Colonial Rhetoric and the Maternal Voice: Deconstruction and Disengagement in Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2000 by Nick Montgomery

EMBARKATION/EXTRICATION

The very title of The Voyage Out asks to be listened to and interrogated. As an announcement of what is to follow, it stipulates a movement from an inside to an outside, a passage through or across boundaries, while leaving the nature of the voyage, the place of departure, and the destination obscure. In fact, the definite article, affirming the singularity of the journey, seems the most stable and solid element of the title. Out is a sweeping deictic gesture toward what Homi Bhabha calls the "beyond" (26), [2] indicating everything that is not "in" and activating all of the epistemological implications and problems of the opposition inside/outside. Boundaries to be traversed, the reader might suppose, could include those between home and the wider world, between interiority and exteriority, between known center and exotic periphery, or perhaps between the patriarchal establishment and some other, oppositional space.

The title also suggests a setting forth into language, the initiation of the author into the public domain of literary production (it was Woolf's first novel), and the embarkation of the reader into the unknown terrain of the text, voyages that could be seen as acts of colonization as well as inauguration. In addition, the title implies a potential voyage back to complete the project, the protagonist returning perhaps transfigured and enriched, to the overall aggrandizement of the inside and the impoverishment of the outside. The fact that the novel confounds this lurking expectation and withholds the voyage back is one measure of its engagement with the rhetoric of colonialism and the discursive mechanisms of empire, indicating that the outward movement has not merely been an exotic, voyeuristic, or therapeutic sortie in pursuit of the rejuvenation of the paternal word, but a more permanent evacuation from that dominant rhetoric. Once out, we remain out. In this sense, the novel is an act of extrication.

The actual process of embarkation is interestingly handled by Woolf. The somewhat stilted and disjointed small talk between the characters includes some significant remarks about "putting things off" and the difficulty of setting out. Ridley Ambrose confesses to having a "weakness for people who can't begin" (10), while the rapid changes of conversational topic, the interruptions, the unfinished sentences, and the dashes and dotted lines suggest not only what Lucio Ruotolo describes as a "dynamic of disjunction" (99) [3] but also the problem of embarking on the fictional project itself. The value of setting out, the very fact of movement and of extrication from a paralyzing social and cultural tradition, would seem to be symbolized by the image of London as seen from the river. To Rachel it "seemed dreadful that the town should blaze forever in the same spot . . . a circumscribed mound, eternally burnt, eternally scarred . . . a sedentary miser" (11). Her impression of the city at once suggests the relentles s, combustible activity of patriarchal capitalism and its intrinsically self-consuming, self-defeating processes.