Cause for Fear:
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Introduction
Virginia
Woolf is best known to scholars today as a feminist writer. Her opposition to
the gendered hierarchy of power in modern Western society prefigured a point of
view that has achieved almost total ascendance in the liberal academy. Woolf’s
writing speaks to “the daughters of educated men” today much as it did to the
middle-class women who were her contemporaries. It serves as a reminder both of
how much we have achieved and how much must still be done in order to achieve
gender parity. Precisely because her words carry such weight in the feminist
discourse, Woolf’s positions on matters of sex and gender are often the victims
of a critical perspective that is burdened by a set of assumptions based on our
current understanding of sex and gender – what they are, how they relate to one
other, and what effect they have on our experience as human beings.
It is
my aim to explore a phenomenon in Woolf’s writing that is distinct yet
inseparable from her feminist ideals – the issue of sexual apprehension. Woolf
spent a lifetime struggling with various kinds of sexual apprehension,
attempting through her writing to express her fear of sexual intimacy and to
escape the influence of patriarchal domination. In writing about how sex (both
the physical act and the biological designation) relates to and is affected by
gender, Woolf attempts to articulate her personal sexual neuroses with the goal
of obliterating them, and to expose the destructive power of the patriarchy in
hopes of reducing its hold over all the “daughters of educated men” who
experience their sex as a social limiter that bars them from professional and
artistic autonomy. My exploration is framed by four recurring questions. What
are the origins of Woolf’s sexual apprehension? How is her attitude towards sex
expressed in her writings? To what extent and in what ways does she succeed in
“killing the angel in the house”?[1][1] Finally, is Woolf’s sexual apprehension
ultimately a product of nature, culture or some combination of the two?
I will attempt to explain what “sexual
apprehension” means in the context of Virginia Woolf’s life and writings.
Woolf’s concerns about sex – both the physical act and the biological
distinction – pervade her written work. Molested as a child, she fears male
sexual aggression and initially equates it with the violation and destruction
of the female. Restricted and marginalized within her family group, Woolf is
intensely anxious to free herself from confining feminine stereotypes and to
avoid the kinds of relationships that place women in service of men. Woolf
fears both physical sexual violation and the more socially acceptable methods
by which women are made to gratify the desires of men. She does not want to be
a victim of sexual violence, and she is equally opposed to becoming someone’s
angel in the house. Essentially, I define sexual apprehension as any fear or
worry that is caused by circumstances arising from the fact that Woolf is a
female.
It is
important to remember that Woolf was writing at a time when the modern
distinction between sex and gender (biological given vs. cultural construct)
was hardly thought of. Therefore, she uses the terms “masculine” and “male,”
“feminine” and “female” interchangeably. Woolf does tend to view certain
behavioral tendencies – the acquiescence of women, the male predilection for
sport and violence – as innate in our biology rather than mere products of
socialization. However, this does not blind her to the coercive power of
culture in making people act out a sharply delineated gender role. Woolf is
intimately familiar with the workings of the patriarchy, and its power to
circumscribe her life and to thwart her artistic endeavors contributes hugely
to her sexual apprehension.
A
modern feminist thinker with rigidly defined boundaries between sex and gender
may find it difficult to understand which concept Woolf is referring to when
she uses words like “sex,” “male” and “female.” There is no easy solution to
this problem. Woolf uses “sex” to refer both to matters of biology and matters
of behavior. She attributes the behavior of men and women both to gender-based
conditioning and to sex-based predilections. Given her limited vocabulary and
her belief that nature and nurture both contribute to human behavior, it
sometimes seems as though Woolf is conflating the now-distinct concepts of sex
and gender. In fact, she is attempting to separate the two in a way that had
never been done before.
Woolf
does not use the term “gender,” but her problems with sexuality were largely
created by the social phenomenon that is now referred to by this term. Much of
Woolf’s difficulty in relating to the opposite sex came from her early
vulnerability when forced to conform to the ideas of her male family members.
The subordinate and service-oriented behavior required by Leslie Stephen and
the sexual exploitation of George Duckworth taught the young Virginia Stephen
that to be a “feminine” woman is to be eternally vulnerable to male aggression
in all its various forms. This is a mentality that she never discarded; although
she herself found a safe and nonexploitative relationship with Leonard Woolf,
her conviction that female oppression was created by the male desire for
dominance remained central to the way that she viewed the world.
Both
as a woman and as a writer, Woolf strove to understand and overcome the limits
that social indoctrination had placed upon her. Artistically, this meant
“killing the angel the house” – using sexually liberated language and exploring
topics that had traditionally been the province of male authors. Woolf’s
depiction of relations between the sexes attempts to smash the barriers
defining acceptable subject matters for ladies. Her success was partial at best
– D. H. Lawrence she’s not – but her attempts to demonstrate frankly and
forthrightly the sexual problems of women had a profound effect upon later
feminist writers. Like most of her female characters, Virginia Woolf longed to
be free of both overt masculine authority and the insidious mind-control of
feminine socialization. This desire is stated very forcefully in her writing;
however, it is not accompanied by the kind of explicitly sexual texts that her
male contemporaries were producing.
