"My Boldness Terrifies Me": sexual abuse and female subjectivity in The Voyage Out

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1995 by Diana L. Swanson

This incident also reveals the father's complicity in abuse, that is, Willoughby's neglect of his daughter, his failure, like Leslie Stephen, to protect his daughter from sexual abuse. As her parent he is responsible for her safe passage into adulthood and through sexual hazards; but the abuse occurs on his own ship, just as Virginia's abuse occurred in her father's house.(10) Rachel's dream resembles a dream or vision that Virginia Woolf herself had had repeatedly and described in a letter to Ethel Smyth as concerning "that end of a drainpipe with a gibbering old man" (Letters 4:297-98). The letter to Ethel connects the drainpipe scene to George and Gerald Duckworth and to being "exposed" by them, that is to being forced to go with them to society parties at which she felt terrible humiliation and shame. This dream also concerns an analogous kind of "exposure" to which Woolf was subjected against her will: the sexual violation by the Duckworth brothers. The beastlike face of the threatening man in the dream resembles Woolf's description of George: "If you looked at him closely you noticed . . . that though he had the curls of a God and the ears of a faun he had unmistakably the eyes of a pig" ("22 Hyde Park Gate" 166). Again, "his face was sallow and scored with innumerable wrinkles, for his skin was as loose and flexible as a pug dog's" (172).

The image of men with beastlike faces surfaces again in The Voyage Out, through allusion. Rachel's "fever" is ushered in by the invocation to Sabrina, the virgin goddess of the river in Milton's Comus, read aloud by Terence. The central theme of Comus is virginity, which becomes the metaphor for virtue, temperance, and godliness. The story told in Comus concerns the perilous journey of three siblings, the Lady and her two brothers. The "trial" of "their youth,/Their faith, their patience, and their truth" in the Lady's case consists of attempted rape, in her brothers' of rescuing her (11. 970-71). By alluding to Comus Woolf indirectly points up the horrible disjunction between public emphasis on female chastity and private sexual exploitation, a disjunction she lived with every day of her life in the Stephen household, where the Victorian ideal of the pure, redemptive influence of woman was worshipped while incestuous abuse went on in secret.(11)

Milton describes Comus as a male Circe who tempts travelers through his forest to drink from his "Crystal Glass," upon which

their human count'nance, The express resemblance of the gods, is chang'd Into some brutish form of Wolf, or Bear, Or Ounce, or Tiger, Hog, or bearded Goat, All other parts remaining as they were. (69-72)

Then they

all their friends and native home forget, To roll with pleasure in a sensual sty. (76-77)

Comus, finding the Lady separated from her brothers and lost in the forest, deceives her into following him to his hall, where he tries to cajole and threaten her into drinking from his cup. When she tries to leave, Comus replies that with a wave of his (phallic) wand he can render her motionless, "a statue; or as Daphne was,/Root-bound, that fled Apollo" (661-62). He is clearly attempting to rape her, as his reference to Daphne and Apollo indicates. The Lady's outcry against his betrayal might have been Virginia Stephen's against the men in her family: