Modern Language Studies
EXPLORING WOMEN: VIRGINIA WOOLF'S IMPERIAL REVISIONS from THE VOYAGE OUT to MRS. DALLOWAY Author(s): ASHLEY NADEAU and UMASS AMHERST Source: Modern Language Studies, Vol. 44, No. 1, VIRGINIA WOOLF (SUMMER 2014), pp. 14- 35 Published by: Modern Language Studies Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24616749 Accessed: 28-10-2019 13:28 UTC
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Maisie Johnson stumbles across Septimus and Rezia Smith in the Regent's Park segment of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), she is given the fright of her life. Watching them, "[She] positively felt she must cry Oh! (For that young man on the seat had given her quite a turn. Something was up, she knew.) Horror! horror! she wanted to cry. (She had left her people; they had warned her what would happen.) Why hadn't she stayed at home? she cried, twisting the knob of the iron railing" (MD 26-27; emphasis added). Despite the incongruous fact that the speaker here is a young Scottish woman recently arrived in London for work, Maisie Johnson's cry of "Horror! horror!" immediately calls to mind the famous last words of Joseph Conrad's Kurtz.1 In this scene, and in the rest of the Regent's Park section, Woolf'sWoolf s novelnovel engages Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) sonically and thematically to startling effect. Maisie's experience of being lostlost andand confusedconfused in in the the park park mirrors mirrors Marlow's Marlows disorienting voyage into the jungle, and the disquieting sensation Maisie experiences at the realization of her people's warnings matches Marlow'sMarlows remorseremorse forfor undertaking his nightmarish journey. The foreign figure of Rezia, along with the old and ill lolling on Bath chairs in the park, further underscores the allusion to Conrad's work as Maisie's first impression of the city distantly echoes Marlow'sMarlows own discomfortdiscomfort atat thethe earlyearly image image of of
This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:28:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms the slumping, half-dead slaves beneath the trees.2 travels" (Mclntire 271), the women of the novel are Unlike Marlow, however, Maisie is not venturing into fixed in domestic spheres and are unaware of the the depths of colonial space. Instead, she has moved exploitative capitalism at the heart of colonialism. to London, the metropole of the English empire. Despite (or perhaps because of) their roles as wives Traveling to London from the semi-peripheral and mothers—the dispatchers of their colonizing Scotland,3 Maisie is shocked to discover that she could men—the women of Heart of Darkness are blocked know so little about the capital. Despite a shared from a full knowledge of the imperial system by the membership in the British Empire, the people of spatial disjunction outlined in Jamesons work and Regents Park are complete others to Maisie, and she remain unconscious of their entanglement in imperial realizes her estrangement from "her people." By systems of oppression. imagining them in this possessive, differentiated way, By placing Maisie Johnson in Marlows role, Maisie highlights her dissimilarity and the great Virginia Woolf addresses this dilemma of spatial distance she feels between her home and the metropole; disjunction through a re-articulation of the compli her sudden alienation reveals that prior to this journey cated ways in which women are connected to, complicit she was unconscious of the breadth of empire. Maisie s in, and subversive of empire. Complicating the fixed naiveté in this scene expresses what Fredric Jameson relationship of women and empire represented in points out is at the heart of imperialism: a spatial Heart of Darkness, Woolf explores the ways in which disjunction that results in a "systematic block on any class, sexuality, and marital status alter this intersec adequate consciousness of the structure of the imperial tion, and she offers her female characters the possibility system" (Jameson 50), where the periphery is unimag of resisting their role as naive dispatchers or repro inable to the metropole and vice versa.4 This inability ducers of male agents of empire. To do this, Woolf to grasp the totality of the imperial system is the focuses on the fixity and naiveté of Kurtz's Intended dilemma that Fredric Jameson argues is "the formal and her position as an unmarried woman, and she contradiction, that modernism seeks to solve" (51). revises this figure, first through Rachel Vinrace in For Jameson, the project of modernism is to negotiate The Voyage Out (1915), and later through Maisie the experience of empire and the gaps in global Johnson and Elizabeth Dalloway in Mrs. Dalloway. knowledge it produces. While scholars have established a relationship Extending and elaborating on Jamesons argu between Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, and ment, Gabrielle Mclntire notes that one's knowledge Conrad's plot,6 and while they have noted the con of, and relationship to, empire is specific to one's nections between Mrs. Dalloway and Heart of identity. In her reading of Heart of Darkness, Mclntire Darkness,7 they have neglected how women, specif notes that while the men are free to roam the empire, ically, mediate Woolf's allusions to Joseph Conrad.8 the women of the novel are moored in either the Particularly significant are the ways in which both of metropole of Brussels, like Kurtz's "Intended" bride, Woolf's novels draw upon Heart of Darkness in order or in the periphery of the Dutch African colonies, to recast women in the role of the roving colonial like the "barbarous and superb woman" by the river explorer. However, scholars have yet to fully explore (Conrad 83). In this text, knowledge of empire is this trope and read Woolf's The Voyage Out and Mrs. divided along gender lines, and Mclntire points out Dalloway s shared deployment of the exploration that the isolation of women functions to preserve for theme as a continued project of testing potential them the "saving illusion" of a benevolent colonialism.5 female subversion of imperial patriarchy. This essay Though "crucial for sending off the men on their posits that Rachel, Maisie, and Elizabeth are not
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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:28:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms separate echoes of Conrad's protagonists and their response to empire, and she presents her characters journeys; they are continued revisions on the theme with the faint opportunity for resistance. of women, imperial space, and knowledge. As young In representing Rachel, Elizabeth, and Maisie as women on the cusp of marriage, their lives parallel colonial explorers, Virginia Woolf anticipates Jameson each other and Kurtz's Intended, though these new and Mclntire, and she demonstrates the centrality of daughters of empire are not trapped in the drawing questions of space in plotting the individual's rela rooms of the metropole. Each new iteration of the tionship to empire. In both novels, the acquisition of young woman figure is an expansion of possibilities, the knowledge of one's place within the imperial and Woolf s women become increasingly mobile and system is figured as a sexual awakening, and this is knowledgeable in response to the previous generations represented by a physical or symbolic move between limited horizons and limited choices as Woolf sounds the metropole and the periphery. This movement is the limits of imperial patriarchy. inflected both by Woolf s developing modernist style Central to these revisions of Kurtz's Intended is and through the revision of Kurtz's Intended. While an exploration of the conditions for women's resistance The Voyage Out employs the tropes of the bildungs to empire and, particularly, the sexual reproduction roman and the romance adventure in order to address empire requires. In general, Woolf s work is consis the distance between metropole and periphery,11 the tently interested in marriage and maternity as a more mature Mrs. Dalloway employs a modernist constitutive force of empire and in the development play of space, time, and simultaneity to answer the of alternate female possibilities.9 By specifically problem of spatial disjunction. As Woolf's work focusing on young, unmarried women in her revision develops and becomes increasingly modernist, the of women's relationship to imperial space and power, center and periphery are drawn closer together. While Woolf is able to test female possibility at its climax, Rachel must voyage across the Atlantic to gain before marital and familial obligations take their toll. knowledge, Maisie and Elizabeth Dalloway can move As an early exploration of these themes, Rachel throughout the city of London and experience a Vinrace is limited in her relationship to empire because layering of colonial and metropolitan narrative spaces her only option for her future is marriage, of which and times.12 the primary object in the early twentieth century But this shift in spatial representation is significant would have undoubtedly been the imperial "repro not just for its indication of Woolf's stylistic devel duction of the race."10 Because of this paucity of opment: it also throws into relief the ways in which options, Rachel is equally limited in possible responses Woolf's literary resistance to imperial patriarchy is and resistance to this role. In Mrs. Dalloway, the more invested in a subversion of patriarchy than in intersection of the young woman and empire is a subversion of empire. As Gayatri Spivak bemoans, multifaceted and ambivalent, and it is greatly deter "It seems particularly unfortunate when the emergent mined by class position and ethnic identity. perspective of feminist criticism reproduces the axioms Furthermore, the close of the First World War had of imperialism" (243). Despite Woolf's gestures in begun to open new possibilities and professions for Three Guineas (1938) towards a transnational bond women outside of motherhood, and this is reflected between women in their subjection,13 Woolf's literary in the multiplicity of female roles in the novel. In revisions of young women as colonial explorers depicting two young women—the dark and orien nonetheless reproduce the axes of imperial power tal-looking Elizabeth and her foil Maisie—Woolf and exclude the native female from the feminist displays more than one possible position within and individualist project14—first, through the employment
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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:28:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms of the native woman as a voiceless foil to Rachels Woolf s and Rachels simultaneous interpellation into awakening, and second, through an elision, absorption, adult sexuality and the British Empire.15 and distortion of the colonial subject in Maisie and One of the earliest echoes of Heart of Darkness Elizabeth's exploration of London as métonymie in The Voyage Out arrives in the form of Richard empire. In Woolf s modernist compression of imperial Dalloway's version of the "saving illusions" that space, figurative interactions with empire replace Marlow s aunt and Kurtz's Intended hold dear. Seeking direct ones, and racial alterity is uncritically deployed companionship and guidance on the deck of as a flag of female empowerment. Ultimately, Woolf s Euphrosyne, Rachel reveals to Mr. Dalloway that she exclusion of the colonial subject in her efforts to grant "know(s) nothing!" and hopes that he will talk to her her young female characters an escape from imperial about his world. But rather than initiate Rachel to his patriarchy suggests two possibilities. First, that Woolf political ideas, Dalloway explains to her that it is "far too is hampered by the spatial disjunction of empire better that you should know nothing." He states: she seeks to rectify, and that her own position as an upper-middle class and metropolitan female imperial "I never allow my wife to talk politics," he said subject inhibits her knowledge and perspective of seriously. "For this reason. It is impossible for empire; and/or second, that Woolf actively negotiates human beings, constituted as they are, both to and even participates in imperialist rhetoric in order fight and to have ideals. If I have preserved mine... to purchase an alternative relationship to patriarchy it is due to the fact that I have been able to come for a particular set of women. This essay seeks to map home to my wife in the evening and to find that Woolf s exploration of the threads that bind young she has spent her day calling, music, play with women in imperial patriarchy and the potential for children, domestic duties—what you will; her freedom from these ties, and it further endeavors to illusions have not been destroyed." (VO 62; explore who remains on the periphery of Woolf's emphasis added) project for female liberation. Woolf begins her exploration of the connection Like the Kurtzes of the world, Richard Dalloways between colonial knowledge, women's sexual repro imperial ideals are kept intact because he keeps the duction, and their position within empire in her first realities of empire attached to these ideals hidden novel, The Voyage Out. In this novel, Woolf directly from his wife. Clarissa Dalloway is a woman of responds to the fixity of Kurtz's Intended with a woman illusions, who can view two British warships on the who can travel and gain knowledge of the "other open water and marvel at their stateliness and exclaim world." The novel follows Rachel Vinrace, chronicling how glad she is to be English without noticing the her sexual awakening as it unfolds during her journey "sinister" quality and "sadness" that the narrator across the Atlantic and reaches its climax deep in the attaches to them. Clarissa never questions why the jungle. This voyage from England to South America warships are there or why they might be needed; she (and from naiveté to womanhood) is plotted along does not negatively associate the hostile purpose and the same lines as Marlows journey up the Congo, and presence of the ships with her experience of empire. the venture leads Rachel to a Kurtz-like revelation and Instead, she acts the hostess at dinner and entertains her subsequent death. Tracing the course of Rachel's her fellow passengers by reciting poetry about valor, transformation from girlish ignorance, as Richard never acknowledging the violence attached to that Dalloway puts it, to the adult rite of being engaged, valor.16 As Erica Johnson points out, in Rachel's we can follow both the echo of Conrad's novel within conversations with Richard Dalloway, "Woolf shows
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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:28:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms how the British man's prerogative to colonize the conversation with Richard Dalloway on the deck of world and to carve up geographical boundaries stems the ship. After identifying Rachel's ignorance about from his creation of concomitant domestic boundaries what he means by love,17 Dalloway continues the based on career, class, and educational boundaries at discussion of politics and her education in the machine home" (69). These parallel boundaries—between of empire in her room, a space that, were they not on metropole and periphery, domestic and political—that a ship, would not under normal circumstances be govern the life of the Dalloways are the same divisions available for private meetings between middle-aged that mark Conrad's text and imprison the Intended. administrators and upper-middle class young women. Rachel, as an echo of the Intended, begins the This private lesson in empire culminates with Richard novel as closed off and contained. When Dalloway telling Rachel that she has the world at her feet and attempts to explain the imperial system to Rachel— with him kissing her passionately. Though Rachel has despite his earlier protestations against female a girlish attraction towards Dalloway, the kiss frightens knowledge—she cannot imagine the whole, or the her: "Her head was cold, her knees shaking, and the "Unity," that he identifies as a fundamental to imperial physical pain of emotion was so great that she could progress. He tells her to "Look at it in this way, Miss only keep herself moving above the great leaps of her Vinrace; conceive the state as a complicated machine; heart" (VO 73-74). we citizens are parts of that machine" (VO 63). Rachel, By tying together Rachel's possession of the whole in response, tries to imagine the role of a single woman world with the sexual feelings of the passionate in the imperial machine, but she cannot do it. For embrace, Dalloway interpellates Rachel into her role her, "It was impossible to combine the image of a lean in the "Unity" of the British Empire and its machine black widow, gazing out of her window, and longing like operations. Though Rachel does not fully under for some one to talk to, with the image of a vast stand or recognize this interpellation into adult machine, such as one sees at South Kensington, sexuality and her future role as a mother of empire, thumping, thumping, thumping" (63). Rachel's she does realize that Dalloway has shown her some inability to see the connection between the single thing that young women are usually kept unaware of woman and the system hinges upon her identification by their containment in the metropole. She feels "as with the lonely "widow." Released from the marriage if she and Richard had seen something together which market and its attendant sexuality through death, the is hidden in ordinary life" (VO 74). What they have widow does not function in the machine of imperi seen in Rachel's cabin room is the connection between alism in the way that Mrs. Dalloway does. She does sex and empire: that Rachel's body is an appropriate not "play with children" or fulfill domestic duties; she location for the sexual desire of agents of empire like is not the comforting wife or nurturing mother. Her Dick—Mrs. Dalloway's nickname for her husband, loneliness and leanness suggests an absence of mater revealed with the warships—and that it will be a nity that resonates with the sexually innocent Rachel, productive piece of the imperial machine, much like and also represents a potentially bleak future should the trading port the Euphrosyne is en route to. Rachel find herself outside of the vast machine. Though Rachel reacts traumatically to this first Rachel, though, will not remain sexually innocent interpellation into womanhood, and though this or disconnected from the great machine of empire; prevents her from fully recognizing the permanence her father s desire to train her as a housewife precludes and scope of her imprisonment in this position, her her from becoming an old maid like her aunts. Her education in the imperial machine is completed later induction into the system begins shortly after her in the novel via her engagement to Terence Hewett.
