Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury avant-garde : War, Civilization, Modernity

efore anyone dreamt of World War I, Virginia Woolf sailed her first heroine, Rachel Vinrace, through a gap in empire to fight a “Great War.”¹ That gap is opened by Joseph Conrad’s 1899 Heart of Darkness as Marlow voyages back from King Leopold’s Congo to tell a lie that tastes of death to Kurtz’s Intended. The Voyage Out (1915) also explores an uncharted darkness within a civilization that Rachel—like Marlow and unlike Kurtz’s Intended—discovers as if for the first time. As she propels her heroine from a cloistered late-Victorian girlhood with her Richmond aunts to a fictional English colony in South America, Woolf makes Rachel’s voyage out into the “great world” a first foray in her own “re-form”—at once ethical and aesthetic—of the English novel (VO 32).

The Voyage Out originates in dialogue with Conrad’s inaugural modernist voyage toward European imperialism’s hidden “truth.”² In Marlow’s eyes, that “truth” is “a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly,” “redeem[ed]” only by “an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.”³ Conrad’s staging of the gender of this truth in his novella’s last scene provides Woolf’s point of departure. For Marlow truth is masculine. In Kurtz he witnesses the ghastly incarnation of Europe’s murderous rapacity in Africa under cover of its ideals; he hears the deathbed whisper that sums up and judges Kurtz’s life: “The horror! the horror!” (68). But Marlow finds this truth “too dark altogether” to tell Kurtz’s Intended in Brussels when he visits her after Kurtz’s death (76). He substitutes a lie, “your name”—even though, he tells his comrades on the Nellie,

It is presumably Marlow’s aversion to lies that compels him to relate Kurtz’s savage maxim—“Exterminate all the brutes!”—instead of burying it “in the dustbin of progress” with “figuratively speaking, all the dead cats of civilisation” (51). Only gender, it seems, can induce him to lie. Kurtz’s Intended “is out of it—completely,” he says, and women “should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours get worse” (49). Both this philosophy and Marlow’s interview with the Intended echo the allegorical scene in Kurtz’s oil sketch of “a woman draped and blindfolded carrying a lighted torch,” the background “sombre—almost black,” her movement “stately,” the torchlight on her face “sinister,” which Marlow studies at the Central Station (27–28). No mere coda to Marlow’s tale but its climax, the interview with the unnamed Intended bathes the civilization that Kurtz, with his “gorgeous eloquence” and horrific acts, so splendidly epitomizes in the “sinister” light of an erotic sublime. She embodies at once the Enlightenment ideal that Kurtz “intended”—by contrast with the unspeakable violence that this white man playing god in the jungle actually commits and at last, for a moment, sees himself commit—and Marlow’s lie, “your name.” In his eyes “a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal,” the Intended is at the same time Marlow’s unwitting yet unconsciously purposeful collaborator, his lie made flesh (70).

In an astonishing sentence abandoned in the manuscript, Marlow figures the idea that women are and should be “out of it—completely” as a “monster-truth” hungry for lies: “That’s a monster-truth with many maws to whom we’ve got to throw every year—or every day—no matter—no sacrifice is too great—a ransom of pretty, shining lies—not very new perhaps—but spotless, aureoled, tender” (49n). This suppressed image reanimates the six-headed Skylla into whose voracious maws the goddess Kirkê instructs Odysseus to throw six of his sailors as he passes: “Better to mourn six men than lose them all, and the ship too.”⁴ The allusion casts Marlow as the heroic voyager forced to propitiate this permanent monster with “pretty” lies—not once, as a foul-tasting exception to his rule of truth, but every year, or even every day. If Marlow’s idea of women’s “beautiful world” justifies his supposedly exceptional lie, the canceled sentence represents it as entirely unexceptional. The lie that tastes of “mortality” and leaves Marlow stirred by “anger,” chilled by “infinite pity,” shaking with fear that the heavens will fall is an offering to a social system that feeds on lies and lets no ship pass without a sacrifice (75).

In her otherwise excellent discussion of Marlow’s lie, Juliet MacLaughlan argues that “Without Marlow’s lie, all ‘light of visionary purpose,’ any ‘slender ray of light’ would be extinguished and, with these, the whole concept of humanity’s upward potential.”⁵ In light of Conrad’s Skylla metaphor, the incoherent, near-hysterical language in which Marlow recounts his lie, and The Voyage Out, it would be truer to say that each novel in its different way endeavors to expose the fiction that “humanity’s upward potential” demands men’s lies to and idealization of women; and that this insight is crucial to its modernity. Marlow’s ultimate revelation—legible in the bodily symptoms of rage, pity, and fear that become a hero throwing fellow voyagers into Skylla’s maws as he sails by—is not that “the truth” is “too dark altogether” for a man of his otherwise truth-loving sensibility to reveal to women. It is that men and women collaborate in history’s lies and delusions, which persist under the sign of Eros more durably than any truth. The Intended appears from her portrait “ready to listen without mental reservation, without suspicion, without a thought for herself”; and Marlow registers her “mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering” (71, 73). Nonetheless, he chooses not to trust this “soul … neither rudimentary nor tainted with self-seeking” with the truth; he bows—stoops to a lie—“before the faith that was in her” (74). For her part, she is no victim of his chivalry but elicits and embraces the lie that stokes her illusion with her leading questions and passionate desire: “I want—I want—something—something—to—to live with,” she implores him, and confirms the lie: “‘I knew it—I was sure!’ … She knew. She was sure.”⁶

Neither Kurtz’s Other nor “outside” civilization, the Intended is his double and mirror. Entombed in domestic seclusion, she lives the “truth” she is not permitted to know. For a woman of her qualities, to know the truth would be not just to “survive[],” as she tells Marlow she has done, but actually to begin to live in the world (73). Alongside the vortex of savagery that sucks Kurtz in despite his ideals and aspirations, redoubled in the compound stare of Kurtz’s and Marlow’s reflections in the “glassy panel” of the Intended’s “mahogany door,” the tale unveils a further horror in her impassioned blindness, itself redoubled in the twinned gestures of mourning by the desolate African woman on the river and this white woman in the “sepulchral city” of Brussels (72). Kurtz is dead yet alive, on the street and in the room where Marlow “s[ees] him clearly enough,” hears his last words echo “in a persistent whisper all around us,” and—more prosaic but no less important—learns that “Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He wasn’t rich enough or something” (75, 74). As he stands in Kurtz’s place, Marlow’s interview with the Intended evokes the enigmatic force of Eros behind a river of desire and lies that flows “into the heart of an immense darkness” and enacts the “monster-truth” of gender as their civilization’s founding lie (75–76).

A reader of The Voyage Out can only wonder how Conrad’s suppressed figure of Skylla might have fired the imagination of one of his deepest admirers, Virginia Woolf. In any case, Marlow’s enmeshment in the economy of lies that binds gender into the heart of civilization was not lost on her. “We carry the burden of lies,” reflects Rachel Vinrace as she sails out in Marlow’s wake, leaving the not so beautiful world that immures her because of her sex (M 14). When she exclaims, “Nothing! I was taught nothing, nothing but lies,” Rachel speaks as a woman who would batter down the walls that imprison her; when she expostulates “Lies! Lies! Lies!” after listening to an unconsciously manipulative servant, she extends the monster-system’s everyday hunger for lies to class (M 183, VO 29). What happens when Rachel too must sail by Skylla? Can a woman uneducated in all but music hope to elude the “monster-truth” that even Marlow propitiates?

