Woolf, Postcards, and the Elision of Race: Colonizing Women in The Voyage Out

When Helen and Ridley Ambrose jostle their way through London's narrow streets toward a ship bound for South America in the opening pages of Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, Ridley momentarily becomes "entangled . . . with a man selling picture postcards." ¹ When Rachel Vinrace, another passenger on board the Euphrosyne, attempts to recall London life while strolling through a South American town, she begins by acknowledging the kind of entanglement Ridley tries to leave behind: "First there are men selling picture postcards" (VO, 91). It makes sense that Rachel's effort to think her way back into England should begin with the selling of postcards, for by 1915 a craze for picture postcards had made them a prominent feature of everyday life. The first picture postcards apparently emanated from the Paris Exhibition of 1889, and many more were produced in England for such large-scale exhibitions as London's Imperial International Exhibition in 1909 and the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924. This essay situates the story of Rachel's education within the cultural politics propagated by colonial postcards and imperial exhibitions, and argues that the novel's culminating scene of cross-cultural encounter uses race to address issues of gender and sexuality that are part of Rachel's baggage on her voyage out of England. ²

Written during the so-called golden age of picture postcards, The Voyage Out follows Rachel up the Amazon in search of a place "where none but natives had ever trod" (VO, 225). What she discovers instead is the difficulty of disentangling herself from a characteristically modern form of cultural expression. Thanks in part to new postal regulations, postcards circulated in unprecedented numbers in England at the turn of the century, and millions more were sent home by English travelers exploring the boundaries of empire. Far from mere exotic throwaways, widely-collected colonial postcards contributed to imperial stereotyping by disseminating primitivist images of indigenous peoples during the most jingoistic period of England's global dominance. Images of the native other were also imprinted onto the English imagination by domestic postcards printed for imperial exhibitions. Underlying the early-century vogue for picture postcards, as well as the concomitant resurgence of imperial romance, was a desire for authenticity attached to exotic locales. In a historical moment increasingly self-conscious about the inescapably mediated nature of reality, colonial postcards satisfied the desire for the authentic (i.e., the seemingly immediate) even as their cataloging of exotic images contributed to the English sense that the realm of the unexplored was rapidly shrinking. ³

The process of globalization in the early twentieth century was not yet far enough along to require the late-century coinage "globality" to describe the economic integration of a wholly interconnected world. But The Voyage Out registers an impression of impending globality by linking the crowded banks of the Thames to the exotic streets of Santa Marina through the ubiquity of the picture postcard: Ridley's literal entanglement becomes Rachel's imagined one. Part Bildungsroman, part imperial romance, Woolf's first novel sometimes figures Rachel's journey to South America as an attempt to voyage out of culture and history altogether, but her engagement to Terence Hewet while traveling up the Amazon in effect turns the South American journey into a trip back into England. Given that Woolf never set foot in South America, it is not surprising that the mossy path running alongside the Amazon begins to resemble "a drive in an English forest" or that her description of native women up the Amazon appears to be informed by the popular ethnography of colonial postcards and imperial exhibitions (VO, 257). Richard Dalloway, who along with his wife Clarissa makes his first appearance in The Voyage Out, finds the spread of Englishness deeply satisfying: the "unity of aim, of dominion, of progress" spreading under the Union Jack, he tells Rachel, makes all the...