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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:28:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms This engagement takes place in an almost dream-like 'Well,' Terrence sighed at length, 'it makes haze during the second major echo of Conrad's novel us seem insignificant, doesn't it?' in The Voyage Out, the river journey deep into the Rachel agreed. So it would go on for ever South American wilderness. Though scholars have and ever, she said, those women sitting under read the narrative voyage away from the colonial trees, the trees and the river. They turned away... center as a move away from imperial rhetoric,18 the They had not gone far before they began to assure constant comparison between the jungle and an each other once more that they were in love, English park suggests that Terence and Rachel's were happy, were content; but why was it so journey up the river operates more figuratively as a painful being in love, why was there so much journey back to England and its values.19 Terence calls pain in happiness? ( VO 303-04) upon England to resituate Rachel in the dominant rhetoric of family life. Indeed, after confirming to This moment of realized insignificance disrupts the Rachel that "Yes, marriage" is their future together, pleasure of engagement for Rachel and Terence, and Terence cannot help imagining "walking with her it further reveals that their new relationship is not through the streets of London" as they travel along a unique. The narrators focus on the women and their jungle footpath (VO 299). In the engagement scene, maternally coded labor in this scene—on the plaiting the future environment of matrimony and family life of straw, preparation of food, and breastfeeding of in the metropole supplants their jungle surroundings children—alongside Rachel's claim that "it would go and the geography of the periphery. Terence and on for ever and ever...those women sitting under Rachel are only awakened from their English fantasy trees," suggests a moment of identification between and returned to the South American jungle when Rachel and the native women. The economic mission they realize that they have nearly stumbled into the at the heart of the voyage allows Rachel to recognize native village. Here, they are confronted by the stares this scene as part of the imperial machine of their of the native women as they go about their work: world, and to suddenly realize that she too is part of a world-system of women and children that would As they sauntered about, the stare followed them, go on forever. Mark Wollaeger has pointed to the passing over their legs, their bodies, their heads, image of the native women plaiting straw as a repe curiously not without hostility...As she drew tition of Rachel's complaint that Austen's marriage-plot apart her shawl and uncovered her breast to the novels are "so like a tight plait," and he further suggests lips of her baby, the eyes of a woman never left that Rachel identifies with the native women and their faces.. .But soon the life of the village took desires a freedom from the prescribed heterosexual no notice of them; they had become absorbed desire on display in the village and the hotel.20 into it. The women's hands became busy again However, this repetition and displeasure in the tight with the straw; their eyes dropped. If they moved, weave also signals a rejection of the entanglement of it was to fetch something from the hut, or to motherhood and the binding third thread of a child, catch a straying child, or to cross the space with as indicated by the conspicuous presence of the naked a jar balanced on their heads; if they spoke, it breast and nursing baby, and Terence and Rachel's was to cry some harsh unintelligible cry.. .Peaceful later conversations about family. Rachel should be and even beautiful at first, the sight of the women, happy with her engagement to Terence, should be who had given up looking at them, made them happy at the sight of a suckling babe—a reflection of now feel very cold and melancholy. her expected future as a mother—but she feels only
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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:28:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pain, much like the earlier pain of her first kiss. Because discourse,"21 we might also read the natives' silence this moment of recognition arrives on the heels of as a necessary foil against which Rachel eventually Terence and Rachels kiss and engagement, and because finds her voice to resist Terence s efforts to domesticate the stares of the native women cannot be avoided, her. Chandra Mohanty has pointed to the ways in the process that began with Richard Dalloway's kiss which third-world women are often characterized as on the ship—Rachel's education in the link between "sexually constrained," "uneducated," "domestic," and sexuality and empire—is completed. "tradition-bound," in comparison to Western white Whereas in Heart of Darkness the "horror" of women who define themselves "as educated, modern, colonial exploration and exportation, and its incom as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, mensurability with metropolitan experience, is and the freedom to make their own decisions."22 revealed to Marlow through Kurtz's death, what Rachel Though Rachel's ability to control her body or make discovers in the jungle before she dies is sexual decisions is fraught because it is only fully realized knowledge and a level of commensurability between in her death, without her confrontation with the the native woman's experience and her own place in women in the jungle she might not have realized her the patriarchal system of the British Empire. Maternity position and entrapment. Despite their ability to is the primary labor of the woman in the village, and foment Rachel's feminist awakening, the women in maternity will be Rachel's expected duty and labor the jungle remain tools rather than subjects of Woolf s in her coming role as a wife in London. Both Rachel feminist project. Problematically, Woolf imagines and the native women are essential cogs in the imperial neither subjectivity nor a future for the women outside machine, as the bodies that produce agents of empire of the current colonial condition. As Rachel claims, and subjects of empire, respectively. What Rachel the native women will remain under the trees, by the learns on her river voyage is the specifically female river, forever. horror that Kurtz's Intended is denied knowledge of: Leaving behind the women who have made her that while men like Marlow only see the economic aware of her position in the British Empire, Rachel and physical exploitation of the colonized native, begins to resist the patriarchal binds that have been women in the periphery and metropole are exploited promised by her engagement. Though Rachel and as the (re)producers of empire and imperial labor. Terence outwardly appear as a happy couple to the It is necessary to point out, however, that this other hotel guests, behind closed doors they struggle moment of realization and recognition does not take over Rachel's new role and the distance she reasserts into account the double exploitation of the colonial between herself and the world. Arguing over con female subject as a foil and midwife to Rachel's feminist gratulation notes and their courtship, Rachel insists individualism and patriarchal resistance. Though that she "never fell in love" with Terence and crumples their hostile stares confront and discomfit the English the notes in a rejection of conformity. She wants to tourists, the native women of the village are not given believe that no one "had ever felt what she felt" ( VO a voice to respond to the imperial discourse of 313), and that her life would be different from those exploitation. They remain silent for most of the scene, well-wishing women who send her cards. She wants and "if they spoke, it was to cry some harsh unintel an out from the imperial machine. However, Terence ligible cry" (VO 303-04J. While Erica Johnson points rebuts her rejection, and he reclaims and redirects to the alignment between the natives' relative speech the conversation. He tells her that Mrs. Thornbury, lessness and Rachel's earlier "estrangement from with her "too many children" is still "a kind of beauty" language" and failure to "interrupt imperialist and that she is "rather like a large old tree murmuring
