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

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

Rachel has learned not to feel anything strongly, certainly not to try to express or communicate strong feeling.

To Rachel, her conclusion that it is better not to try to come to an understanding of other people

was very welcome. Let these odd men and women - her aunts, the Hunts, Ridley, Helen, Mr. Pepper, and the rest - be symbols . . . symbols of age, of youth, of motherhood, of learning, and beautiful often as people upon the stage are beautiful. It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for. Reality dwelling in what one saw was felt, but did not talk about, one could accept a system in which things went round and round quite satisfactorily to other people. . . . Absorbed by her music she accepted her lot very complacently, blazing into indignation perhaps once a fortnight, and subsiding as she subsided now. (37)

Rachel lives in a distanced, disassociated confusion reminiscent of Woolf's cotton wool of nonbeing, unable to grasp the reality of what goes on around her and why, what other people feel or want, or why she feels as she does or what she wants. This kind of numbed, alienated mode of existence often signals and results from childhood abuse, especially sexual abuse. The conclusion of this chapter of The Voyage Out underscores the danger in which Rachel is placed by the failure of those responsible for her education. Shortly after Rachel decides to let other people be symbols, Helen enters Rachel's room to find her asleep in her chair. Gazing at Rachel, Helen muses that "lying unprotected she looked somehow like a victim dropped from the claws of a bird of prey, but considered as a woman, a young woman of twenty-four, the sight gave rise to reflections" (37).

Rachel comes to occasional moments of clarity in the midst of the fog in which she lives, however, moments which correspond to her occasional feelings of indignation. In these moments, she moves toward feminist insights into her social/sexual position as a woman. Early in the novel, for example, Rachel meets Richard Dalloway on board her father's ship, and finds him an impressive and engaging figure. In part, he represents a rare opportunity for her to expand her narrow view of the world; she is fascinated to hear about his childhood, his family, his political theories. In part, he and his wife, Clarissa, are the first people to speak to Rachel as another human being, with an interest in getting to know her. (Helen only approaches Rachel after seeing her becoming intimate with Mrs. Dalloway, motivated at least in part out of jealousy of Clarissa.) Rachel decides "to take the chance he gave her" to communicate and does "her best to recollect and then to expose her shivering private visions" (65-66). Like the young Virginia, Rachel feels that trying to articulate and communicate views of her own means becoming extremely vulnerable, means "exposing" them so that they "look so shivering and naked." In a sense it means undressing oneself. Such "boldness" can only be "terrifying."