All
of Woolf’s novels contain elements of her own experience, with characters and
relationships drawn from life as well as actual autobiographical events
appearing to some degree in every book. Similarly, all of her novels touch in
some way upon issues of sex and gender, although in certain cases, such as the
abruptly ended narration of a commercial sexual encounter in Jacob’s Room,
her preferred technique is selective omission. Mrs. Dalloway and To
the Lighthouse, Woolf’s best known novels, deal extensively with matters of
gender, but not necessarily of sex. I have chosen to deal with three works of
fiction where sexual apprehension plays a major role: The Voyage Out, Orlando,
and Between the Acts. These novels seem to contain particularly focused
attempts by Woolf to articulate her sexual apprehensions, divine their origin, and
study their potential for diminishing both life and art. These fictional
explorations are complemented by her two feminist essays, A Room of One’s
Own and Three Guineas.
Despite
the staggering amount of biographical material available on Woolf, Quentin
Bell’s Virginia Woolf remains essential to any meaningful examination of
her life. His biography is the touchstone upon which all subsequent researchers
base their explorations. Bell is frequently disputed, but never dismissed. This ultra-canonical work on Woolf
seems to me most valuable when paired with a more recent, more topical
examination of her life – Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee. Lee’s book is
divided into categories such as “Childhood,” “Abuses,” “Liaisons,” and
“Marriage,” whereas Bell partitions his work strictly by chronology. Together,
these two biographies provide excellent factual information and plentiful
analysis of my chosen topic.
Woolf’s
personal writings – her diaries, letters and the posthumous Moments of Being
– have been invaluable in directing my attention to those aspects of her sexual
experience that she considered most important. In the
struggle to avoid projecting my own opinions about sex and gender onto Woolf’s
fictional representations, Woolf’s private explanations of her public writing
served as a safeguard against over-extrapolation. The last volume of Woolf’s
complete diary, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, was very helpful in understanding
the extent to which World War II affected Woolf’s perspective on males and
masculinity.
In
terms of form, The Voyage Out is one of Woolf’s less innovative
undertakings. One senses that her creative energies are entirely consumed with
the emotion that she is trying to convey.
This first novel contains Woolf’s most negative take on sexuality per se. Her protagonist, Rachel Vinrace,
experiences sexual passion as a problem which she is completely unequipped to
solve, and unlike Woolf, she does not survive to learn the source of her sexual
anxiety. The language of The Voyage Out is intensely – but indirectly –
physical. Sexual excitement and the fear of sex are conveyed through images of
drowning, suffocating, and being at the bottom of the ocean. Nightmares are
also a key element in constructing the atmosphere of sexual terror that
ultimately kills the protagonist. Woolf’s first novel evokes intense emotion
and portrays distinctly sexual situations, but it does so through the diffused
lens of metaphor.
The
nine-year interval between the completion of The Voyage Out and the
publication of Orlando transformed an inexperienced, obscure young
writer into a well-published celebrity with a successful (if unusual) marriage.
Orlando pays no attention to conventions of form, blurring the line
between reality and fantasy with absolute glee. Moreover, Orlando is
Woolf’s fictionalized portrait of Vita Sackville-West, a woman with whom she
had a years-long affair. Orlando’s experiences portray sexual apprehension as a
result of society’s historical misuse of women, a socially based problem that
disappears when artificial notions of femininity are eliminated from an
individual’s consciousness. Orlando’s transformation from male to female
precipitates the evolution of an androgynous mind that can triumph over the
deleterious influences of feminine socialization.
Orlando
is often made light of by Woolf’s biographers and critics, perhaps for no
better reason than it does not seem tortured enough to be rated a great work of
art. This dismissal is unfair – depth need not always be paired with pathos. In
fact, Woolf’s playful approach to Orlando’s gender struggles is in many ways a
more powerful method of expressing her position than the melodramatic tone of The
Voyage Out. In any case, Woolf’s treatment of sexuality in this “biography”
bears a marked difference from all her previous works. Sex for Orlando is a
positive force, and sexual acts themselves bring uncomplicated pleasure.
Orlando’s real struggle is against the social forces of gender, which threaten
her autonomy and creative potential following the physical transformation.
After finishing Orlando, Woolf continued to explore the effect of the
patriarchal system on female creativity in her feminist polemic A Room of
One's Own. In both works, she concludes that the real solution to the
problem lies not only in the elimination of male dominance but also in a
decreased divide between masculinity and femininity.
Between
the Acts, like The Voyage Out, features a protagonist who
parallels Woolf in age, sex and historical moment, and is thus an excellent
example of the way in which her sexual fears had been transformed both by her
personal experience as a professional woman in a patriarchal society and by
recent historical developments, specifically the rise of Fascism and the
beginning of the Second World War. The narrative consciousness of Between
the Acts is not upset by sexuality per
se, but by the
social order that has transformed naturally occurring desires into a means of
oppressing both women and men. This last novel, which owes much to Woolf’s
second major polemic, Three Guineas, argues that patriarchal
conditioning engenders an oppressive (and violent) masculine paradigm that is
nearly as hard on the patriarchs themselves as it is on those who they oppress.