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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:28:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms in the moonlight, or a river going on and on and on this battle ultimately codes Rachel's death as a rejection and in the same breath announces that Ralph has of this patriarchal imperial order. This rejection seems been promoted in the colonial system (VO 313). particularly clear when we take into account Rachel's Terences repetition of the native village image of a fever dreams before her death, with their mixed images tree by the river passing through time, paired with of metaphorical wombs and metropolitan London.23 his support of Ralphs gains, reads like an effort to As Laura Doyle points out, through death Rachel situate Rachel within imperialist discourse and in her escapes from her nightmares and "retreats specifically future role as a wife and mother. from a sexuality supported and regulated by Empire" Nonetheless, Rachel continues her resistance (144). Furthermore, Rachel's death removes her from and, interjecting into his small talk, asserts, "I wont the marriage market and provides her with an escape have eleven children." Terence, continuing his efforts from a future that devalues her musical and creative to domesticate Rachel, responds, "We must have a abilities in favor of her ability to mother the next son and we must have a daughter.. .because, let alone generation of English men who, like Terence, can the inestimable advantage of being our children, theyd travel and survey the world. She escapes the fate she be so well brought up" (VO 314). And while he carries discovers through the reflection of the women of the on imagining an education that would rob his daughter native camp; she rejects not only sexual experience, of practicality and teach his son to laugh at "great but also the suckling English babe. men," Rachel simply insists that her children be In the end, Rachel's freedom of movement nothing like the fine English gentleman, St. John Hirst. between the poles of the British Empire does not Though Clarissa DaOoway once told Rachel, "'I grant grant her freedom from a global sexual economy of that the English seem, on the whole, whiter than most reproduction, but it does provide her with the vantage men, their records cleaner'" ( VO 61), Rachel's illicit point to recognize her engagement as catalyzing her kiss from Mr. Dalloway and her voyage up the river imprisonment within it. Rachel "experiences travel have made clear to her that English men's records are as a potential shift in her overall frame of reference... not cleaner and are no model for future children. that reflects her experience and understanding of her This scene of tense negotiations about the future new location in history, in society, and in the world" finally culminates in Terence's assertion (behind (Johnson 81). Unfortunately, this new understanding clenched, shaking fists) that he likes Rachel in part arrives moments too late. Like Kurtz's Intended, because if they "stood on a rock together, [Rachel Rachel is committed to her imperial role by her would] throw [him] into the sea" (VO 317); this engagement; she and Terence cannot break it off, subsequently leads them to wrestle on the floor, ripping though she tries. And, with inverted symmetry to the Rachel's dress in pseudosexual passion. Ultimately, Intended, Rachel is only freed from her engagement this scene is a figurative and physical battle between by death. While Rachel's end is certainly not an Rachel's freedom and Terence's efforts to initiate her optimistic revision of the Intended, it is a subversive into her new role as mother and progenitor of the one. She does not wait for her fate in a sitting room; English race and empire. Rachel's repeated thrusts at she is not continually mourning the almost-marriage difference both refuse her future as just another she lost. Her death instead takes on the color of choice mother of empire and yearn for a state of innocence and suggests willful departure from the imperial before her awakening in the jungle to her sexuality machine by the only means available. and future reproduction. Though Rachel's position is bleak, it is the first Occurring as it does just before Rachel's illness, step in a series of possible new relations between
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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:28:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms women and empire. In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf Because Maisie is traveling to a new and foreign place, continues to explore this relationship through two her eyes are wider and more perceptive than the other contrasting models of experience embodied in Maisie visitors to the park. Her newness to London makes and Elizabeth. Because these young women remain the city and its people an object of study for Maisie, unengaged in the novel, Maisie and Elizabeth are not much like the native village was for Rachel. Confused yet cemented in the standard woman's role in empire, and traveling alone in the natural environment of the and remain still-flexible explorations of the possibility park, Maisie is more aware of others' behavior, making of resisting women's prescribed position within the her easily terrified by her odd confrontation with the imperial system. foreign-looking Rezia. Published thirteen years later and after the First When Maisie asks Rezia for directions to the World War, Mrs. Dalloway presents a world that is tube station, Rezia practically yells the way and dis very different from that of The Voyage Out. While misses Maisie abruptly while attempting to shield her Rachel and Terence may spend their time looking at from Septimus's deranged behavior. Maisie intuits clouds, the people of London are instead looking at that "something was up" with this couple, and she the contrail of a plane, spelling advertisements in the predicts that the run-in would "jangle again among sky. In a world brought violently in contact by the her memories" for fifty years to come; she cries war, or through imperial exhibits featuring a "colonial "horror" moments later (MD 26).26 Shirley Neuman contact-zone" like 1924's Wembley (Cohen 90),24 the argues, "What Maisie recognizes in Septimus as distances experienced by Marlow are diminished, 'horror' is such insanity, born of the experience of and the women of Mrs. Dalloway need not travel to war" and a loss of faith in the "saving ideal" of empire South America to experience the empire and revise (65). While Neuman is correct that Maisie's horror the figure of the Intended. Instead, Woolf attempts is in part recognition of an imperial system's ability to bring the empire home by laying it upon the streets to destroy its subjects, it is not only Septimus and his of London, much like she imposed the streets of disturbing behavior that scares Maisie. Septimus's London on the South American jungle. As Maisie wife Rezia accompanies him, and she is the one who and Elizabeth move throughout the city, their journeys interacts with Maisie. Furthermore, Maisie remarks echo the colonial explorations of previous generations that they "both seemed queer" (MD 26). It is the and provide them with the opportunity and perspective image of the two of them together, the unhappy and to view how their lives are part of the imperial system. unsuccessful marriage that elicits Maisie's "horror." Their voyages reestablish the periphery's connection Maisie recognizes that the corrupting powers of to the metropole as they navigate the possibility of empire and conquest reach beyond the men that escaping imperial patriarchy.25 enforce them and consequently touch the lives of Maisie Johnson's voyage through Regent's Park their wives. in search of the tube station is a reversal of the standard That Maisie's fears are directed towards matri "grand tour" narrative and of the romance adventure mony is further suggested by Mrs. Dempster's of The Voyage Out. It not only imaginatively locates observations of her: the colonial space within the park through the invo cation of Marlow and Kurtz, but it also reverses the That girl, thought Mrs. Dempster.. .don't know direction of colonial movement from metropole to a thing yet.. .Percy drank. Well, better to have a periphery, as Maisie has just arrived from the eco son, thought Mrs. Dempster. She had a hard time nomically semi-peripheral Scotland in order to work. of it, and couldn't help smiling at a girl like that.
