COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Never was a book more feminine, more recklessly feminine. It may be labelled clever and shrewd, mocking, suggestive, subtle, ‘modern,’ but these terms do not convey the spirit of it — which essentially is feminine. That quality is, of course, indescribable; but it must not, in this case, be taken to suggest a spirit shallow and weak or one fanatically strong; it must not be supposed that the book is sentimental or cynical, frivolous or hard, as individual experience or prejudice may lead one hastily to assume; it stands here for tolerance and that feminine sort of strength (or inertia) that accepts what is, whether beautiful or ugly; for cruelty, perhaps, wilfulness certainly, and a quivering eagerness about life, admirably dissembled behind an air of detachment. The wit, too, is feminine with its alert scampering from one point to another and the space between taken for granted; one smiles and grows grave and chuckles just as one would in the company of the picturesque aunt who is not the chief personage, but who somehow dominates the whole tragic comedy. And most feminine are the shocks that are plentifully administered; most of them are just contrariness and so one laughs, but some come from one or another of those modern obsessions by notions that most of us are too old-fashioned to blurt out in mixed company, and at these we duly catch our breaths — which is really to say that the shocks are successful.
— April 1, 1915
THE OBSERVER
This is just the story of a voyage, and some rather unusual people, interspersed with some highly usual ones, who spent some time shut up together. Two of them agree to love each other, and one of the two dies. That is all, in vaguest outline; but the filling in is done with something startlingly like genius. That is not a word to use in-advisedly, but there is something greater than talent that colours the cleverness of this book. Its perpetual effort to say the real thing and not the expected thing, its humour and its sense of irony, the occasional poignancy of its emotions, its profound originality — well, one does not wish to lose the critical faculty over any book, and its hold may be a personal and subjective matter, but among ordinary novels it is a wild swan among good grey geese to one reviewer, to whom its author’s name is entirely new and unknown.
— April 4, 1915
E. M. FORSTER
Mrs. Woolf’s success is ... remarkable since there is one serious defect in her equipment; her chief characters are not vivid. There is nothing false in them, but when she ceases to touch them they cease, they do not stroll out of their sentences, and even develop a tendency to merge shadowlike.... [But] if Mrs. Woolf does not ‘do’ her four main characters very vividly, and is apt to let them all become clever together, and differ only by their opinions, then on what does her success depend? Some readers — those who demand the milk of human kindness, even in its tinned form — will say that she has not succeeded; but the bigness of her achievement should impress anyone weaned from baby food. She believes in adventure — here is the main point — believes in it passionately, and knows that it can only be undertaken alone. Human relations are no substitute for adventure, because when real they are uncomfortable, and when comfortable they must be unreal. It is for a voyage into solitude that man was created, and Rachel, Helen, Hewet, Hirst, all learn this lesson, which is exquisitely reinforced by the setting of tropical scenery — the soul, like the body, voyages at her own risk.
— from Daily News and Leader (April 8, 1915)
LYTTON STRACHEY
The Voyage Out — ! You know how I adore that book. I read it with breathless pleasure, the minute it came out — a special messenger came running out with it from Bickers. I don’t think I ever enjoyed the reading of a book so much. And I was surprised by it. I had naturally expected wit and exquisiteness — what people call ‘brilliance,’ but it’s a wretched word — but what amazed me was to find such a wonderful solidity as well. Something Tolstoyan, I thought — especially that last account of the illness, which really — well! — And then the people were not mere satirical silhouettes, but solid too, with other sides to them: Shakespeare wouldn’t have been ashamed of some of them, I thought. I love, too, the feeling reigning throughout — perhaps the most important part of any book — the secular sense of it all — 18th century in its absence of folly, but with colour and amusement of modern life as well. Oh, it’s very, very unvictorian!
— from a letter to Virginia Woolf (February 25, 1916)
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Your praise is far the nicest of any I’ve had — having as you know, an ancient reverence for your understanding of these things, so that I can hardly believe that you do like that book. You almost give me courage to read it, which I’ve not done since it was printed, and I wonder how it would strike me now.
— from a letter to Lytton Strachey (February 28, 1916)
Questions
1. Is your attitude toward Rachel sympathetic or antipathetic? If both, in what proportions? What are your grounds for sympathy and antipathy?
2. Does the landscape of The Voyage Out seem to you symbolic, or would you describe it as simply realistic? Analyze a passage that supports your way of looking at this question.
3. Do you see Rachel’s death as naturalistic — some tropical disease striking her down — or do you see it as psychosomatic? In the latter case, how would you diagnose her condition? Morbid fear of sex? A preference for death over the loss of freedom that goes with marriage?
4. Is Woolf’s treatment of her male characters invidious — that is, does it vilify them unfairly?