Sexual anxiety is still present, but its representation has shifted from the
tribulations of a naïve young lady being respectably courted to the far more
shocking image of a defenseless woman raped by the same British soldiers who are
purported to be the defenders of freedom and justice.
Feminist
theory has paid a great deal of attention both to Woolf’s personal fear of
sexual intimacy and to her political stance on the problems of gender
inequality and its effect on relationships between the sexes. I have found
Rachel Bowlby’s Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf
very useful in locating Woolf inside the tradition of feminist scholarship. The
feminist perspective on Woolf is fascinating but treacherous - so much of
Woolf’s once-shocking ideology has become mainstream feminist thought that
anachronism is a frequent problem. Despite the close resemblances in theory,
Woolf does not fit into any of postmodern feminism’s favorite pigeonholes. She
cannot be fairly evaluated as “simply” an oppressed lesbian schizophrenic
bulimic, although each of these traits had significant effects on her life and
work. Likewise, her changing and intermingled fears both of individual men and
their passions and of the patriarchal system’s dehumanizing power is more than
just “consciousness raising.” Moreover, feminist theory tends to oversimplify
those of Woolf’s positions that address sex rather than gender, maintaining
that her difficulties with physical intimacy are solely the result of the
Duckworth brothers’ abuse.
Virginia
Woolf was not a coward, sexually or otherwise. She experienced terrible
emotional oscillations exacerbated by the death of loved ones, an awareness of
being eternally vulnerable by reason of being female, and the horror of two
world wars. Sexual apprehension was one of her largest stumbling blocks, but
rather than allowing this personal difficulty to limit her literary scope of
inquiry, she doggedly pursued her sexual demons throughout her thirty years as
a professional writer. The result of this battle is a set of beliefs that
anticipate modern feminist ideology. Woolf begins with an intensely personal
terror and discovers its origin in the world around her. In doing this she
brings to the surface many things that had previously remained hidden. From the
depths of the ocean to the mists of time, Woolf locates her fears, names them,
and brings them out for public inspection. To paraphrase E.M. Forster’s famous
saying, Woolf uses the light of the English language to push against the
darkness of her sexual apprehension.
Death and the Maiden: Disposing of the past in The Voyage Out
Like
many first novels, The Voyage Out bears a heavy biographical burden. In its
terrified and revolted treatment of sexual relations, it reflects the abuse its
author had suffered at the hands of her stepbrothers. In its portrayal of
Rachel Vinrace as absurdly sheltered and undereducated and thus at a perpetual
disadvantage, it dramatizes the gender biases that the young Virginia Stephen
so resented. Before she became Virginia Woolf, Virginia Stephen spent many
years preparing to venture into the realm of the novel. She refined her craft
through journalism and short stories, evolved from a dependent to a free agent
with the death of Leslie Stephen and the marriage of Vanessa, and with the
intellectual and emotional support of the Bloomsbury circle, she was able to
take the voyage inward that was necessary for The Voyage Out.
The
saga of Virginia Woolf’s childhood trauma at the hands of her Duckworth
half-brothers, which may have begun as early as 1888 and continued as late as
1904,[2][2] was originally revealed by Woolf in her
essay “A Sketch of the Past” and has been frankly related by Quentin Bell and
subsequent biographers. References to her unpleasant experiences are a
recurring feature of her diaries and letters, and “22 Hyde Park Gate,” her most
famous account of George Duckworth’s abuse, was published together with other
autobiographical writings in 1976.[3][3] The sexual aspect of her marriage to
Leonard Woolf is slightly more obscure, although it is generally assumed that
Leonard’s decision that Virginia should not bear children implies a resolve to
refrain from sexual intercourse.
It
is impossible to say with certainty to what degree Woolf’s future difficulties
with heterosexual relations were caused by Gerald and George. The incident with
Gerald when Virginia was a small child, as described in her 1939 essay “A
Sketch of the Past,” did not seem to provoke such an intense negative reaction
as later episodes with George. She describes, in language far more direct than
is usually found in her fiction, the upsetting but not entirely unusual
occurrence of a young child’s body being used to further the knowledge of a
much older child. Gerald Duckworth was probably aged sixteen to eighteen at the
time, rather old for such dubious experiments according to our modern
standards, but given the sexually repressive atmosphere of Victorian and
Edwardian England it does not seem improbable that his sexual development would
be approximately equal to that of a fourteen-year-old today. Gerald’s behavior
was inappropriate and exploitative, but it is not terribly atypical.
