Virginia Woolf’s Voyaging Out: Woman, Travel, and Englishness in The Voyage Out

초록

Published in 1915, Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, a novel of courtship and engagement, strongly draws on the narrative convention of voyage. In the novel, a young woman of inexperience and naïveté sets out on a voyage into South America out of cloistered domesticity in England, during which she grows into the awakening of her own sexuality as well as the ways of the world. The interpellation of the narrative of female initiation into the narrative of voyage in Woolf’s first novel is both particularly fitting and problematic. As the title of the novel allegorically suggests, the young woman’s maiden voyage undergoes a trajectory both physical and metaphorical. While the female traveler sets out a voyage “out” of the sheltered enclosure of domesticity at home in The Voyage Out, however, the trajectory of the narrative of courtship and engagement enforces her to expect a voyage back to “home.” Thus, the schematic opposition between adventure and domesticity collapses in The Voyage Out. In the novel, the conflation and the collapse of the domestic placement and the adventurous mobility in the novel are registered in the destiny of the female protagonist: the development of Rachel Vinrace’s initiation into female sexuality leads into a dead end when she suddenly dies of a fever as her awakening—both sexual and social—is about to culminate in marriage. Noting such structural collapse of the adventurous mobility and the domestic stability registered in The Voyage Out, this paper aims to illustrate that Woolf’s transgressive voyage into and out of the literary tropes posits the question of the female sexuality and subjectivity within the discursive terrain of English epistemology as well as imperial history.

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