When Rachel’s aunt Helen Ambrose remarks that she “would rather my daughter told lies than believed in God; only they come to the same thing,” she flashes promising credentials as a mentor for the motherless Rachel (M 12). But Helen, for all her iconoclasm, is a far less radical thinker than Rachel herself on the subject of women and civilization. In a conversation cut from the late typescript, Rachel complains, “She doesn’t care enough about women,” and Terence banters, “She values the superior integrity of men.”⁷ It is Rachel who, talking with Terence, envisions a future when women’s complicity with masculine domination “will strike our children as the least civilised thing about us,” and who vows to teach her daughter that the “virtue she sees in women” is the “virtue she has in herself—a very profound truth.” Rachel adds,

“I always suspect a woman who doesn’t like women. … Helen herself would be much better”—

“You can’t expect a woman who’s as beautiful as she is and as attractive to the other sex”—

“I manage—”

“Yes, but you’re comparatively ugly.”

“But, Terence, men and women—”

“… [D]on’t let’s talk theories, Rachel, let’s talk about the things that really matter.”

“You’re disgustingly lazy.”

“No. … I’m sensible. Don’t you see, Rachel … directly you begin talking about men and women you’re talking about things that don’t exist. I exist; you exist; and Evelyn and St. John—but that’s all. Yet people will go on arguing and arguing as though there were hard and fast laws, and they get so angry, and make themselves so unpleasant, and all the time they’re arguing about what doesn’t exist, and the really important things are escaping them. … Besides, if there are laws, let’s leave it to the old fogeys to find them. …” (VO Heine 445–46)

But Rachel has neither adequate weapons nor any very clear cause. She struggles to put her predicament into words, “conscious of what with her love of vague phrases, she called, ‘The Great War.’ It was a war waged on behalf of things like stones, jars, wreckage at the bottom of the sea, trees stars and music, against the people who believe in what they see. It was not easy to explain, supposing Rachel knew what she meant” (M 21). What she means is illustrated by a remembered talk with her aunts, when she tried in vain “to find out what they thought. She had wanted to say that there must be some kind of structure in the backg[r]ound which kept them all living together, … though—she meant to wind up—‘we seem to be dropped about like tables or umbrellas’” (M 23). Thwarted in her quest for an underlying “structure” by the unthinking acquiescence of everyone around her, Rachel takes refuge in “symbols. Let all people be images; worship spirits; wage the great war. … Music was real; books … all things that one saw … all that one thought. … The war was waged chiefly at meals, when one had to keep on knowing that the things that were said were all misfits for ideas” (M 23).

This makeshift philosophy sets Rachel at a tangent to the talk swirling around her in this protomodernist novel of manners: “Reality dwelling in what one saw and felt, but did not talk about, one could accept a system in which things went round and round quite satisfactorily to other people” (VO 37). Encumbered though The Voyage Out is with the “appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner” that Woolf later repudiates as “false, unreal, merely conventional,” producing “[w]aste, deadness,” the novel’s resistance to its own literalism foreshadows her modernist art (D 3:209, 28 November 1928). For example, when Mr. Pepper urges Rachel’s father, Willoughby Vinrace—“a sentimental man who imported goats for the sake of the empire”—to fund a ship to study “the great white monsters of the lower waters,” Willoughby replies, “the monsters of the earth are too many for me!” Rachel sighs, “Poor little goats!” and her father chides, “If it weren’t for the goats there’d be no music, my dear: music depends upon goats.”⁸ Even as the narrative frames the Euphrosyne’s voyage and Rachel’s music within the economy of empire, it overleaps conventional realism with Mr. Pepper’s surreal evocation of “white, hairless, blind monsters lying curled on the ridges of sand at the bottom of the sea, which would explode if you brought them to the surface, their sides bursting asunder and scattering entrails to the winds” (VO 23). Rachel’s war “on behalf of” sea wrecks against “people who believe in what they see” draws such moments of narrative extravagance into an allegorical force field where these marine monsters suffer a sea change and eventually resurface in her fevered thoughts as she lies ill: “While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea. There she lay, sometimes seeing darkness, sometimes light, while every now and then some one turned her over at the bottom of the sea” (VO 341). Incarnating Mr. Pepper’s monsters, Rachel becomes in her delirium a living allegory of realities drowned by the exigencies of empire, of submerged truths that will explode if brought too quickly to the surface.

As Rachel’s fantasies of death-in-life compete with the plot of her death, we glimpse behind the novel’s Edwardian facade its deeper affinity with modernism’s great revolution of the social imagination, its contestation of reality. While Rachel, even as she dabbles in “misfits” herself, dreams “of saying what one thought, and getting it answered,” the narrator ominously observes,

Although these were symptoms of a war to come far subtler than any she had yet engaged in, she did not rise and go to meet it consciously. Uneducated, in the sense that no one had ever required her to know anything accurately, she was ill-fitted to keep her eye upon facts; correspondingly tempted to think of the bottom of the sea. “Why should I go bothering about my feelings, or other people’s feelings,” her meditations ran, “… I live; I die; the sea comes over me. …” [F]ortified by the presence of the spirits, she floated; her soul was like thistledown kissing the sea, and rising again, and so passing out of sight. (M 23, 24).

Woolf, who judged Conrad “a much better writer than all of us put together,” also proposed that “there are no women in his books”; his “beautiful ships” are “more feminine than his women, who are either mountains of marble or the dreams of a charming boy over the photograph of an actress” (L 3:62, 3 August 1923; CDB 81). Named first the Sarah Jane, then the Euphrosyne (Joy, one of the three graces), Willoughby’s imperial merchant ship too is a very vessel of femininity, if different in character from Marlow’s Nellie: “a bride going forth to her husband, a virgin unknown of men; in her vigour and purity … likened to all beautiful things, worshipped and felt as a symbol” yet taken at a distance for “a tramp, a cargo-boat, or one of those wretched passenger steamers where people rolled around among the cattle on deck”; or again “a ship passing in the night—an emblem of the loneliness of human life,” a “lonely little island” (VO 32, 87). As “she” voyages away from England—that “very small,” still “shrinking island in which people were imprisoned”—the Euphrosyne takes on “an immense dignity”: “she was an inhabitant of the great world, which has so few inhabitants, travelling all day across an empty universe, with veils drawn before her and behind”—the “great world” of reality and possibility, beyond the “prison” of appearances and conventions (VO 32).

