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

Once the Euphrosyne is at sea, there is a "long interval of constraint and silence" (15) signaling a shift in the register, substance, and continuity of conversation. Replacing the trivial and disjointed exchanges that had gone before, Mr. Pepper begins a sustained "discourse, addressed to nobody," describing "the great white monsters of the lower waters . . . which would explode if you brought them to the surface," introducing a primordial otherness that Woolf will explore in more detail in the South American sequences. Echoing the start of Marlow's narrative in Heart of Darkness, Mr. Pepper adopts the posture of a Buddha with his "arms encircling his knees" (15-16), further establishing the colonial theme by explaining how he was "condemned to pass the susceptible years of youth in a railway station in Bombay" (18). Presently, all of the passengers follow Helen Ambrose onto the deck to discover that the "ship was out in a wide space of sea." They realize that they are "free of roads, free of mankind" (20), and the process of extrication, for novelist as well as characters, has begun.

THE IMPERIAL MACHINE

To be on the inside of the British Empire, the novel suggests, means to be an organism within a machine, to be, in other words, the subject of a mixed metaphor. Richard Dalloway provides an explicit, if inadvertent, exposition of this paradoxical and unstable predicament during his patronizing catechism of Rachel Vinrace in chapter 4 of the novel:

I can conceive of no more exalted aim--to be the citizen of the Empire. Look at it in this way, Miss Vinrace; conceive the state as a complicated machine; some fulfil the important duties; others (perhaps I am one of them) serve only to connect some obscure parts of the mechanism, concealed from the public eye. Yet if the meanest screw fails in its task, the proper working of the whole is imperilled. (57)

Immediately before this, though, Dalloway has insisted that a "human being is not a set of compartments, but an organism." The imperial subject, therefore, in the formulation of a declared agent of empire, is an organism performing the function of a screw in a machine. Rachel's attempt to visualize this hybrid rhetorical aberration, the human subject, a "lean black widow, gazing out of her window," fused together with the "vast machine" of which she is a component, collapses into the onomatopoeic registration of mechanized sound, the "thumping, thumping, thumping" of a machine "such as one sees at South Kensington." (57)

For Rachel Vinrace, then, the empire becomes an aberrant metaphor that dissolves into the intrusive alterity of throbbing, industrial noise. And this trope, once on the move, is difficult to stop. The pulse of the machine, imagined by Rachel, reverberates like the beat of a heart, so that the machine itself is like an organism, and conversely, the human subject like a machine. The word thumping reverberates like the sound it describes, referring back to itself in an apparent closed circuit. But a thump can also be a blow, an act of aggression against the person, so that the noise of the machine becomes an assault on one of its own "obscure parts," striking at the organism that animates and infests it, through the delicate membrane of its ear. And this antagonism between automaton and human, the impulse of the former to attack and purge itself of the latter, accurately describes the unsustainable relationship between the industrial-imperial complex and its constituent subjects. The brutality and alienation of the industrial process, its travesty of human rhythms and social practices, is concealed from view but is heard nonetheless. (Woolf frequently describes the experience of the human subject in the modern world in terms of delicate membranes and concussive "sledge-hammer" blows, notably in "A Sketch of the Past" [78]).