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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:28:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms You'll get married, for you're pretty enough, She might not know men, but her physical and thought Mrs. Dempster. Get married, she thought, metaphorical journey across colonial space has allowed and then you'll know. Oh, the cooks, and so on. her to observe Rezia and perceive her acquiescence Every man has his ways. But whether I'd have and servility to a husband ravaged by war. Maisie has chosen quite like that if I could have known, gained access to a knowledge that was withheld from thought Mrs. Dempster, and could not help an older generation of women within the empire. wishing to whisper a word to Maisie Johnson... Like Rachel, she has discovered that women are the Ah, but that aeroplane! Hadn't Mrs. Dempster exploited buttresses of empire. Because Mrs. Dempster always longed to see foreign parts? She had a never traveled, because she remained home while the nephew, a missionary. (MD 27) men around her headed off to uphold the "saving illusion," she could not recognize a woman's role Mrs. Dempster identifies with the working-class before she committed to her husband, and she could Maisie, and she recognizes that Maisie is identifying not choose as she would have liked; it is suggested with Rezia, another transplant, and that the married that she would have chosen not to get married. couple is making an impression on the young woman. We never definitively learn what choices Maisie This moment of identification is not unlike Rachel's makes for her life and whether she does marry. The experience with the native women by the river. Rezia's novel does not return to her. What we do know is marked foreignness (as well as her former occupation that despite granting Maisie the knowledge of her weaving flowers, feathers, and colored wires rolled position within the patriarchal imperial system before in beads into hats) suggests that she is a new iteration she becomes engaged like the doomed Rachel, Woolf of the native women. And though Rezia might not does not promise Maisie an escape. Instead, Woolf be a mother caring for a suckling babe, she is mater leaves her frozen, paralyzed in fear, and the narrator nally caring for her damaged husband. In the trauma voices through Mrs. Dempster a prediction of Maisie s of the post-war world, the imperial order has shifted, fate: that she will get married because she is pretty and a sick husband can fill the role of a child; though enough, and there is no other option. Maisie's horror, Rezia wants a baby of her own, the doctors instruct then, is in part tied to her lack of available responses her to play a version of the game eye-spy with her to her newly acquired knowledge of her position. husband.27 So while Rachel identified with the native Like Rezia she has left her people, is vulnerable, and women through the shared labor of motherhood, will likely marry an English man and become fully Maisie is likely identifying with Rezia through a shared absorbed within the machine of the British Empire. outsider status (Rezia is from allied Italy), and through Woolf s depiction of Maisie and her power of sub Maisie's potential future labor of caring for a war version is ambivalent at best. Playing the part of wounded husband. colonizing explorer in the Regents Park scene, Maisie While Mrs. Dempster realizes that Maisie is ultimately as disillusioned as Marlow because of fascinated with the couple—as a potential reflection her subject position. Her class, suggested by her need of her future—what she does not recognize is the to emigrate for work and by Mrs. Dempster s recog revelation in Maisie's horror. Mrs. Dempster assumes nition of herself in Maisie, compacted with her Maisie is naive, that she does not know yet about men immigrant status, grants her little agency and precludes and their ways and what it means to be married, herto from the social mobility to make it in a man's be tied to and subservient to a husband and a son. world without a husband. But Maisie does not need to get married to "know." This attention to class is a significant shift in
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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:28:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Woolf's depiction of this young woman figure and intersection with empire is not signaled through an her characterization as colonial explorer. While echoing of Conrad; it is instead encoded upon her Rachels travel is figured as an educational journey body. Elizabeth, just two years younger than Maisie or pleasure trip, economic pressures instigate Maisie s Johnson, is described as dark and "Oriental." The geographic mobility. Furthermore, while the depiction narrator, musing on Elizabeth's dissimilarity from her and interaction between Maisie and Rezia recalls mother, suggests a long history of cultural contact as Rachel's encounter with the native women, Maisie's the cause: central moment of identification and subsequent enlightenment hinges more upon class-consciousness Was it that some Mongol had been wrecked on than racial alterity. Rachel's brief resistance is fueled the coast of Norfolk (as Mrs. Hilbery said), had by her racial difference from the women in the village, mixed with the Dalloway ladies, perhaps, a which encourages Rachel's claim for difference in hundred years ago? For the Dalloways, in general regards to her marital future. Maisie is not granted were fair-haired; blue-eyed; Elizabeth, on the resistance—the most she can voice is her despair— contrary, was dark; had Chinese eyes in a pale precisely because the Regent's Park scene lacks the face; an Oriental mystery. (MD 122-123) exoticizing difference encouraging female individu ation. Though Rezia's role is structurally analogous In implicating miscegenation and racial fusing in the to the native women, she is not a colonial subject; she creation of Elizabeths features, Woolf creates a figure is Western European and working class, just like whose body can physically register the effects of Maisie. While this development rectifies The Voyage globalization and cultural and racial mixing. In Out's imperial feminist problem of using the colonial choosing to date this interaction at "perhaps, a hun subject as simply a foil, it nonetheless excludes the dred years ago," Woolf challenges the concept that colonial subject and demonstrates a shift in Woolf's these global connections were only possible through politics towards an emphasis on class over colonial the new technologies of the modernist age.28 concerns. In plotting the movement and awakening Furthermore, by suggesting that cultural interaction of the young women of Mrs. Dalloway within the has long been experienced in Britain, Woolf also geographically tighter yet stylistically expanded space undermines the very existence of the historic spatial of London, Woolf continues to engage the intersection disjunction expressed in Conrad's novel. Woolf s of empire and patriarchy while exploring the diversity account of a cultural interaction that predates twen of class positions within the imperial patriarchal tieth-century technology forms a figure that not only system that are largely overlooked in The Voyage Out. revises Kurtz's Intended but also contests the isolation If Maisie is the portrait of a young woman who she represents. knows her position within the British Empire but has Of Virginia Woolf s young, unmarried women, few options for subverting its influence on her life, Elizabeth Dalloway has the most potential to be then Elizabeth is the portrait of a young woman with transgressive. Beyond suggesting global interaction, numerous options and little knowledge. Though the racialization of Elizabeth's body distances her Elizabeth neither directly echoes Heart of Darkness from the expectations of her bourgeois post-war nor roams through Regent's Park, she too is implicated society and physically expresses political difference. in the system of women and empire, rendering her Her anomalous appearance and its repeated emphasis another symbolic figure for testing women's ability in the text act as a shorthand for Elizabeth's break to subvert this system. In the case of Elizabeth, her from her mother's generation and prime the reader