Carrying its women voyagers, the Euphrosyne makes for the fictional South American colony Santa Marina—founded, we are told, not to serve the interests of the British Empire but, on the contrary, because “The English were dissatisfied with their own civilisation” (M 70). As Mr. Pepper can tell anyone who likes to know (though “history books” do not), an Elizabethan colony on the site succumbed after a century or so to hostile native populations, rival European imperialists, and disease. After the last boatload of English people departed, there remained no bastion of empire but a “happy compromise” of populations where “Portuguese fathers wed Indian mothers, and their children intermarry with the Spanish”—a backwater of both “civilisation” (which “shifted its center to a spot four or five hundred miles to the south”) and modernity (“in arts and industries … still much where it was in Elizabethan days”) (VO 89). This multicultural settlement where “Love and friendship and happiness with all the sorrows they bring, flourished … unrecorded” attracted the founders of a tiny new English colony, who wished to escape the Christian civilization of Europe’s “older countries,” with their

enormous accumulations of carved stone, stained glass, and rich brown painting. … The movement in search of something new was … infinitely small, affecting only a handful of well-to-do people. It began by a few schoolmasters serving their passage out to South America as the pursers of tramp steamers. … [T]heir stories of … the marvels of the place delighted outsiders. … The place seemed new and full of new forms of beauty, in proof of which they showed handkerchiefs which the women had worn round their heads, and primitive carvings coloured bright greens and blues. … [A]n old monastery was quickly turned into a hotel, while a famous line of steamships altered its route for the convenience of passengers. (M 70, VO 90)

The new colony’s name might almost be New Bloomsbury: “A single little group then, an infinitely small conspiracy … began to seek out what they felt”—such as delicious sensations of nakedness outlawed in England, where if “One cried for Pan … startled women fled shrieking at the sight of a man without trousers.”⁹ Rachel’s suggestion that Helen embroider “a troupe of naked knights” into her scenic tapestry allies her with untrousered men against shrieking women, but her own desire is not to disrobe herself but to strip the social body of the conventions that clothe and hide it (M 129).

When St. John Hirst—at twenty-four a Cambridge mathematician and “one of the three, or is it five” most distinguished young men in England—endorses “the enlightenment of women” as one of the things that matter most to the modern world, the question of why, how, and to whom it should matter, and what form that enlightenment ought to take, situates Rachel’s education within a vast social transformation in the early part of the century (VO 144, 164). “Laugh at her and enlighten her,” Helen encourages Hirst when he wonders whether he can talk freely to Rachel; “That’s your duty” (M 188). But what does it mean to enlighten a woman? No one in Rachel’s purview quite knows, though everyone makes efforts. For her part, she struggles to understand, articulate her own perspective, and make herself heard. The Voyage Out counterposes the question of women’s enlightenment to the question of whether women can or should be educated at all—whether, as Hirst and Hewet sometimes wonder, women are “stupid” or “have a mind,” suffer from “native incapacity” or only lack training, whether they “reason,” “feel,” “really think,” and can be talked to or are an alien subspecies (VO 107, M 118, 154, 156–57, VO 172).

From the outset, Rachel’s education is entangled in the contradictions and conflicts surrounding the gender of truth and lies. At twenty-three, Rachel is no tabula rasa. She has been educated

as the majority of well-to-do girls in the last part of the nineteenth century were educated. … [T]here was no subject in the world which she knew accurately. … [S]he would believe practically anything she was told, invent reasons for anything she said. The shape of the earth, the history of the world, how trains worked, or money was invested, what laws were in force, which people wanted what, and why they wanted it, the most elementary idea of a system in modern life—none of this had been imparted to her by any of her professors or mistresses. … All the energies that might have gone into languages, science, or literature, that might have made her friends, or shown her the world, poured straight into music. (VO 33–34)

Although she has failed to teach herself German—“which [her father] said, is the foundation of all knowledge”—Rachel excels as a pianist (M 19). Both her advanced sensibility and her fine musicianship emerge as she communes with the “spirit” of Beethoven’s strikingly modern, ferociously difficult Opus 111 and, practicing, climbs “Up and up the steep spiral” of this “very late Beethoven sonata … like a person ascending a ruined staircase” (VO 37, 291). Music permits Rachel to be simultaneously highly accomplished and unworldly, even otherworldly; to dwell amid invisible “Spirits,” the dead, “the things that aren’t there … drowned statues, undiscovered places, the birth of the world, the final darkness, and death” (M 21).

The voyage brings Rachel abundant mentors. Finding Rachel thus adrift in her businessman father’s wake, her aunt Helen intervenes in hope of teaching her “how to be a reasonable person” (VO 83). At first sight Helen seems an ideal mentor: a wife and mother, yet outside conventions, unsentimental, repelled by falsity and humbug. With G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica propped beside her as she embroiders, Helen is a fictional Vanessa, a paragon of Bloomsbury modernity and an antagonist of those proud “citizen[s] of the Empire” the worldly, glamorous Dalloways, who board the Euphrosyne in Lisbon by “special arrangement” (M 49, VO 40). Like Helen, Clarissa too finds Rachel appealing and would like to “rake her out before it’s too late.”¹⁰ During her short stay she does what she can to counteract the influence of these “very oddest” of people: “literary people—they’re far the hardest of any to get on with. The worst of it is,” they “might have been … just like everybody else, if they hadn’t got swallowed up by Oxford or Cambridge or some such place and been made cranks of” (VO/E 49). Answering Rachel’s declaration “I shall never marry,” Clarissa extols marriage and presses Jane Austen’s Persuasion upon her (VO 60).

Meanwhile, the genial former M.P. Richard scoffs at “the equality of the sexes” and confides to the infatuated Rachel both his fervid hope to be in his grave before an Englishwoman has the right to vote and his categorical conviction that “no woman has what I may call the political instinct” (VO 43, 69). Rachel perseveres in her quest for enlightenment. “Please tell me—everything,” she wants to say, convinced that “if one went back far enough, everything perhaps was intelligible”; that she might discover how “the mammoths … in the fields … had turned into paving stones and boxes full of ribbon, and her aunts” (VO 56, 67). While Rachel longs to trace the evolution of the modern “system” that shapes individual lives all the way back to nature and so unravel the perplexities of social laws and conditions, Richard looks forward to securing England’s global empire: “He ran his mind along the line of conservative policy … as though it were a lasso that … caught … enormous chunks of the habitable globe. … ‘we’ve pretty nearly done it,’ he said; ‘it remains to consolidate.’”¹¹

Richard’s own contribution to Rachel’s enlightenment is of another order entirely. The two great “revelations” of his life, he tells her, are

“The misery of the poor and”—(he hesitated and pitched over) “love”!

Upon that word he lowered his voice; it was a word that seemed to unveil the skies for Rachel.

“It’s an odd thing to say to a young lady,” he continued. “But have you any idea what—what I mean by that? No; of course not. I don’t use the word in a conventional sense. I use it as young men use it. Girls are kept very ignorant, aren’t they. Perhaps it’s wise—perhaps—You don’t know?”

He spoke as if he had lost consciousness of what he was saying. (VO 68)

The kiss puts an end to talk. Rachel is assailed that night by terrifying dreams of “gibbering … barbarian men” harassing the ship, which she confides to Helen after the Dalloways debark the next day (VO 77). Puzzled by Rachel’s terror, Helen, who finds Richard “pompous,” “sentimental,” “silly,” and “secondrate,” explains lightly, “Men will want to kiss you, just as they’ll want to marry you” and advises her to forget it (VO 80–81, 83). But Rachel, with her truth-seeking if uneducated mind and her fierce curiosity about the “structure” of things, vows, “I shall think about it all day and night until I find out exactly what it does mean” and arrives at an epiphany far beyond Helen’s comprehension (VO 80):

“Tell me,” she said suddenly, “what are those women in Piccadilly?”

“In Piccadilly? They are prostitutes,” said Helen.

“It is terrifying—it is disgusting,” Rachel asserted, as if she included Helen in her hatred.

“It is,” said Helen. “But—”

“I did like him,” Rachel mused, as if speaking to herself. “I wanted to talk to him; I wanted to know what he’d done. The women in Lancashire—”

It seemed to her as she recalled their talk that there was something lovable about Richard, good in their attempted friendship, and strangely piteous in the way they had parted.

… [Helen] said, “you must take things as they are; and if you want friendship with men you must run risks. Personally,” she continued, breaking into a smile, “I think it’s worth it; I don’t mind being kissed; I’m rather jealous, I believe, that Mr. Dalloway kissed you and didn’t kiss me. Though,” she added, “he bored me considerably.”

Rachel did not return the smile or dismiss the whole affair, as Helen meant her to. Her mind was working very quickly, inconsistently and painfully. Helen’s words hewed down great blocks which had stood there always, and the light which came in was cold. After sitting for a time with fixed eyes, she burst out:

“So that’s why I can’t walk alone!”

By this new light she saw her life for the first time a creeping hedgedin thing, driven cautiously between high walls, here turned aside, there plunged in darkness, made dull and crippled for ever—her life that was the only chance she had—the short season between two silences.

“Because men are brutes! I hate men!” she exclaimed.

“I thought you said you liked him?” said Helen.

“I liked him, and I liked being kissed,” she answered, as if that only added more difficulties to her problem.

Helen was surprised to see how genuine both shock and problem were. … [Helen] wanted … to understand why this rather dull, kindly, plausible politician had made so deep an impression on her, for surely at the age of twenty-four this was not natural. (VO 81–82)

By the stark “new light” that floods Rachel’s mind in this scene, “a thousand words and actions bec[o]me plain to her” (VO/E 87). Her epiphany arrays the kiss, prostitutes, her own constricted, virginal life, and Helen herself—wife, mother, friend (especially of men), and complaisant mentor who would have her “take things as they are”—within a social system that sequesters women behind “great blocks” of ignorance, “high walls” of chastity, domesticity, and poverty, in seclusion from the great world appropriated by men and driven by male desire. If Richard’s first impression is that Rachel is “conscious of her virginity” (“he could not suppress a smile”), he himself occasions a colder, brighter enlightenment than he or Helen has any notion of (M 29).

Although Rachel refuses to “take things as they are,” Helen’s insistence that she “be a person on your own account” leaves her “profoundly excited at the thought of living” (VO 84). This excitement puts her at odds with the “system” as she begins to grasp the social forces that imprison women, not just physically but economically, intellectually, emotionally, and morally. Rachel, “brought up with excessive care … for what it seems almost crude to call her morals,” has “never troubled her head about … censorship” (VO 34–35). In her new awareness, her liking for Richard and her pleasure in the kiss do not contradict her hatred of “men” in the abstract. She has had “[n]o adventures,” she tells Terence, unless one counts nightmarish visions of being “chased by men” after seeing “the women … under lamps in Piccadilly”: “Suppose anyone had forbidden you to walk down Bond Street alone when you were eighteen! because of the women! It made me feel robbed of my life … you have only one life—just for a second and all that waste behind you and before you … I shall never never never have all the feelings I might have because of you” (M 150–51). Terence—nicknamed “Monk” in allusion to his sexual adventures—takes freedom for granted: “Have you ever walked about London at night, or been to a music hall, or talked to old men in the street—I forgot … you’ve never done any of these things, because of me,” he says moments later. “I’m very sorry. It seems monstrous when one comes to think of it” (M 152, 154, 198).

As Rachel confronts the “monstrous” sex/gender system in the cold new light of her ongoing education, “what it seems almost crude to call” women’s “morals” is unmasked as the oppressive code of female chastity that in effect makes the great world a masculine preserve and cripples women with fear. Like Conrad’s “monster-truth,” this system exacts everyday tribute of lies from men and women. “I would have told a lie, if you’d given me time,” Rachel tells Terence, because of her fear “of you—not of you but of the world” and its ridicule; the fact that men “suspect one” and the fact that “women are kissed.” “It’s a pity that you should tell lies,” Terence answers; “Nothing in the world would make it possible for me to tell a lie” (M 105–7). Hirst credits Cambridge with teaching him “to speak the truth,” and Helen responds, “Practically no woman speaks the truth” without noting that virtually no woman has Hirst’s education; Hirst adds, “And very few men” (M 155). When Hirst tells Rachel that he thinks it “quite possible” that she has a mind but doubts whether she can “think honestly because of your sex you see,” she feels “as if a gate had clanged in her face” (VO 156). Terence, after talking with Evelyn Murgatroyd, mutters, “Why is it that they won’t be honest?” (VO 194). As in Conrad, truth is a masculine prerogative, although men may choose to lie, especially when they talk with women.

“What is it that makes it not just possible but necessary that women lie, and not impossible but at least unnecessary that men should? Terence comforts Rachel when she expostulates, “It is insolent to say that women can’t be honest, to condescend to me because I am a woman. … if I had a gun I would shoot him!” (M 119). When she complains, “It’s no good; we should live separate; we cannot understand each other; we only bring out what’s worst,” he answers that he is “bored” by “generalisations” about the sexes, which seem to him “generally untrue” (VO 156). Yet he later contradicts himself, treating Rachel like a specimen of an exotic race: “‘I’ve often walked along the streets where … one house is exactly like another house, and wondered what on earth the women were doing inside,’” he says.

“Doesn’t it make your blood boil? … I’m sure if I were a woman I’d blow someone’s brains out. But … how does it all strike you? …”

His determination to know made it seem important that she should answer him with strict accuracy; but … Why did he make these demands on her? Why did he sit so near and keep his eye on her? No, she would not consent to be pinned down by any second person in the whole world. She … sighed, and waved her hand almost with a gesture of weariness towards the sea. (VO 215)

Along with other virtual guns pointed by women at Hirst, at “someone,” at Terence (“now you look as if you’d blow my brains out”), these images pose the question of how far being a woman is a natural, how far a social, condition (VO 298). Once engaged, Rachel tries to put that question aside, considering it “reserved for a later generation” to discuss sex differences “philosophically” (in fact years will pass before Woolf tackles it in A Room of One’s Own) (VO 292). But as Rachel tries to quit the social battlefield for the “reality” of Opus 111, Terence, busy at his novel, pesters her: “it’s the fashion now to say that women … have … no sense of honour; query, what is meant by masculine term, honour? what corresponds to it in your sex?”—as if indeed he has “no conception what it’s like—to be a young woman,” though she has told him of its “terrors and agonies” and of a certain compensatory “freedom … like being the wind or the sea” in the fact that “No one cares” and “people don’t listen” (VO 291, VO/E 247–48). Terence’s obtuseness calls Rachel back to the “destiny” of her Great War, for The Voyage Out does not permit its heroine a merely personal salvation but subordinates her individuality to the “structure” of things—even as that destiny keeps in play Hirst’s proposition that few things matter more at present than the enlightenment of women.¹²

South America’s “profusion of leaves and blossoms and prodigious fruits” puts Hewet in mind of Shakespeare: “That’s where the Elizabethans got their style” (VO 268). Founded to explore and invent a new world, the modern English colony promises an adventure that it does not deliver. “If I were a man,” Evelyn Murgatroyd goads one of her many hapless suitors, “I’d raise a troop and conquer some great territory. … I’d love to start life from the very beginning—as it ought to be. … It’s the idea, don’t you see? We lead such tame lives” (VO 136–37). While Rachel yearns for explorers and visionaries who “see things new,” Santa Marina’s English—“people with money, … given the management of the world”—are, in Terence’s eyes, “not satisfactory,” “ignoble” and, in Helen’s estimation, not so different from the conventional Dalloways: “Think of his attitude to her—to all women. She has daughters to bring up. He rules us. A fine mess they’ll make of it! Still … they’re very nice people” (VO 134, M 65).

