Contours of Travel and Exile in The Voyage Out

Contours of Travel and Exile in The Voyage Out Erica L. Johnson Virginia Woolf makes the geographical point of departure for The Voyage Out clear in the opening pages of the novel as the Ambroses make thenway to the ship that will transport them to their vacation house in South America. Straggling through a particularly industrial London cityscape, Helen Ambrose takes in motor cars and factory chimneys, and notes the tripartite class system of the crowd around them. Her quite detailed vision of everyday English life clearly situates her husband and herself in thenhomeland before they climb aboard the Euphrosyne. In contrast, thenniece , Rachel Vinrace, begins her voyage from the less solid ground of the vessel itself. Her relationship with London as "home" is immediately called into question when, upon departure, she and Helen regard the city ("a circumscribed mound, eternally burnt, eternally scarred ... a crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser," [18]), and Rachel's response is, "How beautiful!" While Helen is well-acquainted with the London of the narrator's description through her own experience as its citizen, the extent to which Rachel either identifies with or even knows London poses a significant problem for her status as a traveler. That is, the traveler moves between different locations, and experiences distance from home, but Rachel, an unanchored subject, claims no home from which to travel as the ship sets sail, with the consequence that her status as a traveler differs from that of her aunt or uncle. JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 31.1 (Winter 2001): 65-86. Copyright © 2001 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 66 JNT Thus, the voyage of The Voyage Out takes on different characteristics according to different characters' experiences of "home" and "away"; indeed , travel is never a simple presence in narrative, as numerous critical works on the theme of travel in literature have shown. Rosi Braidotti points out that travel is a particularly important and challenging endeavor for female subjects, given the "perversely monological mental habits of phallocentrism" (2) integral to traditional narratives of travel. By focusing on not only configurations of gendered subjectivity, then, but on the movements of gendered subjects, feminist theorists implicitly dismantle any static definition of female subjectivity, for the very concept of the gendered subject in motion is open to and constituted by shifting, diverse models of female subjectivity. It is precisely this fluidity of experience and identity that Braidotti, who identifies herself as a nomad, seeks to define in terms of nomadism, a concept that she helpfully distinguishes from exile and migration. Briefly stated, while the nomad is an agent of her own travel, and while the migrant is suspended between the distinct reference points of a lost home and a desired arrival in a new place, the location of the exile hinges on fewer and less distinct points of reference; indeed, in some cases the exile may possess neither agency nor home.1 Thus, the presence of an exiled subject in a text undermines assumed points of reference ; the very concept of exile demands an explication of travel and of boundaries that define "home" and "away" in narrative. Caren Kaplan addresses the issue of boundaries in her analysis of exile and tourism, explaining that although travel of any kind presupposes the presence of boundaries in the world, these boundaries occur unproblematically for the tourist, whereas the exile's undefined relationship to boundaries introduces telling questions with regard to the legitimacy of boundaries and the historical process through which they are formed.2 Kaplan notes that "if the tourist traverses boundaries, they are boundaries that the tourist participates in creating" (58), thus indicating the imperialist history of tourism that is very much at play in Woolf's novel. In The Voyage Out, Woolf clearly identifies the imperial practice of creating boundaries through her frequent references to the colonial project in which her British characters invest so much of their identities. The Euphrosyne sets anchor, at the end of its trip, not in a foreign country far from England, but in "a virgin land behind a veil" from which "English sailors bore away bars of silver, bales of linen, timbers of cedar wood, golden crucifixes knobbed Contours...