My
aim here is to distinguish between the offensive behavior of Gerald Duckworth
and the later, multiple and more complicated transgressions of his elder
brother. Woolf herself does not attempt to attribute her sense of body shame to
Gerald’s adolescent groping; rather, she cites the incident as evidence that “a
feeling about certain parts of the body; how they must not be touched; how it
is wrong to allow them to be touched; must be instinctive.”[4][4]
The
behavior of George Duckworth, on the other hand, goes far beyond any normal
sexual impulse and verges on psychological aberration. His unabashed invasion
of a realm of young womanhood that is typically sacrosanct within the family
unit extended much further than the surreptitious fondlings at bedtime. Indeed,
Woolf notes that George created the setting for his unsavory conduct when he
paid for the renovations that put Vanessa and Virginia into separate
bed-sitting rooms.[5][5] All the elements of his conduct suggest a
well-laid plan to control the existence of his half-sisters in every situation,
from the brightly lit ballroom to the darkness of the renovated night nursery.
It
is the nonsexual aspects of George Duckworth’s abuse that were often referred
to in the conversation and correspondence of Vanessa and Virginia, not the actual
incidents of illicit physical contact. It is impossible to say with certainty
whether this indicates a shared trauma so deep that they were not able to
discuss it even in the privacy of their letters, or whether the physicality of
the incidents paled in comparison to their psychological context. This much is
certain: George Duckworth’s abuse made Virginia feel victimized in ways that
transcended the physical. His power over her was derived from the heightened
status automatically conferred on males, and Virginia was helpless to defend
herself when he chose to abuse his masculine authority.
How
violent a trauma George Duckworth’s misdeeds precipitated at the time is
impossible to say, but it is obvious that the memories of coerced social
engagements and constant pressure to dress and act in a way that ran contrary
to her personality were imbued by Virginia with life-damaging venom. Woolf
biographer Hermione Lee points out in her most recent book that the actual
facts of George’s abuse may be less important than reality as his victim
perceived it: “…Virginia Woolf herself thought that what had been done to her
was very damaging. And to an extent, her life was what she thought
her life was. She used George as an explanation for her terrifyingly volatile
and vulnerable mental states, for her inability to feel properly, for her
sexual inhibition…”[6][6]
It
does seem probable that all the unpleasantness with George created two of the
most powerful forces in Woolf’s sexual life – a need for autonomy and an affinity
for female intimacy. Her early infatuations with women seem far less sexual
than those that took place after her marriage. Friends such as Madge Vaughn and
Violet Dickinson provided affection, security and a certain element of romantic
thrill, but these relationships seem more directed towards fulfilling
Virginia's desires for maternal affection and intellectual validation than to
providing an outlet for eroticism. Female “crushes” gave Virginia the
excitement of infatuation without any danger of violation or attempts to gain
control over her actions. Women were simply not in a position to abuse her as
George had.
If
the psychological framework of The Voyage Out owes much to the specters
of Woolf’s childhood, its plot deals mainly with concerns arising from her
young adult life. As Melambroysia, it was begun in 1908 by Virginia
Stephen, a young lady of twenty-two residing with her brother Adrian at No. 46
Gordon Square, Bloomsbury; as The Voyage Out, it was submitted for
publication in March of 1913 by Mrs. Leonard Woolf of Clifford’s Inn, Fleet
Street. Many events of Woolf’s life during the writing of the novel found
expression therein. As this was the period of her flirtation with Clive Bell,
the proposal of Lytton Strachey, and her courtship by and marriage to Leonard
Woolf, it is hardly surprising that a large portion of the novel’s
autobiographically based material deals with issues of courtship and
problematic sexual awakening.
Virginia
Stephen did not become the wife of Leonard Woolf until August 1912, when she
was thirty years old and had spent many years safely independent from any
rapacious male, Duckworth or other. The self-conscious destruction of ancient
taboos brought both Vanessa and Virginia into great intimacy with several of
the most famous homosexuals of the early twentieth century. These years in the
company of the “Bloomsbury buggers” continued the healing process begun by
friendships such as the one with Violet Dickinson. Although Virginia was
evidently celibate during this time, sexuality was an important element in the
interactions of the Bloomsbury circle. Virginia’s years of spinsterhood were
not passed in a cloister. In the years between her move to Gordon Square and
her marriage to Leonard, she had several suitors whose intentions were serious
(although hers were not), rejected more than one marriage proposal, and became
romantically entangled with two men who were to be important to her for the
rest of her life – Clive Bell and Lytton Strachey.
There
is much about the idea of marriage to a brilliant homosexual that might appeal
to a shy, sexually confused young woman. Lytton Strachey would have provided
intellectual companionship without making any threatening physical demands.
Bell believes this to be Virginia’s primary motive for accepting Lytton’s
proposal rather than any of those she had received from heterosexual men: “She
had always been, as she was later to admit, a sexual coward and her only
experience of male carnality had been terrifying and disgusting. But she did
want to be married; she was twenty-seven years old, tired of spinsterhood, very
tired of living with Adrian and very fond of Lytton.”[7][7]
Leonard
Woolf returned from Ceylon in June of 1911 intrigued with the idea of the
intellectual, virginal Miss Stephen that Strachey had encouraged him to pursue.