At nineteen, Virginia Stephen, on the premise that the “only thing in this world is music—music and books and one or two pictures,” conceived “a colony where there shall be no marrying—unless you happen to fall in love with a symphony of Beethoven—no human element at all except what comes through Art” (L 1:41–42, 23 April 1901). In Santa Marina’s monastery-turned-hotel, radical fantasy bows to realism and marrying comes to the fore. Yet in this specular English colony founded to “see things new,” the conventional marriage plot is overborne by a daring surrealism, an intricate network of figures that transforms the novel of manners through a Post-Impressionist freedom of formal invention (M 151). Consider this conversation between Evelyn, with her ineffectual spirit of adventure, and Rachel. The love child of a farmer’s daughter and “the young man up at the great house,” who provided for Evelyn and her mother when his “people” blocked the marriage and was killed in the war, the self-dramatizing Evelyn collects proposals like scalps and longs to join “a revolution,” found a colony, “cut down trees,” “make laws,” make a “splendid” world, stop prostitution, reform “inebriate women,” fight and die for a cause, whether freedom, God, or the Russians.¹³ When Evelyn suspects that Rachel has “no cause you’d die for,” Rachel’s oddly unconscious response frames the marriage plot as the “cause” that conscripts unwitting women to “die” for it:

Although Rachel tells Evelyn that she does not know who she is or what she wants, or even quite believe she exists, she too wants “to explore,” to envision life from the beginning as it ought to be, to live with purpose if not to die for a cause (VO 251). Lent the first volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Hirst, Rachel takes it with her on a walk in “this land where … it was possible to lose sight of civilisation in a very short time” and opens it to read of resistance to Roman colonization. The hot climate of “Aethiopia and Arabia Felix” protected “the unwarlike natives of those sequestered regions” from invaders; the northern European countries, peopled by “a hardy race of barbarians, who despised life when it was separated from freedom,” “scarcely deserved the expense and labour of conquest” (VO 173–75). The words stir her imagination:

Never had any words been so vivid and so beautiful—Arabia Felix—Aethiopia … hardy barbarians, forests, and morasses. They seemed to drive roads back to the very beginning of the world, on either side of which the populations of all times and countries stood in avenues, and by passing down them all knowledge would be hers, and the book of the world turned back to the very first page. Such was her excitement at the possibilities of knowledge now opening before her that she ceased to read. (VO 175)

Walking fast, “her body trying to outrun her mind,” Rachel (in what only seems a non sequitur) confirms her “suspicion” that she is in love, “much as a person coming from a sickroom dreads to find the signs of infection” (M 132, VO 175–76). At the very moment when she exults to see for the first time “how the earth lived” and that “she herself was alive,” Rachel finds herself “awed by the discovery of a terrible possibility in life” and makes her way back to the villa “much as a soldier prepared for battle,” as if she has found a cause worth fighting for: to turn “the book of the world” back to the beginning so as to see things new in the light of “knowledge,” “freedom,” and (not least) “love” (M 132, VO 176).

To paraphrase Richard Dalloway, Rachel’s cause is “love” as young women use it. But since the love most women live for makes Rachel fear death, as if by drowning or “infection,” her cause is to see “love” new. The English colony teems with women who, however dissatisfied with their civilization, hold motherhood to be “the crown … of a woman’s life” (VO/E 127). Such knowledge as the literary historian Miss Allan possesses, though enviable, is “not what women want”; unmarried women lead “the hardest life of all”; even the longsuffering family servant Mrs. Chailey expects to forget her tribulations when Rachel’s child is placed in her arms (VO 115). Mrs. Thornbury, still bursting with vitality after helping her eleven children climb “infallibly to the tops of their trees,” avers that “we can learn a great deal from the young. … I learn so much from my own daughters” (M 91, VO 116). And Susan Warrington rejoices, on becoming engaged to Arthur Venning, at the prospective reassignment of her familial servitude from her aunt Paley to her own children: “‘I am a woman with children too—one of the great company,’ the regiment which toils all through middle life in the heat” (M 113).

At the dance celebrating Susan’s engagement, Rachel makes a spontaneous intervention in the social rituals of mating and marriage that leads the whole company momentarily to see things new.¹⁴ Early in the evening she announces, “This is my idea of Hell”; stung by Hirst’s condescension, she longs to “be a Persian princess far from civilisation” and “the strife and men and women”; then Terence sweeps her off, and soon, Arthur reports, she has changed her mind: “she’d no idea dances could be so delightful” (M 117, VO 155, 163). At two in the morning, when the musicians, deaf to the dancers’ appeals, hold up a watch and depart, Rachel is importuned to play, and she swirls the company beyond waltzes and polkas into the free-form expressionism of modern dance. Beginning with “some music that’s really happy”—a Gluck melody, Mozart—she commands, “Invent the steps,” and they do. Helen whirls Miss Allan about the room in a sequence of minuet steps, curtseys, spins, and darts “like a child skipping in a meadow”; Hirst hops first on one foot, then the other; Terence sways “like an Indian maiden … before her Rajah”; Miss Allan executes an elaborate bow to Susan and Arthur; Mr. Pepper adapts an “ingenious” figure-skating step; Mrs. Thornbury dances a one-woman quadrille; the Elliots “gallopad[e]” across the room with alarming “impetuosity” (M 125, cf. VO 166f). At last Rachel strikes into “The Mulberry Tree” for “the great round dance!” and the dancers join hands and whirl “faster and faster” until the chain breaks, flinging them every which way and leaving “Arthur and Susan sprawling back to back upon the floor” (M 125).

The scene recalls Virginia’s reflections in a 1903 diary-essay, “A Dance in Queens Gate,” on the unique power of dance music to “stir[] some barbaric instinct” so that

you forget centuries of civilisation in a second, & yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room—oblivious of everything save that you must keep swaying with the music—in & out, round & round—in the eddies & swirls of the violins. It is as though some swift current of water swept you along. It is magic music. Here the bars run low, passionate, regretful, but always in the same pulse. We dance as though we knew the vanity of dancing. We dance to drown our sorrows—but dance, dance—If you stop you are lost. This one night we will be mad—dance lightly—raise our hearts as the beat strengthens, grows buoyant—careless, defiant. What matters anything so long as ones step is in time—so long as one’s whole body & mind are dancing too—what shall end it? (PA 165, my emphasis)

As Rachel looses the dancers from ritual patterns of coupledom, she opens the conventional mating dance to innovations of every kind—same-sex partners, individual expression, mime, invention, vagaries of speed and pace—as if the dance were mirroring profuse, prodigious forms of life and social relations, real and potential. This freedom, this forgetting of “centuries of civilisation” inspired by Rachel’s musical imagination, culminates in a collective vision. After the round dance has ended, Rachel goes on playing Bach, and the “younger dancers” drift in from the garden to sit on “deserted gilt chairs round the piano”; as the music stills them, they seem to see “a building with spaces and columns … rising in the empty space” and then “to see themselves and their lives, and the whole of human life advancing” (VO 167). Seeing things new by the light of the impromptu Post-Impressionist spectacle Rachel’s playing conjures, the community, on what Susan declares the “happiest night of my life,” celebrates both her future and a revelatory vision of its own (VO 167).

