The Voyage Out (59 page)

[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.… Mrs Woolf’s vision may be inferior to Dostoieffsky’s—but she sees as clearly as he where efficiency ends and creation begins, and even more clearly that our supreme choice lies not between body and soul, but between immobility and motion. In her pages, body v. soul—that dreary medieval tug-of-war—does not find any place. It is as if the rope has broken, leaving pagans sprawling on one side and clergymen on the other.…

The writer can sweep together masses of characters for our amusement, then sweep them away; her comedy does not counteract her tragedy and at the close enhances it, for we see that the Hotel and the Villa will
soon be dancing and gossiping just as before, that existence will continue the same, exactly the same, for everyone, for everyone except the reader; he, more fortunate than the actors, is established in the possession of beauty.

From
Daily News and Leader
, April 8, 1915

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Admitting the vagueness which afflicts all criticism of novels, let us hazard the opinion that for us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide. Nevertheless, we go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the vision in our minds. So much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting out the light of the conception. The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love, interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this.” Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in
the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.

• • •

The problem before the novelist at present, as we suppose it to have been in the past, is to contrive means of being free to set down what he chooses. He has to have the courage to say that what interests him is no longer “this” but “that”: out of “that” alone must he construct his work. For the moderns “that,” the point of interest, lies very likely in the dark places of psychology. At once, therefore, the accent falls a little differently; the emphasis is upon something hitherto ignored; at once a different outline of form becomes necessary, difficult for us to grasp, incomprehensible to our predecessors.

• • •

“The proper stuff of fiction” does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss. And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.

From “Modern Fiction,” in
The Common Reader
, 1925

KATHERINE ANNE PORTER

Almost everything has been said, over and over, about Virginia Woolf’s dazzling style, her brilliant humor, her extraordinary sensibility. She has been called neurotic, and hypersensitive. Her style has been compared to cobwebs with dew drops, rainbows, landscapes seen by moonlight, and other unsubstantial but showy stuff. She has been called a Phoenix, Muse, Sybil, a Prophetess, in praise, or a Feminist, in dispraise. Her beauty and remarkable personality, her short way with fools and that glance of hers, which chilled many a young literary man with its expression of seeing casually
through a millstone—all of this got in the way. It disturbed the judgment and drew the attention from the true point of interest.

• • •

Virginia Woolf was a great artist, one of the glories of our time, and she never published a line that was not worth reading.

• • •

The world of the arts was her native territory; she ranged freely under her own sky, speaking her mother tongue fearlessly.

From “Virginia Woolf,” in
The Collected Essays and
Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter
, 1970

W. H. AUDEN

I do not know how Virginia Woolf is thought of by the younger literary generation; I do know that by my own, even in the palmiest days of social consciousness, she was admired and loved much more than she realized. I do not know if she is going to exert an influence on the future development of the novel—I rather suspect that her style and her vision were so unique that influence would only result in tame imitation—but I cannot imagine a time, however bleak, or a writer, whatever his school, when and for whom her devotion to her art, her industry, her severity with herself—above all, her passionate love, not only or chiefly for the big moments of life but also for its daily humdrum “sausage-and-haddock” details—will not remain an example that is at once an inspiration and a judge.

From “A Consciousness of Reality,” in
Forewords and Afterwords
, 1973

1. Do you consider Rachel Vinrace a sympathetic character? Why or why not? Discuss Michael Cunningham’s reading of her as “an engine of perception.”
   
2. Critics have compared
   The Voyage Out
   to Jane Austen’s novels, since both involve marriage plots. In what ways are they similar? Different?
   
3. Both Susan Warrington and Rachel receive marriage proposals in Santa Marina. Compare the attitudes each has toward marriage. How is each woman’s social predicament different?
   
4. In his Introduction, Michael Cunningham writes that it was Woolf’s conviction that “what’s important in a life, what remains at its end, is less likely to be its supposed climaxes than its unexpected moments of awareness, often arising out of unremarkable experience, so deeply personal they can rarely be explained.” Consider this notion in light of Rachel’s character. What moments of awareness does Rachel experience? Compare her moments of awareness with those of another character, for instance, Helen Ambrose. What similarities or differences can you draw from the comparison?
   
5. Discuss the significance of the novel’s title. To which “voyage” do you think it refers?
   
6. In Chapter XVIII, Terence considers the sacrifices women must make in marriage. He then resolves that Rachel, if she will marry him, will be “free, like the wind or the sea.” In what ways does his later behavior indicate this may not be the case?
   
7. Why, ultimately, do you think Rachel dies? What effect does her death have on the novel’s structure?
   
8. In her essay “Modern Fiction,” which she published a decade after the publication of
   The Voyage
   Out, Woolf writes, “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” To what extent do you think
   The Voyage Out
   adheres to this vision?
   

T
HE
M
ODERN
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IBRARY
E
DITORIAL
B
OARD

Maya Angelou
•
Daniel J. Boorstin
•
A. S. Byatt
•
Caleb Carr
•
Christopher Cerf
•
Ron Chernow
•
Shelby Foote
•
Stephen Jay Gould
•
Vartan Gregorian
•
Charles Johnson
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Jon Krakauer
•
Edmund Morris
•
Joyce Carol Oates
•
Elaine Pagels
•
John Richardson
•
Salman Rushdie
•
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
•
Carolyn See
•
William Styron
•
Gore Vidal