The Voyage Out

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Log in or sign up to add this lesson to a Custom Course. Login or Sign up. Sometimes, authors' lives are almost as interesting as the work they produce, and Virginia Woolf's life is a tremendous example of this. As a woman writing in the early 20th century, Woolf offers a unique voice that speaks both to her own fascinating life and to the historical moment in which she was writing.

Woolf was born in in London, and throughout her life she had the opportunity to surround herself with London's elite thinkers. She began writing early and published her first novel, The Voyage Out , in She would go on to write numerous novels, short stories, and works of nonfiction. Throughout her life, Woolf suffered from nervous breakdowns and depression, and in , having filled her jacket with stones, Woolf drowned herself in a river.

Although Woolf's work hasn't always been popular, it has remained an important part of the 20th-century literary cannon, particularly with regards to feminist literature.

The Voyage Out

The end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century brought about the birth of philosophy and science that challenged how people traditionally understood the world. These changes, combined with the human capacity for evil that was displayed during WWI, resulted in many artists believing that it was necessary to disregard traditional art forms and philosophies and to attempt to create new and revolutionary works of art. This revolutionary movement came to be known as modernism. Modernists were eager to experiment and attempted to complicate reality and how we believe that we understand reality.

Woolf's own work reflects many of the ideals of the modernist movement. Her narration is defined by its stream-of-consciousness quality; rather than having a fixed narrator with a fixed perspective, Woolf goes in and out of the minds of different characters, making unexpected connections that are not always clear or necessarily rational.

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This feature of her writing allows her to produce stories that are less driven by the plot than by the beauty of the minute details that make up the experience of life. Because The Voyage Out employs stream-of-consciousness narration, there is no fixed narrator. The novel centers on the experience of a year-old woman named Rachel Vinrace as she travels from London to South America in a boat.

Once on board, Rachel and her family meet other passengers, and a series of conversations ensue that reveal the complexity of human relationships. For example, as another passenger named Richard Dalloway, the husband of Clarissa Dalloway, gets frustrated by his inability to communicate with Rachel, the reader discovers the ways in which each character's assumptions influence and dictate what is communicated. As the novel progresses, Helen and Rachel become closer and the boat eventually reaches Santa Marina.

Rachel soon meets Terence and they begin a close relationship. At one point, Terence and Rachel explore the island and begin to talk of their future plans, which results in the two beginning to ponder a more permanent relationship. The group then takes a trip up a local river and visits a local village, which symbolically allows Woolf to further explore the ways that people encounter the world around them. Rachel and Terence soon begin to talk of love and marriage.

When Rachel returns from the trip, she is increasingly consumed by the thought of marriage but soon becomes ill. Rachel then dies as a result of her illness, and the novel ends with a storm and the sounds of people coming and going. One of the most interesting and influential aspects of The Voyage Out is the way that it reflects the inner workings of the mind.

One way Woolf depicts the complexity of thought is through dreams, which appear throughout the work.

Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out: Summary & Analysis

These dreams reflect the ways in which consciousness is created by demonstrating the strange and unpredictable connections the mind makes between ideas, images, and people. This quality of the narration, moreover, allows Woolf to show the beauty of seemingly mundane events. This theme of consciousness, however, also speaks to the greater theme of the interconnectedness of individuals.

Throughout The Voyage Out , the ideas, motives, and emotions of the characters are shown to be intertwined and difficult to separate, despite the clear social conventions that the characters adhere to. The way that wealthy characters, for example, treat those of a lower class is shown to be in contrast to the reality of the nuances within the relationships and the thoughts that the characters experience.

This blurring of individuals, moreover, also speaks to the novel's complication of gender roles, one of the most important aspects of the novel. Throughout the work, the assumptions that the characters have concerning gender are constantly disrupted and complicated. The men, for example, frequently assume that Rachel is naive and incapable of in-depth conversation.

Yet ironically and humorously, there are many times in the novel when it is the men who are seen as simple-minded and incapable of seeing things as they actually are. This paradoxical aspect of The Voyage Out reflects both Woolf's feminism and the feminism throughout much of her other works; both in her works of fiction as well as non-fiction, Woolf portrays the problematic gender roles that men and women enact and the ways that this influences society.

Woolf lived from to and wrote modernist works that have played a significant role in the feminist literary studies of the last half of the 20th century. The Voyage Out , published in , was Woolf's first novel and tells the story of Rachel Vinrace's experiences with a group of people who travel on a ship to South America.

The story employs Woolf's famous stream-of-consciousness narration, which allows her to connect small details in unexpected ways. This aspect of connecting unexpected ideas and emotions helps Woolf to challenge how we experience reality, a quality of her text that demonstrates the ideals of modernism. To unlock this lesson you must be a Study. Login here for access.

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Want to watch this again later? Forster described it as " Here at last is a book which attains unity as surely as Wuthering Heights , though by a different path. Literary scholar Phyllis Rose writes in her introduction to the novel, "No later novel of Woolf's will capture so brilliantly the excitement of youth.

Personally, I'd like to go on for a hundred years Think of all the things that are bound to happen! From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The Voyage Out Cover of the first edition of A Life of Virginia Woolf , p.

About Rebecca Beatrice Brooks

Forster, as quoted in Majumdar, op. A Biography Roger Fry: Retrieved from " https: Views Read Edit View history. This page was last edited on 21 February , at

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