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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:28:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms to expect possibly deviant behavior. Urmila Seshagiri The relationship of domination between First argues that, "Racial alterity, freed from its dominant and Third World was masked and displaced by association with colonized subjects, became in Woolf s an overriding (and perhaps ideological) con world—as it was for the English avant-garde—a sciousness of imperialism as being essentially gateway into disruptive or subversive cultural possi between First World powers or the holders of bilities" (146). However, I would argue that Elizabeths Empire, and this consciousness tended to repress racial alterity is not so much freed from association the more basic axis of otherness, and to raise with colonized subjects, but rather suggests a con issues of colonial reality only incidentally (48) traction of the relationship between Rachel and the native women into one figure. Either way, in giving In turning a battle over Elizabeths actions and future Elizabeth markers of race—her "fine, Chinese, oriental into a battle between adult women, Clarissa and Miss eyes" and dark hair, so different from her bird-like Kilman imagine Elizabeth devoid of agency and will. and fair mother, Clarissa—Woolf rehabilitates the Elizabeths physical otherness is ignored in favor of negative association of disruption and degeneration her behavioral otherness: she prays too much, accord attached to miscegenation by deploying it as a signal ing to her mother, and is too willing to play the for Elizabeths dissidence towards her mother and socialite, according to Miss Kilman. Both women her potential positive subversion of her parents' wish her to act more like themselves, to be definitely oppressive world of politics and parties.29 shaped by only one woman's influence. What both Clarissa most keenly feels Elizabeths resistance Clarissa and Miss Kilman forget is that time has passed in the form of Elizabeths tutor, the spartan and fanatic and that Elizabeth is on the cusp of adulthood. As a Miss Kilman. Associated with Germany by heritage symbol of colonialism in a post-Great War world, she and education, Miss Kilman is an expert in modern can begin to resist their influence and act for herself, history and a devout Christian, and her influence over and perhaps even seek full independence. Elizabeths behavior and spirituality deeply troubles Elizabeth's power of resistance and potential Clarissa. Facing off at the top of the stairs directly independence from both women first becomes before Elizabeth and Miss Kilman go shopping,30 the apparent when she abandons Miss Kilman in the two older women experience a cold war of emotions, department store in favor of a voyage through London each hating the other silently and desperately wishing that her mother would disapprove of. During this that Elizabeth will choose to side with her. Interestingly, trip, Elizabeth's oriental features are again emphasized, it is right before Mrs. Dalloway and Miss Kilman's reasserting her difference from her mother and Miss standoff that Elizabeth is first described as "oriental," Kilman, as well as her refusal of their codes of conduct. and it is through this characterization that she is This second description of Elizabeth as "oriental" figuratively territorialized and becomes the space does not continue the trope of Elizabeth as a colonized upon which each woman wishes to mark her influence. land, however. Instead, it functions to personify Here, the racialization of Elizabeth functions to suggest Elizabeth as a voyaging other. Like Rachel and Maisie, a reading of Elizabeth as a colonial territory, with Elizabeth is also cast as a colonizing figure traveling Clarissa and Miss Kilman as competing imperial through London; however, she is not depicted as an powers, Britain and Germany in particular. This echo or reflection of an English colonizer wandering figurative battle between aging empires is analogous through a park. Instead, she is an oriental pirate sailing to Jamesons model of a pre-World War One system on a pirate-ship omnibus through the streets: of imperial interactions. He points out that:
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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:28:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Suddenly Elizabeth stepped forward and most serious; so busy. In short, she would like to have competently boarded the omnibus, in front of a profession. She would become a doctor, a farmer, everybody. She took a seat on top. The impetuous possibly go into Parliament, if she found it creature—a pirate—started forward, sprang necessary, all because of the Strand. (MD 136) away.. .for pirate it was, reckless, unscrupulous, bearing down ruthlessly...And now it was like Remembering Miss Kilman's suggestion that riding, to be rushing up Whitehall; and to each women could now enter professions that were pre movement of the omnibus the beautiful body in viously only available to men,31 Elizabeth surveys the the fawn-coloured coat [Elizabeth] responded Strand and decides that "she liked the feeling of people freely like a rider. (MD 135-136) working" (MD 136) and that she herself should take up a profession. Interestingly, Elizabeth's choice of Though initially losing her balance and grabbing professions suggests that her subversion of societal onto the railing, Elizabeth quickly masters the gender roles cannot entirely escape the imperial system quick-sailing bus and rides it masterfully up the and its patriarchal underpinnings. Mark Wollaeger Strand into a working-class district. Because "no notes that, "Woolf worrie[d] that Englishwomen Dalloways came down the Strand daily; she was a already colonized under patriarchy 'like slaves in a pioneer, a stray, venturing, trusting," she is a colonial harem' may become colonizers in their turn as they explorer (MD 137). Surveying the world from above, follow 'the procession...of educated men' into the Elizabeth takes stock of the objects around, almost public sphere" (45), and Naomi Black argues that a as if she is appreciating a territory all her own. Dressed central tenet of Woolf s Three Guineas is that "women in fine-cut clothes and looking down on the world, must earn their own livings, but do it in a way to Elizabeth's position in a vertical axis of space distin discourage hierarchy and militarism (96). Taking a guishes her from Maisie on the ground, looking for position in Parliament is a straightforward partici a tube station, and emphasizes the class difference pation in the administration of Empire, doctors are that divides the two women and their positions within a crucial component of an imperial system that the empire. Elizabeths class position and education physically and mentally harms its subjects and men in modern history grants her a larger vantage point like Septimus Smith, and the farmer's ownership, or, symbolically, a global perspective. Furthermore, ordering, and cultivation of land continues the colonial Elizabeths association with a global power of the past metaphor. Elizabeth's list of acceptable professions is further frees her from the limitations of contemporary a matrix of colonial control where territories, bodies, British women, and her body's containment of multiple and politics intersect. These connections and racial markers might also allow it to be read as a Elizabeth's figurative colonial exploration are entwined, figurative empire of its own. Elizabeth might contain suggesting that the network of imperial control is masses rather than be one among them. While Maisie strengthened even in attempts to escape patriarchal is terrified and paralyzed in space by her journey order. Elizabeth may only escape her exploited role because of her limited semi-peripheral agency, within empire by becoming a cog in the exploitative Elizabeth is inspired by her journey because she is system of empire; she must become an imperialist empowered to imagine possible control over the herself. Though hopeful in some respects—it would world around her: grant her a freedom from marriage unavailable to Rachel and Maisie—Elizabeth's possible professional It was quite different here from Westminster, she subversion of patriarchy is ultimately revealed as thought, getting off at Chancery Lane. It was so highly ambivalent.
