the service; very good, isn’t it?”
    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 herselfhad 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