Rachel’s own engagement scene during a river voyage up the Amazon departs yet more daringly from the conventional novel of manners. As Melymbrosia’s narrator waxes poetic, we know we’re not in Kansas anymore: “To find the sources of the river, you must be the first to cut through the thongs of creepers; the first who has ever trodden upon the mosses by the river side, or seen trees which have stood since the beginning of the world” (M 193). What is this river whose sources we (“you”) are seeking? “It is as though some swift current of water swept you along,” muses young Virginia on the “barbaric instinct” awakened by dance music, while Terence sees in the heroically maternal Mrs. Thornbury “a kind of beauty, … like a … river going on and on and on” (VO 294). That the novel’s Amazon is not the actual river but the rushing current of Eros and generation we understand from its peculiar visibility to young couples during the picnic on the mountaintop: “Susan and Arthur had seen it as they kissed,” Terence and Rachel as they “sat talking,” Evelyn and Mr. Perrott as they “strolled” (VO 264). The river whose sources Rachel voyages upstream to seek is exotic not because it is a geographical feature of South America but because it allegorizes the tremendous hidden currents, natural and social, that sweep individuals along, not least the torrents of desire and life that society channels through marriage. The expedition, after all, is neither “dangerous nor difficult,” indeed “not even unusual”; “Every year” English people steam upriver and return unharmed (VO 264). Yet this same river voyage carries Rachel to a specular, mythic locale, the “beginning of the world”: at once a “garden of Eden” watered by natural and cultural “sources” and the “country of the future” where she and Terence would see their lives new (M 208).

If Susan’s joyous engagement dance loosens the “tight plait” of Jane Austen’s marriage plot, Rachel’s engagement scene has a darker forebear in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss.¹⁵ When Terence remarks of Hirst’s sister, “No one takes her seriously, poor dear. She feeds the rabbits,” Rachel, instead of joining the world in not taking Miss Hirst seriously, identifies with her: “I’ve fed rabbits for twenty-four years; it seems odd now” (VO 213). In The Mill on the Floss Maggie Tulliver neglects to feed her brother, Tom’s, rabbits while he’s away at school, with fatal consequences, not only for the rabbits. Deborah Gorham notes that this feminine rabbit-feeding in support of brothers’ education had an earlier, wider currency in popular children’s literature. As Maria E. Budden’s Always Happy!! Anecdotes of Felix and his Sister Serena. A tale. Written for her Children, by a Mother puts it, “In feeding his rabbits, and arranging his garden, [Serena] felt she was preparing a pleasure for her dear brother.”¹⁶

Helen’s “presentiments of disaster,” her fear that desire has but “a moment’s respite” before “again the profound and reasonless law asserted itself, moulding them all to its liking,” again aligns Rachel with Maggie Tulliver (VO 285, 263). Called to look at jewelry in the jungle village, Helen sees instead “a boat upset on the river in England, at midday,” as if the Amazon were the Floss in flood and their steamer the boat that Maggie, in a feat of will and strength, steers over the raging river to the mill to rescue Tom before they are capsized by wreckage on the rushing stream (VO 285). Through Mrs. Thornbury’s likeness to “a river going on and on and on,” Woolf shifts the symbolic course of the English river that destroys Maggie Tulliver—rather arbitrarily, Eliot’s readers often feel—to figure not the wrath of the “World’s Wife” (the quasi-sexual scandal over Stephen Guest that drives Maggie out of the community) but the “drowned” lives of the World’s Mother—the female destiny of marriage and maternity that Rachel wishes not to “die” for.

What is that “profound and reasonless law”? In Melymbrosia’s version of the engagement scene, Terence calls their love “the most wonderful thing in the world”; Rachel feels it “Something terrible” (M 197). Terence loves her, he says, for her “free soul,” which neither time nor “marriage” will alter; “That’s why our life together will be the most magnificent thing in the world” (M 199). Contracting to remain independent and autonomous, Rachel tells Terence that she loves him as a woman, not a child; hence their marriage must be “a battle.” He agrees: “You fight; and I shall fight! We’ll have something better than happiness” (M 200). They celebrate their informal vow of mutual strength in their life’s adventure not by a dance but by Terence’s reading from Whitman’s “Passage to India”: “Voyage to more than India!/O secret of the earth and sky!/Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only,/Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me,/For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,/And we will risk the ship ourselves and all./O my brave soul!/O farther, farther sail!” (M 206–7). Despite Rachel’s initial “terrible,” her will to “fight” rather than submit, and the great “risk” of this voyage to “more than India” that will be their marriage, it is far from clear in this exalted moment that Rachel is destined to die.

In The Voyage Out, the engagement scene assumes a peculiarly literary fatality as the lovers seem to turn back the book of the world to the very first page, a Post-Impressionist Genesis. Even before they embark on the river voyage, Helen’s fear for Rachel evokes the Fall: “great things were happening—terrible things, because they were so great. Her sense of safety was shaken, as if beneath twigs and dead leaves she had seen the movement of a snake” (VO 263). While the others rest on the journey, Rachel and Terence walk like a new Adam and Eve alone into a surreal jungle as Hirst calls after them “Beware of snakes” (VO 270). It is as if they cross from a Constable landscape into an Eden that Henri Rousseau might have painted. Larger than life, their figures move through great spaces full of strange light, vast and green, where butterflies circle and settle amid creaking, sighing sounds that make them feel they are “walking at the bottom of the sea” (VO 270). Strangest of all is the silence that weighs them down. Neither can “frame any thoughts,” yet

“Does this frighten you?” Terence asked. …

“No,” she answered, “I like it.” … There was another pause.

“You like being with me?” Terence asked.

“Yes, with you,” she replied.

He was silent for a moment. Silence seemed to have fallen upon the world.

“This is what I have felt ever since I knew you,” he replied. “We are happy together.” He did not seem to be speaking, or she to be hearing.

“Very happy,” she answered.

They continued to walk for some time in silence. …

“We love each other,” Terence said.

“We love each other,” she repeated.

The silence was then broken by their voices which joined in tones of strange unfamiliar sound which formed no words. … Sounds stood out from the background making a bridge across their silence. …

“We love each other,” Terence repeated. … She said “Terence” once; he answered “Rachel.”

“Terrible—terrible,” she murmured … thinking … of the persistent churning of the water. … On and on it went in the distance, the senseless and cruel churning of the water. (VO 271)

Where Melymbrosia‘s engagement scene moves past Rachel’s “terrible” to envision an adventurous voyage toward a “magnificent” future, here “terrible” is the dialogue’s last word, uttered as if in unconscious homage to the overwhelming force of that symbolic “river.” Trying to speak a new beginning in the silences of an unwritten world, Rachel and Terence find themselves sucked into a maelstrom of unconscious repetition, as if an ancient cultural script were asserting itself with the force of nature. “I don’t want to be late,” says Terence. “We’re so late—so late—so horribly late,” he repeats “as if he were talking in his sleep” as he seeks the way back to the broad path that resembles “the drive in an English forest”—Rachel following, “ignorant of the way, ignorant why he stopped or why he turned” (VO 272).

