The Voyage Out

Helen Ambrose is the wife of Ridley Ambrose, who is Rachel Vinrace’s uncle. Helen appreciates her married life and loves her children, but a bout of depression in London motivates her and Ridley to embark on a months-long voyage to South America. Riding in a cab through the London streets to embark on the Euphrosyne, Helen sees her city as a dismal, crowded scene of poverty and thwarted lives. The implication is that she has felt this way for some time, that the trip, for her, is a last-ditch effort to break the spell. It works, and almost as soon as the Euphrosyne sets sail, Helen is in high spirits, studying her traveling companions with interest and joking about her worry that the nanny will try to turn her children into Christians in her absence. Helen is notably beautiful and well-liked because she is able to converse on a variety of topics with diverse people. But Helen also has very specific ideas about the world around her. She is disturbed when she discovers how childish Rachel is and encourages Rachel to grow into her womanhood. Helen has the wisdom of a long marriage and motherhood, but she also craves privacy and time to read and think on her own—something she gives to the young Rachel in a gesture that is strongly suggestive of Woolf’s famous essay “A Room of One’s Own,” published 15 years after The Voyage Out. She is a maternal figure to Rachel and is a leader in her household. Helen is well-educated and smart. She appreciates art and intellect but understands the value of real-life experience. Her friendship with Hirst highlights her ability to nurture other people on their journeys.

Terence Hewet is a young Englishman and aspiring novelist. Unlike his friend St. John Hirst, Hewet is kind, compassionate, and genuinely interested in other people. As a novelist, he carefully observes and considers human emotions and experiences. He likes being around other people and is a good companion and friend. Hewet falls in love with Rachel because of her earnestness—he sees that she is on a journey of Self-Discovery, and he identifies with how seriously she takes this process. He appreciates her for her distinct looks, her deep thoughts, and their conversation. Hewet struggles with the idea of marriage. Like Rachel, he wants enter adult life with his eyes open, and he fears passively accepting the prescribed forms of middle-class English life, doing things merely because other people do them. Early in his courtship with Rachel, he tries to imagine what their married lives will be like, and his mind sees a husband dashing out of the house, seeking happiness away from his wife, who has become oppressive to him. Even worse is a second vision, in which a husband and wife converse with a friend, casting secret, judgmental glances between them, each reassuring the other that they are right. Married couples either grow apart, becoming strangers to each other, or they grow too close together, reinforcing each other’s prejudices and cutting each other off from the rest of the world. Ultimately, he believes in his feelings. This quality of his character, above all, is what connects him to Rachel. He trusts that, because he loves her, he will be able to have a marriage with her that is different from the conventional marriages he has seen. Later, after they become engaged, both Rachel and Hewet have a brief crisis in which they worry that the reality of their marriage will not live up to their ideals. As soon as they decide to break it off, they realize that they can’t do so: Their love for each other supersedes all other concerns. Hewet’s life is turned upside down when Rachel falls ill and dies. He realizes that he didn’t appreciate his happiness with Rachel when he had it.

St. John Hirst is Terence Hewet’s friend, another young Englishman in Santa Marina for adventure. Hirst is obsessively intellectual. He was raised in a privileged household that prized intellectual achievement as a specifically masculine quality. As a result, he harbors misogynistic attitudes, believing that women are naturally incapable of understanding literature, philosophy, and history. But his intellect has prevented him from understanding human connection. Hirst is easily annoyed with other people and grows frustrated with the dearth of conversation he believes other people are capable of. His sexism leads him to dismiss Rachel as an impossible person to befriend because as a woman, he believes, she can’t keep up with his conversation. He demands that she read Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, explicitly stating that this is a test of her capabilities. Initially, Rachel feels intimidated by this test and genuinely believes that her inability to enjoy the book means that he is right about her. Later, Hirst’s misogyny proves a useful foil for Rachel—a way for her to define her own preferences by recognizing what she doesn’t like.

Hirst’s sexist and elitist attitudes bely a deep well of insecurity. He fears that other people stereotype him as a cold, unfeeling intellectual. He is physically frail and suffers from rheumatism, and as a result he fears that he is unattractive to women. He dismisses others to pre-empt their dismissals of him. He becomes besotted with Helen because of her beauty and her capacity for conversation but also because—since she is a married woman 20 years his senior—there is no possibility of a genuine romance between them and he therefore doesn’t need to fear rejection. Hirst knows that people don’t like him, but he wants to be liked. He tries to be kinder to other people, taking Hewet’s advice about pursuing human connection. Hirst is transformed by his friend’s relationship with Rachel. Even though he believes that they’ll fall out of love with one another, his lack of faith in the durability of human relationships threatens to get in the way of his development, so he congratulates and supports his friend. Rachel’s death and the grief that surrounds it teach him the importance of human connection.