It took Virginia four and a half months to determine that she loved Leonard
Woolf and accept his proposal of marriage, but having decided, she never gave
any indication of having second thoughts. Certainly, a woman who had already
experienced two serious episodes of mental breakdown would not have put herself
under the protection of anyone she did not trust completely. Despite the
terrible violations of trust committed, George Duckworth, it seems, did not
succeed in destroying Virginia’s ability to place her confidence in men.
There
is, however, a world of difference between confidence and passion. Virginia was
cruelly honest about her lack of physical attraction towards Leonard - “when
you kissed me the other day… I feel no more than a rock.”[8][8] Her decision to marry him in spite of
this lack, which her nephew and biographer Quentin Bell praises without
reservation as “the wisest decision of her life,” clearly indicates that she did not consider erotic affinity a necessary ingredient
for a happy union.
Leonard
may have felt that Virginia would learn to enjoy sex over the course of time,
and certainly she was cheerfully willing to attempt the act, but they returned
from their honeymoon having succeeded in nothing but the mechanical aspect of
intercourse. A consultation with Vanessa yielded no useful advice: she could
say only that Virginia “never had understood or sympathized with the sexual
passion in men.”[9][9] There is no evidence to indicate that
Virginia’s frigidity in the marriage bed was ever ameliorated, and while this
was understandably a lifelong source of frustration for Leonard, Virginia does
not seem conscious of any lack in her married life.
Bell,
who had the advantage of familial intimacy with all three parties, believes
that it was at the beginning of the Woolf’s marriage that the specter of the
night nursery was called up to account for Virginia’s frigidity – “Vanessa,
Leonard and, I think, Virginia herself were inclined to blame George
Duckworth.” Bell acknowledges that George “certainly had left Virginia with a
deep aversion to lust,” but seems convinced that much of her lack of physical
passion was an innate personality trait: “I think that the erotic element in
her personality was faint and tenuous… she regarded sex, not so much with
horror, as with incomprehension.”[10][10]
There
may have been something lacking on Leonard’s side as well. Clive Bell claimed
in a letter to Mary Hutchinson that Leonard had failed in the most fundamental
of sexual initiation rites: “Wolf [sic] fucks her once a week but has not yet
succeeded in breaking her maidenhead. They have been married six years. It
gives her very little pleasure.”[11][11] (Clive had obvious reasons for unfairly
disparaging Leonard’s sexual prowess – he had, after all, succeeded where Clive
had been completely rebuffed.) However strong Virginia’s ambivalence about sex,
six years of weekly intercourse without breaking her hymen does not fit any
definition of inspired lovemaking. If we accept Clive’s assertion as truth,
Woolf’s lack of interest in heterosexual relations suddenly seems far less
surprising.
Virginia
Woolf (née Stephen) continually revised The Voyage Out as her
perceptions altered and her realm of experience expanded. Between 1908 and 1915,
she drafted at least seven versions of the novel,[12][12] made substantial revisions in galley
proofs, and revised yet again for the American edition in 1919. One scene in
particular, wherein Rachel and Terence come upon a couple in the throes of
passion, was altered in a rather telling manner after Miss Stephen became Mrs.
Woolf.
The
Voyage Out tells the story of Rachel Vinrace, a young woman of
twenty-four, as she struggles to achieve identity and adulthood. Anyone who has
read Quentin Bell’s biography of Woolf will immediately recognize her
reflection in Rachel Vinrace. Raised primarily by two maiden aunts after the
death of her mother, Rachel is exceptionally naïve about men. She is not
frigid, but her complete inability to understand her sexual drives results in
emotional chaos that precludes her enjoying romantic or physical intimacy. In
this first novel, Woolf explores issues so personally painful to her that the
act of writing became self-destructive. Many of the distressing incidents of
own her youth – the loss of her mother, an education far inferior to that of
her male peers, extreme difficulty in relating to the opposite sex – are
inflicted on her female protagonist. The Voyage Out functions as an
exorcism of sorts; Woolf is relating a worst-case scenario of what may befall a
young woman facing the same obstacles as Woolf did herself.
Rachel
Vinrace fails to complete her journey into womanhood, dying of a mysterious fever
two weeks after her engagement to Terence Hewet. Virginia Stephen, on the other
hand, was courted and wed by a man who would respect her need for independence
and yet provide the intimacy and companionship that seemed to her the primary
benefits of marriage. Virginia Woolf may have succeeded where Rachel Vinrace
foundered, but she remained closely identified with her heroine, to the point
where writing about Rachel’s delirium and death precipitated bouts of madness
in Woolf herself.[13][13]
In
its subject matter, The Voyage Out is a very conventional novel in that
it explores the well-trodden territory of courtship. However, the relative
conventionality of the plot line is complicated by the atmosphere of terror
that Woolf creates both on the high seas and in her imaginary tropical
paradise. Woolf draws heavily on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in
creating her version of the South American jungle. Like Conrad’s Congo, Woolf’s
South America is a dark and dangerous place, perilous to the sanity of the civilized
man. However, Woolf replaces Conrad’s civilized man with a young woman and
makes sexuality the jungle’s chief symbolic peril. Her descriptions of the wild
environment are primarily intended to represent sexual terrors. In both cases,
however, the menacing wilderness is not simply a literal place but an
externalization of the true heart of darkness, which exists in the depths of
the human soul.