As the characters fail to break into new speech, their bodies enact the ancient story of the Fall in which they seem entangled and lost, so that the social is infused with the surreal and even the sublime. Back with Helen and the others, Rachel hardly knows that she is “engaged.” (Indeed the words are never spoken. On the other hand, can a young Edwardian man and woman emerge from the jungle without being engaged?) “Are we to marry each other?” she asks. “Marriage?” she repeats. “It will be a fight” (VO 281, 282). As she and Terence walk ahead, “sunk” beneath “the waters” of their “happiness,” Helen comes up unheard and, with an iron blow like a “bolt from heaven,” tumbles Rachel to the ground and rolls her in the grass until, “speechless and almost without sense,” Rachel sees looming against the sky “the two great heads of a man and a woman, of Terence and Helen,” who “kissed in the air above her. She thought she heard them speak of love and then of marriage,” then “realised … happiness swelling and breaking in one vast wave” (VO 283–84).

But whose happiness? As if translating the Fall of Genesis into Rachel’s physical fall, Helen’s blow almost seems to knock Rachel’s desire and happiness out of her own body and into the abstract man and woman kissing in the air above her (VO 284). “‘Who are they?’” Rachel, momentarily disoriented, wonders of the “human figures” awaiting them in the distance (VO 284). The company walks on to the Amazon village that is “the goal of their journey,” as the Inner Station is Marlow’s. Here Rachel and Terence flinch under the village women’s strong gazes in an ethnographic encounter that makes Rachel feel her world as strange and inexplicable in their eyes as in her own. As she arrives at the “sources of the river,” as it were, this flowing maternal life-world “far beyond the plunge of speech” yields a subdued yet momentous analogue to Marlow’s epiphany: in this civilization as in her own, to be a woman is to be inscribed in and circumscribed by natural cycles of birth and death. “It does make us seem insignificant, doesn’t it?” Terence sighs; to Rachel it seems that the women, the trees, and the river will “go on forever”; and Helen, as we have noted, involuntarily sees a boat capsized on an English river, as if Rachel’s fate were now mysteriously revealed (VO 285). In short, the scene intercuts realism with a sublime apprehension of a nature “in comparison with which everything else is small”: “Nature” as phenomena betokening “infinity”; the consciousness “that we are superior to nature within, and … without us”; “pain” that is “at the same time … purposive.”¹⁷ Journeying upstream on the Amazon to find “the sources of the river”—that powerful current of maternal destiny—Rachel confronts a femininity bound into nature, before which she is silent, insignificant, horribly late, or perhaps only terribly early.

“I want to write a novel about Silence,” [Terence] said; “the things people don’t say. But the difficulty is immense. … [T]he whole conception, the way one’s seen the thing, felt about it, made it stand in relation to other things, not one in a million cares for that. And yet I sometimes wonder whether there’s anything else in the whole world worth doing. These other people,” he indicated the hotel, “are always wanting something they can’t get. … What you said just now is true: one doesn’t want to be things; one wants merely to be allowed to see them.” (VO/E 249)

How does Rachel Vinrace’s death “stand in relation to other things”? In Melymbrosia Rachel falls into a delirium in which she “pushe[s] her voice out as far as possible until it became a bird and flew away,” doubting “whether it ever reached the person she was talking to”; “each face” hovering over her reminds her “that she ought to fight for something”; she “wished for a moment to fight for something, and then forgot” (M 230–31). Rachel dies, it seems, when she ceases to fight; and once her life ebbs away, Terence feels “triumph and calm”: “‘It is only to us two in the world that this could have happened. … Because we loved each other. Therefore we have this.’ … This death was such a little thing. It seemed that they were now absolutely free, more free more entirely united than they had ever been before … the most wonderful thing in the world” (M 231–32).

Terence’s eerie gladness parodies with shocking force his relief as the battleground of marriage gives way to what only he is left to describe as a perfect union of wills, freed “absolutely” from contingency and struggle by Rachel’s “little” death. “I really don’t advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married,” says Katherine Hilbery’s aunt Charlotte in Woolf’s next novel, Night and Day (ND 212). To this homespun wisdom that marriage entails the sacrifice of a woman’s desire and will, Rachel opposes her vow that her marriage will be a “fight.” She does not go like a lamb to the slaughter but (like Gibbon’s “hardy barbarians”) takes up arms against the system and dies a soldier’s death in the “cause” of seeing women, men, and marriage new. In this light, we can read Rachel’s death as a sacrifice to a “cause” that conscripts her from the moment of her mingled pleasure and rage in response to Richard’s kiss. Legally, economically, and socially, the Victorian marriage system enforces the sacrifice of women by constricting female destiny within the “profound and reasonless law” of desire, generation, and death. As Rachel foresees life with Terence as a fight to resist that sacrificial death-in-life (of which Evelyn says glibly, “That’s just why one must marry”), her actual death—before the marriage—forecloses that fight and subtly alters her death’s sacrificial meaning. Instead of marrying and fighting the system from within, Rachel dies a weary soldier’s death (“she ought to fight,” “wished for a moment to fight”) on the threshold of marriage, outside the “structure” of things, in the midst of her greater war to speak “the truth.”

Even before Rachel falls ill, The Voyage Out shows her vanquished in one everyday skirmish when Terence deliberately interrupts her practice of Beethoven’s Opus 111. Deaf to its unearthly beauty—what she calls its “reality”—he describes it as “an unfortunate old dog going round on its hind legs in the rain” (VO 292). He then accuses her of reading “trash” and of being “behind the times” while she compares his industrious, domineering self-importance with “the ants who stole the tongue” at the picnic:

“I thought you and St. John were like those ants—very big, very ugly, very energetic, with all your virtues on your backs. However, when I talked to you I liked you—”

“You fell in love with me,” he corrected her. …

“No, I never fell in love with you,” she asserted.

“Rachel—what a lie—didn’t you sit here looking at my window—didn’t you wander about the hotel like an owl in the sun—?”

“No,” she repeated, “I never fell in love, if falling in love is what people say it is, and it’s the world that tells the lies and I tell the truth. Oh, what lies—what lies!”

She crumpled together a handful of letters from Evelyn M., from Mr. Pepper, from Mrs. Thornbury and Miss Allan, and Susan Warrington. It was strange, considering how very different these people were, that they used almost the same sentences … to congratulate her upon her engagement. (VO 293)

In condemning the world’s conventional “lies” about love and marriage, Rachel wages her Great War for “the truth.” But Terence, a fearsome opponent, has the lies and allies of gender in his arsenal. If their marriage is to be a battle for “truth,” the question is, whose truth? Helen wonders whether Rachel is “a person ever to know the truth about anything” and how Terence will stand “the sordid side of intimacy” (M 207). Hirst’s congratulations take form as a smug calculus that precisely calibrates the empire’s dependence on the fertility rate and his own dependence on the economy of empire: “if every man in the British Isles has six male children by the year 1920 … we shall be able to keep our fleet in the Mediterranean; if less than six, the fleet disappears; if the fleet disappears, the Empire disappears; if the Empire disappears, I shall no longer be able to pursue my studies in the university of Cambridge” (M 218).

