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

When Richard Dalloway goes on to assert that "no woman" has "statesmanship," or "the political instinct" (58), he commits himself to another, rather more self-evident tautology (namely that women do not advertise attributes in themselves that have been prohibited, that they are outside of something into which they have not been admitted), but this also has the effect of spurring Rachel into a more coherent and forward-looking elucidation of the "machine" of the state than Richard himself was able to muster: "Under the streets, in the sewers, in the wires, in the telephones, there is something alive; is that what you mean?" (58). In Rachel's formulation, Dalloway's grotesque organism-as-screw figure modulates into something more like a ghost in the machine, anticipating the virtual spaces and the rhetoric of intersections and networks typical of modernity and postmodernity. Whereas his imagery dwells on the mechanics of industrial production, evoking the "thumping" of steam engines, she looks to the revolutio n in communications, particularly imagining the new acoustic technologies for the long-range transmission of language and the human voice.

Steven Connor has suggested how the development of the telephone contributed to a conceptual reconfiguration of space, its simultaneous "immensification" and collapse, leading to the paradoxical experience of a remote intimacy, along with the increasing familiarity of the virtual space of a switchboard, inhabited by a spectral operator (211). [6] Certainly there is a more sophisticated spatialization of the imperial machine in Rachel's description, with its sense of the subterranean and overhead dimensions and the multiple technologies involved in sustaining, connecting, and modernizing a global empire. There is also, though, a strong hint of the sentient, suggesting the monstrosity of the intelligent and self-serving machine. The phonemic patterning and the parallelism of phrase vocalize a concealed anxiety about the momentum and acceleration of this technological revolution. This sense of a monstrous, entropic potential is more explicitly articulated later, when Rachel expresses the belief that "the world might change in a minute and anything appear" (132).

In Jacob's Room, Woolf more fully registers the potentially alienating properties of new acoustic technology, the "distancing and exteriorization" that introduce "absence, spacing and exorbitance into the voice" (Connor 217):

And the telephones ring. And everywhere we go wires and tubes surround us to carry the voices that try to penetrate before the last cards are dealt and the days are over. 'Try to penetrate,' for as we lift the cup, shake the hand, express the hope, something whispers, Is this all? (Jacob's Room 80)

While Woolf here sees something affirmative in the will to communicate, the insistence of the phrase try to penetrate also suggests the invasiveness of acoustic technology, its destabilization of the inside/outside opposition, while the image of encirclement by "wires and tubes" implies captivity, hinting at the general pervasiveness of the auditory and the peculiar vulnerability of the ear. The sinuous and stealthy proliferation of acoustic technology, juxtaposed with the finite and fleeting "days" of the human subject, here seems to suggest something malign and sinister about the living machine invoked earlier by Rachel Vinrace.