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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:28:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms This ambivalence is largely due to the questions Once the young women of empire cement matrimonial that surround Elizabeth. We do not know whether ties, motherhood is expected to follow, and the Elizabeth will be able to escape the patriarchal imperial possibilities for resistance are summarily closed down. system of exploitation because she is still ignorant of It is interesting and problematic to note that her position within the system. Unlike Rachel and Elizabeths inability to fully know her position within Maisie, she does not experience the flash of recogni imperial patriarchy is due to her failure to meet a tion, the horrific revelation. Looking back on her colonized subject—real or symbolic—because that journey through the city we can discover why it failed colonized subject has already been absorbed into the to provide her with the knowledge so important to characterization of Elizabeths own body. This absorp Woolf's other young women: Elizabeth is distanced tion continues to revise the problem of the necessary from the space through which she travels. Though presence of the colonized other, like the distortion of she eventually gets off the bus and walks along the colonized subject in the form of Rezia, and such streets, Elizabeths initial encounter is from the vantage assimilation continues to be highly ambivalent. While point of the voyeur; she is safely separated from the Woolf s deployment of other-raced characteristics as world she observes. When Elizabeth does finally reach a symbol of Elizabeths potential evacuation of dom the street, she is distracted by thoughts of her mother s inant and oppressive social constructions is a radical upcoming socialite party. Unlike Rachel and Maisie, invocation of the raced body as a productive and Elizabeth is not forced to come face to face with the positive figure, this artistic paradigm still only func imperial subject; she does not make eye contact with tions to benefit white women. Elizabeths body registers colonized natives or speak to a soldiers wife. Her race only so that she may escape the patriarchal system position within a circle of colonial administrators of the novel by seeking to dominate others—either blinds her; her class and social positions prevent her the working class below her on the street or the from knowing life on the ground. subjects of empire ruled by Parliament. Even though As demonstrated through Rachel and Maisie, in Elizabeth's racially marked characteristics suggest order for Elizabeth to subvert empire, she must "know" power and domination in her voyage up the Strand, her place within it, and this knowledge is granted in they still carry the sediment of her domination and a sexual awakening fomented by a confrontation with territorialization by her mother and tutor. the reflective other. What is crucial is that this sexual Though Elizabeths future and the future of the awakening and the realization of one's place within young, unmarried woman in general is still an open empire must take place before becoming engaged and question at the end of Mrs. Dalloway, the outlook is committed to the patriarchal order. Mrs. Dalloway not positive. In the last pages of the novel, Elizabeth ends before we learn whether Elizabeth will follow is continually sexualized, admired by the men around the path of her mother and marry into the set of her, and described in the same terms that Marlow imperial administrators that surrounds her, or whether applies to Kurtz's Intended, as ominously echoed in she will complete the resistance gestured towards in The Voyage Out. Where Marlow heard "the ripple of her voyage. It is clear that, in order to actualize her the river, the soughing of the trees swayed by the resistance, she will need to learn the intersection of wind, the murmurs of the wild crowd" (HD 93), Willie sex and empire, and she must understand that Titcomb thinks of Elizabeth that, "She was like a becoming a doctor and healing the sick is not enough poplar, she was like a river, she was like a hyacinth" to stem the damaging forces of empire and war if she (MD 188). Like the Intended, the novel ends with is still a wife and mother, a reproducer of empire. Elizabeth still ignorant of the "other world." However,
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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:28:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Elizabeth is not without the possibility of learning, class. Elizabeth contains the racial qualities of the though the window of time for this revelation is colonized other as symbol of mastery and as an beginning to close. artistic trope of difference, rather than confronting Revising the figure of the young, unmarried or embodying actual otherness; fascinatingly, as a woman and the spatial disjunction between the result, Elizabeth is described in the same terms as metropole and the periphery, Woolf grants her women the geographic location of The Voyage Out's native the potential to know what an imperial system entails, women during Mrs. Dalloway's party scene. Her to have the knowledge Kurtz's Intended so sorely comparison to a "poplar" and "river" indicates just lacks. As her work becomes increasingly modernist how much she remains bound by the intersecting in the years between The Voyage Out to Mrs. Dalloway, rhetoric and power of empire and patriarchy, despite the disparate worlds of imperial center and colonial her subversive potential. outpost grow closer. As the metropole and periphery Ultimately, Woolf's elision of the colonized meet and as the women in them learn how to navigate subject in her later work reveals an awareness of the their futures, what is discovered is the degree of nuance breadth and scope of empire, rather than an unprob in women's relationship to empire. A woman's future lematic reproduction of these axioms of power. Her is not only determined by her knowledge, but is also evolving invocation of native women points to the determined by her class, social status, global position, ways in which the resistance to patriarchy available and racial identity. Though Elizabeth has the social to her social class problematically reinstated the force position Maisie needs to access the world of careers of empire. While the young, semi-peripheral, and and an escape from marriage, this same social position metropolitan woman gained mobility and freedom prevents Elizabeth from discovering the conditions over the course of Woolfs work, the native women of her position within the empire. Revising Kurtz's remain isolated and oppressed in the periphery. Intended, through Rachel, Maisie, and Elizabeth, Though Woolf s young women map the intersecting Virginia Woolf admits to a greater world of possibility, threads of sexual reproduction and exploitation that but not one that is more hopeful. bind all women under the British Empire, the path Significantly, in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf s efforts toward liberation is ultimately still closed for everyone to address spatial disjunction result in the erasure except the most privileged, and it is obscured even of the confrontation with native peoples that imperial for those with access. travel and exhibits provided. Elizabeth and Maisie may travel like Rachel, but their failure to meet the native women by the river is important. Rather than deploy the actual bodies of colonized subjects as foils to her young women's development, Woolf draws upon the class and white ethnic difference that are featured in Three Guineas, and the novel only figu ratively invokes the colonized other. Because this figurative presence of the other is located in the characterization of Rezia and is a reflection of Maisie's own otherness, Maisie is able to achieve awareness of her position but remains simultaneously limited by her own imperial position as an other to the ruling
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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:28:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms NOTES
"The horror! The horror!" (Conrad 85).
See Conrad 19-20.
In Bardic Nationalism (1997), Katie Trumpener points out that Scotland shares a similar history to Ireland and Wales in its early colonization and disenfranchisement by Britain: "In Scotland the dramatic political, economic, and social reorganization of the Highlands in the wake of the failed 1745 Jacobite uprising British military occupation and forced Anglicization, the introduction of land-intensive sheep grazing, and the subsequent forced clearances' of large numbers of peasants whose labors were no longer mar ketable—was matched by far-reaching changes in landholding and local government in the Lowlands.. (20). Though by 1923 Scotland was no longer a colony of the British Empire and was fully absorbed within it, its colonial history is still sedimented in Maisie's journey and her experience of distance and difference.
Jameson writes in "Modernism and Imperialism" that, "For colonialism means that a significant structural segment of the economic system as a whole is now located elsewhere, beyond metropolis.. .in colonies over water whose own experiences and life world.. .remain unknown and unimaginable for the subjects of imperial power" (51).
See Mclntire 259.
Like Maisie's turn in Regent's Park, Rachel Vinrace's river journey reminds us of Marlow s own trip into the jungle. For more examples of the connections made between Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Woolf s The Voyage Out, see Kathy J. Phillips's book Virginia Woolf against Empire; Christine Froula's book Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity; Urmila Seshagiri's book Race and the Modernist Imagination; Mark A. Wollaeger's essays "Woolf, Postcards, and the Elision of Race: Colonizing Women in The Voyage Out" and "The Woolfs in the Jungle: Intertextuality, Sexuality, and the Emergence of Female Modernism in The Voyage Out, The Village in the Jungle, and Heart of Darkness"; Susan Friedmans essay "Virginia Woolfs Pedagogical Scenes of Reading: The Voyage Out, The Common Reader, and Her 'Common Readers'"; and Nick Montgomery's essay "Colonial Rhetoric and the Maternal Voice: Deconstruction and Disengagement in Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out"
For some examples of the connections made between Heart of Darkness and Mrs. Dalloway, see Shirley Neuman's essay "Heart of Darkness, Virginia Woolf and the Spectre of Domination"; David Adams's essay "Shadows of a 'Silver Globe': Woolf's Reconfiguration of the Darkness"; Danell Jones's essay "Mrs. Dalloway and the Art of Death: Monuments, Merchandise, and Memoirs"; Jesse Wolfe's essay "The Sane Woman in the Attic: Sexuality and Self-Authorship in Mrs. Dalloway"; and Elizabeth Clea's essay "Moving Tropes: New Modernist Travels with Virginia Woolf."