Though Mrs. Thornbury’s sly wish that Hirst might “be the next” deflates him, his reading of maternity as the pillar of England’s imperial economy illuminates Rachel’s earlier subliminal identifications with Willoughby’s traffic in goats and Mr. Pepper’s great white monsters of the lower waters. Her “truth” resonates within his, though submerged in images, unable to surface lest it “explode.” Thus when Rachel and Terence argue about how to raise their prospective son and daughter, whether their son should be like Hirst, and whether Hirst or Rachel speaks the truth, Terence sides with Hirst, deaf to Rachel’s truth claims: “with all your virtues you don’t, and you never will, care with every fibre of your being for the pursuit of truth! You’ve no respect for facts, Rachel; you’re essentially feminine” (VO 295). Terence’s presumptive masculine superiority beats her. Laying down her arms, she kisses him and, when he says, “I ought to be writing my book, and you ought to be answering these,” she obediently takes up her pen, only to be interrupted again as he reads to her from a bad novel: “Perhaps, in the far future, when generations of men had struggled and failed as he must now struggle and fail, woman would be, indeed, what she now made a pretence of being—the friend and companion—not the enemy and parasite of man” (VO 295, 297).

Wondering what their marriage will be like, Terence shakes his fist in Rachel’s face and says, “now you look as if you’d blow my brains out. There are moments … when, if we stood on a rock together, you’d throw me into the sea” (VO 298). But he is mistaken, for it is herself Rachel suddenly sees “flung into the sea, … washed hither and thither, and driven about the roots of the world—the idea was incoherently delightful” (VO 298). As they act out this alarming fantasy, he dominates and she escapes: she swims about the room and he catches her saying, “our marriage will be the most exciting thing that’s ever been done!”; then they “f[ight] for mastery, imagining a rock, and the sea heaving beneath them” until Rachel is thrown to the floor, still insisting, “I’m a mermaid! I can swim” (VO 298). On hearing of their engagement, Mrs. Flushing, like “a child” pouncing on “what its elders wish to keep hidden,” observes that “if the boat ran upon a rock,” neither Terence nor she herself would “care for anythin’ but savin’ yourself … One reads a lot about love. … But what happens in real life, eh? It ain’t love” (VO 274). In the fight she imagines as marriage, Rachel saves herself by vanishing into her earlier imaginary underwater existence. This moment prefigures her death as a death-in-life, an escape from mentors and “tormentors” who think her dead when “she was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea” (VO 341).

Earlier Terence has expressed amazement that “it’s the beginning of the twentieth century, and until a few years ago no woman had ever come out and said things at all” (VO/E 245). He wonders at the “respect that women, even well-educated, very able women, have for men” in terms that foreshadow A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas:

“They see us three times as big as we are or they’d never obey us. For that very reason, I’m inclined to doubt that you’ll ever do anything even when you have the vote. … It’ll take at least six generations before you’re sufficiently thick-skinned to go into law courts and business offices. Consider what a bully the ordinary man is, … the ordinary hard-working, rather ambitious solicitor or man of business with a family to bring up and a certain position to maintain. … [T]he daughters have to give way to the sons; the sons have to be educated; they have to bully and shove for their wives and families, and so it all comes over again. … Do you really think that the vote will do you any good?” (VO 212–13)

For now, the fearsome “river” engulfs Rachel (as it nearly did Woolf), overwhelming “her own body … the source of all the life in the world, which tried to burst forth here—there—and was repressed” by “the weight of the entire world”—“churches, politicians, misfits, and huge impostures.” ¹⁸ Yet in refusing to propitiate the “monster-truth” of gender, in making a final, mysterious retreat “Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave” where drowned women live among “drowned statues, undiscovered places, the birth of the world, the final darkness, and death,” Rachel “dies” a sacrificial death on the threshold of Woolf’s modernism.¹⁹ Even as Woolf embraces modernity’s ideal of civilization on women’s behalf—that enlightenment project than which “few things matter more”—she designs a destination and a “destiny” for her heroine that bear witness, alongside Conrad and Marlow, to the great river of Eros that runs beneath civilization’s barbarities and to the “terrible” fight to slay rather than propitiate a “monster-truth” that lives on women’s bodies and sacrificial lies. Conrad evokes—and Woolf confronts—the “monstrous” system of gender in ways that render problematic the very terms male modernism and female modernism.²⁰

Rachel’s “fight” rescues the meaning of her sacrificial “death.” No mere lie thrown in despair to a monster-truth, her death recaptures Melymbrosia’s suggestion of a modern fertility myth, oriented toward the future. “To the one man who had yet asked her to marry him she had said that it seemed to her ridiculous,” Rachel reflects early on, for she “half expected to come up next year as a bed of white flowers” (M 21). Her education and engagement interrupt this lonely life among spirits and drowned things. Congratulating Terence and Rachel, Miss Allan lays on them “the burden of the new generation”; Mrs. Thornbury applauds their future:

After Rachel dies, a violent thunderstorm crashes and booms all around the hotel, and when it is over, the inmates’ spirits seem watered and replenished. While the moth that evokes Rachel’s soul or psyche dashes “from lamp to lamp” they talk of the future (VO 370). Miss Allan’s “imaginary uncle”—“a most delightful old gentleman” who is “always giving me things” like a gold watch, a “beautiful little cottage in the New Forest,” a ticket to a place she dreams of seeing—makes them all think of “the things they want[]”: Mrs. Elliot, a child; the Flushings, Mrs. Thornbury, and Miss Allan, to “go on for a hundred years” so as to see the “changes, the improvements, the inventions—and beauty” and to find out whether there is “life in Mars”; Hirst, to see “the pattern” formed by movements and voices in the room (VO 371).

The reader, too, is led to think of “the whole conception, the way one’s seen the thing, felt about it, made it stand in relation to other things.”²¹ For example (as we saw in chapter 1) not one but two women die in The Voyage Out: the good ship Sarah Jane sails back transformed into the Hirsts’ parlormaid Susan Jane, who poisons herself after asking the cook to hold her twenty pounds of gold—the price of a woman’s silence and a modernist strategy for calling readers to witness a civilization founded on the sacrifice of female desire. Through its postimpressionist stress on forms in relation, Woolf’s first experiment to “re-form the novel and capture … things at present fugitive” projects a re-formed reader whose aesthetic pleasure in formal relations is inseparable from the ethical imperative to see things new. Long after surviving her own battle to make Rachel’s death not “an accident” that “need never have happened” but a “destiny” whose meaning derives from its relation to other things, Woolf figured the sheer pleasure of reading (pace Richard Dalloway) as the most potent of forces in humanity’s long struggle toward civilization, sociability, and peace:

Reading has changed the world and continues to change it. When the day of judgement comes therefore and all secrets are laid bare, we shall not be surprised to learn that the reason why we have grown from apes to men, and left our caves and dropped our bows and arrows and sat round the fire and talked and given to the poor and helped the sick—the reason why we have made shelter and society out of the wastes of the desert and the tangle of the jungle is simply this—we have loved reading.²²