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

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

The Voyage Out is about the struggle of a young middle-class British woman, like Virginia Stephen, to become a person, and her defeat by the socio-sexual forces of British society. Woolf's first novel is her first major articulation of her experience as a patriarchal daughter and her understanding of woman's place in upper-middle-class British society. As such it is also a story of sexual abuse and its implications for female subjectivity. That Rachel's upbringing and education are presented as typical of her class underscores Woolf's understanding and critique of "normal" female socialization as abusive and deadly. Rachel's fate bears out Virginia's feeling, expressed in the early stages of writing The Voyage Out that "a painstaking woman who wishes to treat of life as she finds it, and to give voice to some of the perplexities of her sex, in plain English, has no chance at all" (Letters 1:381). For Virginia the point of writing her novel was that "it represents roughly a view of one's own." The central problem of the novel concerns Rachel's struggle to find and develop her own view of the world, to become a subject rather than an object of desire.

Christine Froula makes a related argument in "Out of the Chrydalis." She reads Woolf's quest in this novel as an attempt to write "a reformed female initiation plot that would lead her heroine not only toward love and marriage but also to an identity in history and culture" (66). Froula compellingly demonstrates that "Rachel finds that she can become herself only by becoming a warrior" and joining in the "battle between women's desire to be subjects in history and culture and a social world that 'depends' upon their compliant silence" (68, 66). Froula also, as I do, considers Rachel's battle much the same as Woolf's and sees this novel as Woolf's crucial "attempt to bring into being a self who did not yet exist, her own artist-self" (68). Froula shows how The Voyage Out bears witness to the dangers of this battle and the vulnerability of the young female artist who has no supportive mothers to think back through and no workable cultural forms or language. In the following pages I discuss Rachel as a more general figure for the daughter in patriarchy, not only the young female artist, and her struggle as the daughter's quest for an effective and self-creative subjectivity, not only the female artist's struggle for literary language, form, and authority.

The plot, in brief, goes as follows. The novel begins with Rachel's voyage to South America on her father Willoughby Vinrace's steamship, along with her aunt and uncle, Helen and Ridley Ambrose. Richard and Clarissa Dalloway join them for part of the voyage. When the ship arrives in South America, Rachel stays with Helen and Ridley in a villa on the coast, while her father continues on his business trip. Helen and Rachel become involved in the life of the English hotel in the coastal town and Rachel becomes engaged to one of the Englishmen, Terence Hewet, during a voyage up the local river into the jungle. Several weeks later, Rachel is stricken by a fever and dies.