Chief
among Woolf’s tactics is the recurring imagery of drowning. Throughout the
novel, Rachel repeatedly imagines herself submerged in dirty or deep water
during every moment of sexual tension. These visions are always ominous - witnessing a kiss between her aunt and
uncle provokes a vision of “wrecked ships… the burrowings of eels… the smooth
green-sided monsters who came flickering this way and that.”[14][14] As Rachel’s sexual experiences shift
from observation to action (a central part of the coming-of-age process), her
visions of water become progressively more terrifying.
Rachel
is first introduced to physical passion aboard her father’s ship, when Richard
Dalloway, a married passenger much older than she, concludes a platitude on the
“inestimable power” of a young and beautiful woman by giving her a very
enthusiastic kiss: “he kissed her passionately, so that she felt the hardness
of his body and the roughness of his cheek printed upon hers. She fell back in
her chair, with tremendous beats of the heart, each of which sent black waves
across her eyes.”[15][15] Rachel’s reaction indicates intense
physical arousal – it may also suggest suffocation.
This
passage is the only such encounter where Rachel’s reaction makes any sense to a
modern reader of normal sexual proclivity. Her reaction is very intense, but
not inappropriate for a twenty-four year old woman getting her first experience
of passion under such surprising and improper circumstances. Recovering from
the first shock of the experience, Rachel enters another emotional state that
resonates – “She became peaceful too, at the same time possessed with a strange
exultation. Life seemed to hold infinite possibilities that she had never
guessed at… something wonderful had happened.[16][16] This initial reaction is quickly
diminished: “At dinner, however, she did not feel exalted, but merely
uncomfortable…”[17][17] Retiring for the evening, she dreams of
a long damp tunnel opening up into a vault inhabited by a demented and deformed
man; waking, she “felt herself pursued, so that she actually got up and locked
her door. A voice moaned for her, eyes desired her. All night long barbarian
men harassed the ship; they came scuffling down the passages, and stopped to
snuffle at her door. She could not sleep again.”[18][18]
Rachel’s
irrational sexual anxiety springs not from a lack of interest in physical
intimacy, but from a fear of where such interest might lead. DeSalvo suggests
that Rachel’s nightmare is prompted by guilt – that her sheltered upbringing
has conditioned her to believe that women’s physical passion is responsible for
creating a complementary drive in men.[19][19]
This opinion is problematic at best – if Woolf viewed reciprocal passion
between the sexes as something to be universally avoided rather than as her own
particular failing, such an idea does not reappear in her later novels. In
Rachel’s final delirium, the nightmare of the damp tunnel and the barbarian men
will recur, demonstrating that she has failed to work past this trauma. Whether
or not she feels responsible for inciting male passions, her terror of them is
incurable.
When
Rachel turns to Helen for advice, Helen compounds the problem by her
unwillingness to provide the information that might have allayed Rachel’s
apprehension.
Helen really was at a loss what to say. From the little she knew of Rachel’s upbringing she supposed that she had been kept entirely
ignorant as
explain what these are. Therefore
she took the other course and belittled the entire affair.[20][[21]20]
Helen’s
failure to provide Rachel with the facts of life is a critical moment in
Rachel’s sexual awakening. Her advice to “think no more about it” is the first
instance of a pattern that will recur throughout the novel. Rachel is unwilling
to let the matter drop, vowing that “I shall think about it all day and all
night until I find out exactly what it does mean.” She is profoundly confused,
and Helen’s primary concern is to convince her niece to dismiss as trivial
feelings that she cannot even comprehend, much less evaluate. Helen’s attitude
increases Rachel’s sense of being besieged by an incomprehensible force.
Woolf
uses this conversation not to characterize the relations of men with women as
irretrievably disgusting and terrifying, but more to illustrate the terrible
potential for damage when a young woman has no resources for information and
explanation when first confronted with sexual passion. Helen’s gravest mistake
is to assume that the passion in Richard and Rachel’s encounter was all on the
man’s side. At this point it is Helen, not Rachel, who is denying the
pleasurable part of female sexuality. Helen’s characterization of male sexual
passion is perhaps the most directly derogatory statements ever made by Woolf
on the subject. Directly after assuring Rachel that her experience is “the most
natural thing in the world,” Helen proceeds to categorize physical passion as
merely another irritating corollary of physical existence.
Men will want to kiss you, just as they’ll want to marry you. The pity is to get things out of proportion. It’s like
noticing the noises people make
when they eat, or men spitting; or, in short, any small thing that gets on one’s nerves.[22][21]
Another
damaging omission on Helen’s part is her failure to point out to Rachel the
difference between the feelings that will make men want to kiss and marry her
and those directed towards the prostitutes in Piccadilly. This distinction may
be so clear to Helen that she does not think to mention it, or it may be that
she herself sees romantic and commercial sexuality as essentially the same
thing. Whatever her intent, this lack of explanation only worsens Rachel’s
inability to reconcile her enjoyment of the embrace with her fear of being
victimized.
…Rachel did not return her 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 hedged-in thing,
driven cautiously between high walls, here turned aside, there plunged in
darkness, made dull and crippled for ever -
ehs ecnahc ylno eht saw taht efil reh .secnelis owt neewteb nosaes trohs eht – dah
“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.[23][22]
Having
thus inauspiciously begun the process of sexual maturation, Rachel decides to
leave her father’s ship and sojourn with Helen and her husband on Santa Marina,
an imaginary island off the South American coast. Their villa is quite near a
hotel, which provides Rachel with a microcosm of middle class English society
in which she attempts to present herself as an adult. Certainly this in an
improvement on her cloistered life with her aunts in Richmond or her literal
isolation from society aboard her father’s ship, but sexuality remains her
pitfall. The fears that Helen failed to allay will fester into an ultimately
destructive neurosis concerning sex and men.
Rachel’s
bad luck in companionship continues when she meets Terence Hewet, the man who
will become her fiancé. Outwardly, Terence seems to have led a far more normal life
than Rachel. His experience contrasted with her naïveté leads the reader to
hope that he will disabuse Rachel of her association of physical passion with
violence and degradation. Unfortunately, Terence himself has reached no
satisfactory conclusions about either women or sexual relations. Like Helen, he
covers a profound incomprehension of what passionate relations should be with a
veneer of sophisticated dismissiveness. This is highlighted in Chapter XI, when
Rachel and Terence accidentally observe Arthur and Susan in a passionate
embrace.
This
scene is one of many that where the original draft takes a far different tone
than the version that actually made it into print:
They beheld a man and woman
beneath them, pressed in each other’s arms.
They rolled slightly this way and that, as the embraced tightened and
slackened. Then Susan pushed Arthur away, and they saw her head laid back upon
the turf, the eyes shut, and a queer look of pallor upon
it, as though she had suffered and must soon suffer again. She did not seem
altogether conscious, which affected both Hewet and Rachel unpleasantly. When
Arthur began butting her as a lamb butts a ewe, they turned away. Hewet looked,
half shyly at Rachel, and saw that her cheeks were white.
“Oh how I hate it –
how I hate it!” she cried to him.
“Yes” he
said. “It’s odd how terrible that seems, until one gets used to it. But you
know, you must get used to it, because if you don’t you will exaggerate its
importance.”[24][23]
"Here's shade," began Hewet, when Rachel suddenly stopped dead. They saw a man and woman lying on the ground beneath them, rolling slightly this way and that as the embrace tightened and slackened. The man then sat upright and the woman, who now appeared to be Susan Warrington, lay back upon the ground, with her eyes shut and an absorbed look upon her face, as though she were not altogether conscious. Nor could you tell from her expression whether she was happy, or had suffered something. When Arthur again turned to her, butting her as a lamb butts a ewe, Hewet and Rachel retreated without a word. Hewet felt uncomfortably shy. "I don't like that," said Rachel after a moment."I can remember not liking it either," said Hewet. "I can remember--" but he changed his mind and continued in an ordinary tone of voice, "Well, we may take it for granted that they're engaged. D'you think he'll ever fly, or will she put a stop to that?"[25][24]
The
early version of the scene is a very strong echo of Rachel’s conversation with
Helen following Richard Dalloway’s kiss. Terence, like Helen, is primarily
interested in persuading Rachel to dismiss sexual passion as trivial. DeSalvo
characterizes his positively – “Terence can console Rachel because he can speak
knowingly of the terror of physical love.”[26][25] However, Rachel herself does not
consider sexual passion trivial in the least - she is violently upset by it.
Terence’s exhortation that she “must get used to it” does more harm than good.
His advice reinforces Helen’s, and neither of them are consoling to Rachel in
the least.
The
final published version[27][26] of this passage seems in a way to have
obeyed the command of Helen and Terence – Rachel has dampened her violent
reaction against physical passion without gaining any useful information on the
subject. She may be saying “I don’t like that” instead of screaming “Oh how I
hate it!,” but her fundamental terror of “it” is has in no way been
addressed. Terence’s reaction is
likewise moderated from preachiness to virtual apathy, with no increase in
meaningful substance. The narrator’s description of their feelings as they
observe the embracing couple also retreats from the intensity of the drafted
version.
