The Voyage Out

Helen takes Rachel under her wing, becoming a role model and mother figure to the younger woman, exposing her to more mature understandings of the world. Rachel’s privilege has kept her sequestered in ignorance. Her musical whims have been nurtured at the expense of any sensible real-world education. Therefore, at 24 years old, Rachel is immature. She has a belated sexual awakening thanks to the kiss with Richard Dalloway, and because this awakening comes late in life and without any context, she exaggerates the significance of the kiss. Helen intervenes because she wants Rachel to be rational about her emotions. It is a dangerous thing to be an ignorant woman in a misogynistic and patriarchal society. Helen wants Rachel to be more mature so that she can live better and more confidently in the world around her. The voyage therefore becomes a bildungsroman for Rachel, in which travel and new experiences facilitate a period of Self-Discovery, a process of learning about the world, about her desires, and about what kind of person she wants to be. Notably, Rachel’s education lies mostly in music; as a woman, no one in her family deemed it necessary to educate her further than the basics. Helen offers Rachel real-world experience as a form of education, but she couples this hands-on education with literature. Woolf champions books as a method of independent learning. Through literature, Rachel starts connecting with the human experience. She discovers that there are experiences she’s never known, but she experiences them second-hand through the power of literature. What’s more, the feelings expressed in her novels tap into her own dormant emotions. She starts thinking about herself as a human being and starts wondering more about other human beings. Literature teaches her empathy for herself and for others. Thus, Woolf uses the form of the novel to reveal how important novels are to the formation of the human being. In The Voyage Out, literature is not a replacement for real-world experiential learning—rather, literature inspires Rachel to be more open to real-world experiential learning.

Woolf deposits Rachel, Ridley, Helen, and William Pepper on a fictional island in South America called Santa Marina, allowing her to explore and satirize Colonialism and the Concept of Civilization. The fictitious setting enables Woolf to generalize about the people and environment of South America without being confined by actual history and geography. South America is a notable place for English people to be in the early 20th century because, unlike most of the rest of the world, South America was largely unsettled by English imperialists. At the time of the novel, England had a single South American colony in British Guiana, on the northwestern coast of the continent, though in the 1600s they had also briefly occupied neighboring Suriname. Strikingly, Suriname under British rule was called Willoughbyland, after an English Baron who shares a surname with the fictional Willoughby who owns the Euphrosyne. England did not further colonize South America mostly because it didn’t need to; the British Empire was flourishing on every other continent in the world. What’s more, the Portuguese and the Spanish crowns arrived in South America first, and fighting a war with either of these governments for South America was not beneficial for England. Some of this history is summarized in the opening of Chapter 7, as the Euphrosyne arrives in the port of Santa Marina.

The scarcity of English people in South America in the 20th century helps to explain why the English people in Santa Marina would find each other so quickly and try to make their mini-community work. Because the fictional Santa Marina is a small outpost of little political or historical significance to England, it functions in the novel as an idyll defined by its natural beauty and its distance, both literal and figurative, from England. In Santa Marina, everything is foreign to the English. The weather in Santa Marina, unlike in England, is warm and sunny. The people in Santa Marina, unlike in England, are Catholic. Thus, both the physical setting and the cultural setting of Santa Marina are exoticized through difference. There is plenty for the English people to learn from, such as the flowers and the people. Notably, and predictably, they don’t interact too much with the locals, but they watch the locals and learn, in some cases for the first time, that ways of living different from their own exist. At the core of Woolf’s satire is the degree to which, even in the midst of all this newness and natural splendor, the English people are consumed by the lives that await them back home in England. The English characters in Santa Marina are endlessly inventive in coming up with ways to ignore the world around them while focusing on the England in their minds. They check the news of England and think about home, knowing that their responsibilities and perceived real lives are still on the other side of the Atlantic.

When a large, new group of English tourists arrives, their presence complicates the novel’s social world and introduces new sources of tension and discovery into the lives of the central characters. Most of the English people staying in Santa Marina are strangers to each other, and the close quarters and perceived hostility of the environment around them leads to surprising moments of Human Connection Through Forced Proximity. Two young men, Hirst and Hewet, are foreshadowed to be potential suitors for Rachel. One young woman, Susan, is in the throes of a burgeoning love affair with another Englishman in the hotel, Arthur. Susan Warrington is the typical English woman. She wants only one thing in life: marriage. At 30 years old, Susan worries that she’s too old and unattractive for marriage. However, her voyage is not only to Santa Marina; it is also to a new chapter in her future. Outside of the social norms of courtship in England, she and Arthur can get to know one another through sharing a formidable and exciting experience abroad. Arthur and Susan fall in love and plan an engagement, emphasizing the importance of such relations. Rachel witnesses them in a passionate embrace and becomes embarrassed, emphasizing her immaturity. She’s disgusted by affection, revealing that she has never experienced affection herself. Rachel is an adult, but she acts like a child in the face of any sign of sexuality or romance. Susan presents a foil to Rachel. Unlike Rachel, Susan is worldly and has internalized her society’s expectations of marriage. Unlike Rachel, Susan is eager to experience love and sex and excited to share her life with a man whose love she believes in.

Helen and Ridley recognize some of the English people staying in this hotel, revealing that the British social aristocracy is an incredibly small group. If Helen and Ridley don’t know the entire company through meeting in London, they know them by name. Thus, even in a remote place like Santa Marina, the English are not free of their ties to home and are not anonymous. They flock together in a foreign space for comfort and community. The introduction of a group of relative strangers into Rachel and Helen’s life in Santa Marina is a plot development that helps develop Rachel and Helen’s characterization. The new group of friends provides Helen with new stimulation and presents Rachel with the potential to learn how to connect with others. As much as Rachel is learning through reading, without the introduction of new and similar enough people, Rachel’s character cannot develop in isolation of society.