The Voyage Out Read Online Free PDF Page B

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:
    “May I ask how you’ve spent your time? Reading—philosophy?” (He saw the black book.) “Metaphysics and fishing!” he exclaimed. “If I had to live again I believe I should devote myself to one or the other.” He began turning the pages.
    “ ‘Good, then, is indefinable,’ ” he read out. “How jolly to think that’s going on still! ‘So far as I know there is only one ethical writer, Professor Henry Sidgwick, who has clearly recognized and stated this fact.’ That’s the kind of thing we used to talk about when we were boys.”
    A life of action is posed most vehemently, however, by the flirtatious, hysterical Evelyn Murgatroyd, who says to Rachel:
    “I belong to a club in London. It meets every Saturday, so it’s called the Saturday Club. We’re supposed to talk about art, but I’m sick of talking about art—what’s the good of it? With all kinds of real things going on round one? It isn’t as if they’d got anything to say about art, either. So what I’m going to tell ’em is that we’ve talked enough about art, and we’d better talk about life for a change. Questions that really matter to people’s lives, the White Slave Traffic, Women Suffrage, the Insurance Bill, and so on.”
    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