What
prompted Woolf so to mute Rachel’s reaction? According to DeSalvo, many other
of the alterations made between the first and final versions of The Voyage
Out were prompted by her fear that she had revealed too much of herself in
the character of Rachel Vinrace.[28][27] Was this her object here? If we consider
The Voyage Out a primarily autobiographical effort, this seems a
plausible explanation. However, it seems to me that while Woolf drew heavily on
her own experience in constructing Rachel’s history, she did not identify with
Rachel entirely or exclusively. The Voyage Out is related by an
omniscient narrator who moves effortlessly from character to character, and
while much of the reader’s time is spent inside Rachel’s head, the
points-of-view of Terence, Helen and several other characters give us a
critical perspective on Rachel.
DeSalvo
sees Rachel and Virginia as coequal, a state of affairs that would obligate
Woolf to reveal certain details in order to paint an accurate psychological
portrait of herself. If, as it
seems to me, Woolf did not regard Rachel Vinrace as merely a
fictional manifestation of her own personality, her editorial choices become
much more difficult – and interesting – to explain. In the course of writing The
Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf had sorted out her own feelings regarding
male/female sexual relations to the point where she felt ready to marry. She
was sure enough of her position to tell her prospective husband flat out, “I
feel no physical attraction in you.”[29][28] Woolf did not resolve the question of
sexual passion positively; however, she seems to have evolved from a confused
girl crying “Oh how I hate it!” to a woman stating quietly but decisively “I
don’t like that.”
To
what extent Rachel’s experience with Terence reflects Woolf’s experiences with
Leonard, Lytton Strachey or Clive Bell is impossible to determine. Hermione Lee
does describe Leonard Woolf’s attitude towards sexual relations in a manner
that suggests Terence Hewet: “… his youthful attitude towards women was very confused.
His jokes to Lytton about the squalor of copulation and the disgustingness of
his whores in Ceylon (to whom he refers with a mixture of boastfulness and
evasiveness), alternated with scornful remarks about the degradation of falling
in love with a nice colonial girl with ‘big cow eyes which could never
understand anything which one said.’”[30][29]
Terence
and Rachel’s peculiar courtship continues, culminating during a trip upriver to
explore a primitive village. This trip into the heart of the jungle is
perceived as dangerous by some of their countrymen, and dangerous it turns out
to be. The lush jungle atmosphere as described by Woolf is a profoundly
destabilizing force, an environment that according to Hirst “makes one awfully
queer” and, with prolonged exposure, threatens to drive the English travelers
“raving mad.”[31][30]
While
Helen and Hirst remain safely at the water’s edge, Rachel and Terence venture
together into the forest. They start on a convenient path that “resembled a
drive in an English forest,” but this comforting familiarity proves to be an
illusion. Woolf continues her water theme in the depiction of the forest, where
“the noises of the ordinary world were replaced by those creaking and sighing
sounds which suggest to a traveler in the forest that he is walking at the
bottom of the sea.”[32][31] Struggling against their mutual
inability to “frame any thoughts,” Terence makes a heroic attempt at a marriage
proposal, hampered by the fact that neither he nor Rachel can conceal their
profound anxiety at being in such a position:
“Does
this frighten you?” Terence asked when the sound of the fruit falling had completely died away.
“No,”
she answered. “I like it.” She repeated “I like it.” She was walking fast, and holding
herself more erect than usual. 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. Their steps unconsciously quickened.
“We
love each other,” Terence said.
“We love each other,” she
repeated. [33][32]
Genuine
as Rachel and Terence’s affection may be, this exchange is fraught with denial.
Terence’s initial question – “Does this frighten you?” is met with a response
that flatly contradicts Rachel’s earlier reaction as an observer of Arthur and
Susan. The radical shift from “I don’t like that” to “No… I like it… I like it”
seems forced rather than spontaneous, the product of a desperate embarrassment.
Their frantic rush along the path, while “he did not seem to be speaking and
she did not seem to be hearing,” produces the strong impression that Rachel and
Terence are both attempting to escape an awkward circumstance encountered on
the street, feigning obliviousness and quickening their gaits as though pursued
by an importunate beggar. Inevitably, whatever may be chasing them catches up
and
simultaneously they
stopped, clasped each other in their arms, and dropped to the earth. They sat
side by side…
“We love each other,”
Terence repeated, searching into her face. Their faces were both very pale and
quiet, and they said nothing. By degrees she drew close to him, and rested
against him. In this position they sat for some time…
“Terrible – terrible,” she
murmured after another pause…[34][33]
Rachel
experiences one brief instant of victory over her sexual apprehension in the
form of her quite proper romantic embrace with Terence, but the experience is
deeply draining. The quietness of her response to Terence’s kiss as opposed to
Richard Dalloway’s is not a positive sign; rather, her “white cheeks” and “very
tired” bearing indicate that her anxiety has turned inward, taking the form of
physical and intellectual debilitation. She has ceased to ask questions and to
try to comprehend her problem. Later, she and Terence will recall this incident
with difficulty, establishing the occurrence only by remembering that they had
“sat upon the ground.”[35][34]
Voices crying behind them never reached through the waters in which they were now sunk. The repetition of Hewet's name in short, dissevered syllables was to them the crack of a dry branch or the laughter of a bird. The