The Voyage Out

Relationships deepen between Rachel, Helen, and the new group of English tourists. St. John Hirst has a particularly important influence in these chapters. Hirst doesn’t just have a hard time relating to women, he also is disliked by men. Hirst’s superiority complex is so extreme that he believes that few people, man or woman, are worthy of real conversation. This attitude is intimidating to Rachel, who has had so little contact with other people that she can recognize Hirst hurts her feelings, but she can’t name why. Rather than come to terms with Hirst’s personality and sexism, Rachel tries to keep up with him by reading the book he assigns to her explicitly as a test of her intellectual capabilities: Edward Gibbon’s imposing History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But this is a futile effort because Hirst will never respect Rachel as an equal. On the other hand, Rachel and Hirst are equally socially awkward. In a sense, they are foils for one another, as Rachel’s sheltered life and narrow education—confined entirely to music—represents an Edwardian ideal for young women just as Hirst’s equally sheltered life and obsessively rigorous education represents an ideal for young men. In keeping with the conventional role of a literary foil, Hirst’s antagonistic relationship with Rachel ultimately spurs her process of Self-Discovery, leading her to develop a stronger sense of her own preferences in opposition to his authoritarian judgment.

The naïveté and social ineptitude of both Rachel and Hirst are balanced by the outgoingness and generosity of Hewet and Helen. Hirst is besotted by Helen because of her beauty and her capacity for conversation. Her positive, wise, and rational energy makes Hirst feel comfortable with her. He is convinced that she’s the only woman worthy of conversation with him. Helen recognizes Hirst’s attraction to her, which she finds flattering, but she is still wise enough to see Hirst as she sees Rachel—young, immature, and in need of more real-life experiences. Helen advises Hirst to pursue the bar exam and move to London so that he can get away from his bubble and learn more about the world around him, just as she advises Rachel to travel and read literature so she can be more exposed to the reality of the full human experience. Hewet, for his part, develops an intense attraction to Rachel, though at first he can’t explain why. Hewet has a more outgoing personality than Rachel does, and he is able to put words to thoughts and feelings that Rachel has but can’t express. As a novelist, he is sensitive to the internal workings of the human mind and spirit. He guides Rachel through conversations that she would not be able to have with anyone else, least of all with Hirst. He doesn’t judge Rachel for her immaturity, and he patiently converses with her about topics she’s only just learning about. He’s more accepting of Rachel than Hirst is, implying that Hewet would be a good romantic match for Rachel.

In these chapters, Woolf continuously alludes to The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, published starting in 1776 through 1789. In doing so, she satirizes not only the pomposity and sexism of a certain British intellectual tradition but also the system of Colonialism and the Concept of Civilization that tradition props up. Gibbon’s series of six thick volumes explores the entire history of Western culture, though it should be noted that Gibbon’s conception of “Western culture” is itself a product of European colonialism—a grand narrative intended to legitimate the European powers as the inheritors and guarantors of a great tradition stretching back to antiquity. This vision of history was still very much ascendant in Woolf’s England, though by the time The Voyage Out was published, the horror and destruction of the First World War had begun to shake its foundations. Gibbon’s text is a notoriously difficult one, thick with endless names and dates on which generations of English schoolboys had been ruthlessly quizzed. In Woolf’s time, it was required reading for the well-educated man. By associating it with the odious Hirst, Woolf satirically suggests that the book itself is as tedious and authoritarian in its worldview as he is. Rachel struggles to read the book not because she’s a woman but because she’s bored by it. Even so, she feels pressure to read it so she can be considered well-versed and knowledgeable. Woolf uses this book to satirize her characters’ intellectual pomposity. Woolf gently mocks characters like Hirst who mistakenly believe that reading about the history of Western civilization makes the reader a good, worthy, educated, smart person. In fact, this satire mirrors the early satirizing of the Dalloways. Just as Clarissa and Richard Dalloway believe in the superiority of the British Empire, Hirst’s attachment to The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire reveals that he is invested in the centrality of Western history as the most important world history. This is highlighted through the irony of being in South America and caring more about Western European history and life than in learning about South American history and life.

Woolf implies budding romantic relationships between Rachel and Hewet and suggests that Hirst is falling in love with Helen despite Helen being married and much older than him. Woolf has explored the topic of love in this novel since the beginning, when the Dalloways espoused the beauty of having love in their lives. In these chapters, Woolf continues the exploration of love through Evelyn’s internal conflict. Evelyn is a young, unmarried English woman who finds herself entangled in two separate potential love affairs. She is conflicted in love because she worries that she’s in love with two people at the same time. Through Evelyn, Woolf pushes against the accepted boundaries of romantic love, wondering whether it’s possible to be in love with two people at the same time. This question leads to more internal and external conflicts, as Evelyn questions the degree to which romantic love can be trusted as a foundation on which to build a life and she weighs the values that might allow her to choose one lover over another.

For Evelyn, love is partially about being able to identify what she loves about a person. For Hewet, whom she turns to for advice, love is a feeling that defies identification. Hewet believes that he is right and judges Evelyn for her conundrum, but the novel makes clear that it is possible to fall in love in different ways. The conversation with Evelyn about love exposes some of Hewet’s misogyny. He judges Evelyn for flirting too much with men and dismisses her real conflict as the whims of a loose woman. Evelyn is a direct communicator and calls Hewet out on being unfair to her, but he doesn’t care. Evelyn wanted a man’s perspective on her problem so she could better understand how the two men she’s in love with might feel. But Hewet doesn’t think Evelyn has a real problem beyond a female inability to understand relations between two people. Woolf highlights that in her society, there are double standards between men and women. Hewet is himself confused about being in love, but he doesn’t give Evelyn the same respect to believe that she might be going through something like him. Love becomes yet another battlefield between the sexes, highlighting how men and women think of love differently and how their perspectives of love are treated differently by their society.

Woolf also continues her exploration of intellectualism versus art in these chapters. Hirst and Hewet present opposite sides of this debate. Hirst is intellectually driven, while Hewet, a novelist, is interested in the power of art to move people and reflect the human experience. Hirst’s over-intellectualization of everything suggests that Woolf finds intellectualism purposeless unless it’s coupled with art. Hirst may know a lot of facts, but he has a difficult time expressing himself and connecting with other. Hirst’s entire world is intellectual, which makes him robotic. As a juxtaposition, Hewet, the novelist, can tap into deep connections with people because his art form gives him access to thinking about the human experience. Indeed, Woolf is herself a novelist and uses this novel to celebrate the novel as a natural extension of the human experience. After all, Rachel is moved by novels, not by a historical work of fact such as The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Hewet worries about his art form because he realizes that few people in his society value novels. Through Hewet, Woolf expresses her own concerns about how novels are received in society. Moreover, through Hewet, Woolf expresses her own admiration of the writing process and the ability of novels to connect human experiences across culture, time, and place.