David Adams marks Maisie's "horror," and he also points out the connection between Rezia's vision of the London park as a Roman swamp and Marlows reflections on England's past as a Roman colony (Adams 177); Shirley Neuman notes the similarity of the nurse knitting beside a napping Peter Walsh and the women knitting outside of the Brussels office (Neuman 60). Both critics focus on Septimus Smith as the
30 Modern Language Studies 44.1
This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:28:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms "sometimes-Kurtz figure" and the central connection between the two novels, but neither addresses the degree to which the female characters mediate the allusions to Conrad's novel in the Regents Park scene.
9 Kathy J. Phillips successfully demonstrates Woolf s investment in exploring "the connections among imperialism, war, and gender relations" as these "three topics interrelate through economics, school training, professions, life-styles, sexual mores, religions, and so on" (ix).
As Anna Davin points out in her essay on empire and maternity, drops in birthrate, depreciation in masculine health attributed to modern lifestyles, and the climax and impending decline of the British Empire heightened anxieties about colonial rule in the early twentieth century. The fear that soon there may not have been enough to men to run the vast empire became a prominent political concern of the period. In response, women were encouraged to value motherhood above all else, and it was portrayed as women's role to reproduce the future agents of empire. Davin demonstrates this shift in attitudes towards reproduction through a comparison of manuals for young women. She writes, "In a manual of the 1860s the young woman was advised to seek as partner for life someone able to support her, willing to protect her, ready to help her, and qualified to guide and direct her—no mention of children—while a 1914 book on young women and marriage gave as the three main objects for marriage the reproduction of the race, the maintenance of social purity, and the mutual comfort and assistance of each married couple" (Davin 91). In fifty years time, child rearing and imperial concerns have moved to the forefront of marital issues above female fiscal and physical protection.
11 See Wollaeger, "Woolf, Postcards, and the Elision of Race: Colonizing Women in the Voyage Out," 44; Friedman 105.
The young, unmarried woman and her relationship to empire is a repeated theme throughout Woolf s body of work. In particular, both Jacob's Room (1922) and The Years (1937) feature young women facing their position within the British Empire, and therefore merit greater scholarly attention in this regard. Though these texts fall outside of the scope of this essay—primarily because they do not demonstrate the same matrix of young women on the cusp of marriage, engaging in literal or figurative imperial voyages and explorations, potentially achieving sexual awakening—future versions of this project would need to consider their place within what I am identifying as Woolf s continued and related feminist engagements with the young woman figure. Though Jacob's Room and The Years also participate in this project, they do not parallel in the same direct ways that I argue The Voyage Out and Mrs. Dalloway do, and it is those parallels that are the animating focus of this essay.
Woolf writes in Three Guineas: "'For,' the outsider will say, 'in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world'" (109), and, "And if he says he is fighting to protect England from foreign rule, she will reflect that for her there are no 'foreigners,' since by law she becomes a foreigner if she marries a foreigner" ( 108). Though not explicit, Woolf s disavowal of citizenship in favor of being a member of the world community suggests that she sees the position of women worldwide as commensurate.
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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:28:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms "As the female individualist, not-quite / not-male, articulates herself in shifting relationship to what is at stake, the 'native female' as such (within discourse as a signifier) is excluded from any share in this emerging norm" (Spivak 245).
Laura Doyle characterizes Rachels journey across the Atlantic as a journey away from her mother-country and towards female adulthood (Doyle 145), and Mark A. Wollaeger identifies the journey as, in part, Rachel's initiation to imperial Englishness ("Woolf, Postcards, and the Elision of Race" 44).
See Woolf, VO 66.
See Woolf, VO 65.
Nick Montgomery writes, "The fact that the novel confounds this lurking expectation and withholds the voyage back is one measure for its engagement with the rhetoric of colonialism and the discursive mechanisms of empire, indicating that the outward movement has not merely been an exotic, voyeuristic, or therapeutic sortie in pursuit of the rejuvenation of the paternal word, but a more permanent evacuation of that dominant rhetoric. Once out, we remain out. In this sense, the novel is an act of extrication" (36-37).
See Wollaeger, "Woolf, Postcards, and the Elision of Race: Colonizing Women in the Voyage Out," 44.
See Wollaeger, "Woolf, Postcards, and the Elision of Race: Colonizing Women in the Voyage Out," 64.
Johnson writes, "In fact, the villagers' speechlessness is highlighted by the narrative inclusion of sur rounding 'voices,' 'cries,' and 'songs,' all of which are unintelligible and more emblematic of the jungle landscape than of its human inhabitants. Rachel's estrangement from language aligns her—however problematically—with people whose subjectivity lies very much outside of the British tourist's world view" (76), and that "any parallels between Rachel and the South Americans rest solely on their respective failure to participate in or interrupt imperialist discourse" (76).
"This average third world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and being 'third world' (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.). This, I suggest, is in contrast to the (implicitly) self-repre sentation of Western women as educated, modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions" (Mohanty 337).
David Adams describes the dreams as a blend of sex, empire, and the impotence of patriarchy (209), and Mark Wollaeger describes them as a "sexual revulsion" and as an equation of Rachel's sexual awareness with the prostitutes on the London streets whom she fears ("Woolf, Postcards, and the Elision of Race" 53).
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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:28:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Kurt Koenigsberger points out that, "Within the walled bounds of Wembley, the British Empire Exhibition sought to round out a view of the world as a whole, laying before the British the spectacle of an entire empire in miniature" (99). This world as whole was a world wholly theirs, and it featured over twenty-five lands under British rule and displayed plants, animals, art, architecture, and labor from its different regions. As Scott Cohen notes, there were even "races in residence" that lived on-site in order to create a "colonial contact-zone." (90)
Snaith and Whitworth point out that Woolf was "[a]lways attuned to the changing uses and signification of urban spaces, her writing both reveals and creates the layered histories of spaces" (1), and that, "The question of a woman's relationship to the city, particularly its public spaces, is central to [ Woolf s] spatial politics" (2).
See Woolf, MD 26.
"'Look,' [Rezia] implored him, for Dr. Holmes had told her to make him notice real things, go to music hall, play cricket—that was the very game, Dr. Holmes said, a nice out-of-door game, the very game for her husband. 'Look,' she repeated" (MD 25).
The Wembley Exhibit emphasized the advantages of modern technology and endorsed the idea that now the world could be in contact. As Scott Cohen points out, "The stuttered start of the Empire Exhibition at Wembley was recorded in the newspapers as a 'marvel of modern science'.. .The band was playing as the King read the seventy-odd letters typed on the enclosed Eastern Telegraph form reporting that the sovereign's proclamation had just circled the globe in merely one minute and twenty seconds. This technological stunt was a fitting beginning to an exhibition devoted to monumentalizing images of imperial unity and demonstrating the British Empire's global reach" (85).
Urmila Seshagiri points out that "Disruptions in the continuity of racial identity—through miscegenation, geographical displacement, religious conversion, or political upheaval, for example—engendered scientific as well as cultural anxieties about hybridity, contamination, and degeneration" (8).
See Mrs. Dalloway 125.
Though Ms. Kilman suggests this opportunity is open to all women of Elizabeths generation, we should remember that these early opportunities were more likely to be open to women with enough money and education to enter the professional workplace.
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This content downloaded from 143.107.3.152 on Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:28:05 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms WORKS CITED
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