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

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

Rachel at least for a moment perceives that indeed, for her, her body is the source of all life and that the weight of her entire world (the church fathers represented by Mr. Bax, political fathers represented by Mr. Dalloway, the abusive sexual system represented by Mr. Dalloway and by Evelyn, who has just told Rachel about a sexual assault she experienced, and the complicit mothers and aunts represented by Mrs. Paley) is bent on repressing her body and therefore her life. Rachel can find no way through the despair, disgust, and isolation she feels as a result of this perception, and when she sees her Aunt Helen come to take tea at the hotel, "the dust again began to settle," blurring her intense, clear vision of the world (259).

Rachel needs desperately and tries repeatedly to articulate and analyze her feelings and perceptions in order to develop a meaningful view of life, to make sense of her experiences by seeing how they fall into patterns, conditioned by social and political values and customs. Like Woolf, she believes that the "moments of being," that is the moments of clarity that pierce the cotton wool of daily life, "will become a revelation of some order," will reveal "that there is a pattern hid behind the cotton wool." For Woolf, her writing formed her way to pursue this revelation, to make things "real" and "whole," "to put the severed parts together" ("A Sketch" 72-73). For Rachel, "that was what music was for."

But even in this mode of pattern-making Rachel is frustrated: in the two instances in the novel in which we see Rachel creating a shape with her piano, she is interrupted. On shipboard one morning, while Rachel "string[s] the notes [of a fugue] together, from which rose a shape, a building," Mrs. Dalloway enters her room and "the shape of the Bach fugue crashed to the ground" (57). Later, in South America, Rachel climbs "up and up the steep spiral of a very late Beethoven sonata" while Terence Hewet, now her fiance, repeatedly interrupts. When Rachel complains, Terence admits that he has been purposely trying to stop her playing, saying, "I've no objection to nice, simple tunes - indeed, I find them very helpful to literary composition, but that kind of thing is merely like an unfortunate old dog going round on its hind legs in the rain" (292). Upon Terence's suggestion, Rachel ends the morning writing replies to notes of congratulation about their engagement while he reads a novel. Terence's actions belie his avowal that "he liked the impersonality which [music] produced in her," the moods in which she became "quite forgetful of him" (291). Terence in this way is as traditional as Rachel's father (or Virginia's); he wants Rachel's energies and thoughts to revolve around him, wants her to be the enabling background music to his accomplishments.

Because Rachel meets active obstruction of her attempts to systematize rather than verification of her perceptions, because she has no "knowledge-validation community,"(7) her repeated attempts to theorize her experiences fail. She continues to live in a fog or at times "a haze of feverish red mist" (258). Not being able to make a pattern of meaning out of her life leaves her the victim of her own emotions and her (apparently) repressed memories of abuse, unable to name them.