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Mark A. Wollaeger
MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, Volume 64, Number 1, March 2003,

pp. 33-69 (Article)
Published by Duke University Press
For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mlq/summary/v064/64.1wollaeger.html
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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
Mark A. Wollaeger
I n A Room of One’s Own (1929) Virginia Woolf advises women writers

to “think back” through their mothers, but the tortuous composition
of The Voyage Out (1915) reveals that, to begin her own career, Woolf
first had to think past her husband to get to Joseph Conrad.1 The Voyage
Out assumed its final form only after Woolf had returned from her hon-
eymoon to read Leonard Woolf’s first novel, The Village in the Jungle
(1913), in manuscript. Both The Village in the Jungle and The Voyage Out
are indebted to Conrad, particularly to Heart of Darkness (1899 –1900),
and this common debt magnified the influence of Leonard’s book on
Woolf’s. While many have written about the influence of Heart of Dark-
ness on The Voyage Out, Conrad’s importance to Woolf has not been
understood in the context of her marriage to Leonard, a colonial
administrator who renounced his outpost of progress in Ceylon to set
up house in London with her while finishing The Village in the Jungle.2
I thank Jay Clayton, Gayle Rogers, Jen Shelton, and Karin Westman for their com-
ments on earlier drafts of this essay, and the audiences at the annual conferences of
the Modernist Studies Association and the International Society for the Study of Nar-
rative Literature. I am grateful also to Barbara Fuchs for her editorial acumen and to
MLQ’s anonymous reader, who provided a generously detailed and helpful report.
1 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
1957), 79. Hereafter cited as Room.

2 See, e.g., Rosemary Pitt, “The Exploration of Self in Heart of Darkness and
Woolf’s The Voyage Out,” Conradiana 10 (1978): 141– 54. For a more detailed com-
Modern Language Quarterly 64:1, March 2003. © 2003 University of Washington.

34 MLQ ❙ March 2003
Far from a love triangle, however, the web of relations linking Leonard,
Woolf, and Conrad also implicates one of Woolf’s literary mothers, for
to distance herself from the Edwardian writers she would criticize in
“Modern Novels” (1919), Woolf also had to disentangle herself from
Jane Austen, whom she singles out in A Room of One’s Own as one of the
few women writers strong enough (unlike George Eliot or Charlotte
Brontë) to laugh at the predominant masculinity of English prose (80).
Thus if Woolf did not quite contravene A Room of One’s Own by going
to “the great men writers for help” (79), the incipient female mod-
ernism of The Voyage Out was catalyzed by her productive engagement
with two male writers (one great, one not), who helped define her dif-
ference from Austen.
In her journal in 1906, two years before beginning the story that
ultimately became The Voyage Out, Woolf tried to capture “the domes-
ticities” of the “soft grass paths” of Norfolk by reaching for a simile: “It
is so soft, so melancholy, so wild, & yet so willing to be gentle: like some
noble untamed woman conscious that she has no beauty to vaunt, that
nobody very much wants her.”3 The image of the untamed woman goes
to the heart of the emotional turbulence that was stirred up by Woolf’s
decision in 1912 to marry Leonard, and its relevance to my argument
is threefold: it is precisely the paired notions of domesticity and the
parative study of Heart of Darkness and The Voyage Out see Marianne DeKoven, Rich
and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1991), 85 –138. I comment on DeKoven’s book at the end of this essay.
3 Virginia Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897 – 1909, ed.
Mitchell A. Leaska (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 312, 313. Although
she was not yet married to Leonard Woolf, I most often refer to Virginia Stephen as
Woolf, the name by which she is known as a writer, except where confusion with her
future husband may arise. For the most part I follow the customary practice in Vir-
ginia Woolf criticism of referring to her husband as Leonard.
Mark A. Wollaeger is associate professor of English at Vanderbilt Uni-

versity. He is author of Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism
(1990), coeditor of Joyce and the Subject of History (1996), and editor of
James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man”: A Casebook (forth-
coming). His work in progress includes a study of British modernism
and the new media. His essay “Killing Stevie: Modernity, Modernism,
and Mastery in Conrad and Hitchcock” appeared in M L Q 58:3 (Sep-
tember 1997).
Wollaeger ❙ Emergence of Female Modernism 35
taming of women that are at issue in Woolf’s response to The Village in

the Jungle, a novel about the domestication of women in the wilds of Cey-
lon; the untamed woman also suggests the myth of the Amazon warrior,
which undoubtedly lies behind Woolf’s decision to send her heroine,
Rachel Vinrace, to South America, where she travels up a great river;
and, finally, the image leads back to Conrad, whose “savage and superb”
African woman on the banks of the mighty river in Heart of Darkness
informs Woolf’s representation of native women upriver in The Voyage
Out.4
Leonard and Virginia Woolf worked closely together in 1912 as
they were becoming engaged and finishing their novels. Leonard notes
in his autobiography that in January and February 1913, two months
after she read the version of The Village in the Jungle that he sent to the
publisher Edward Arnold, Virginia was “writing every day with a kind
of tortured intensity.”5 Nevertheless, several critics reject the idea that
The Village in the Jungle influenced The Voyage Out ; others simply ignore
the possibility; no one has explored it.6 Louise A. DeSalvo’s edition of
4 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3d ed. (New York:
Norton, 1988), 60. Subsequent page references are to this edition.

5 Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964), 148. For Virginia Woolf’s acknowl-
edgment in November 1912 of having read The Village in the Jungle see The Letters of
Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, 6 vols. (New York: Har-
court Brace Jovanovich, 1975 – 80), 2:12. Hereafter cited as Letters.
6 Although Mark Hussey observes that “the early fictions of Virginia Woolf
(Melymbrosia, The Voyage Out, and Night and Day) and Leonard Woolf (The Village in
the Jungle, The Wise Virgins) create a complex structure of comments upon one
another and upon the issues of affectivity, engagement, marriage, and passion in
which their authors were themselves so caught up between 1906 and 1919,” he is
interested in Night and Day as a response to The Wise Virgins, not in The Voyage Out
and The Village in the Jungle (“Refractions of Desire: The Early Fiction of Virginia and
Leonard Woolf,” Modern Fiction Studies 38 [1992]: 127). Both Natania Rosenfeld and
Theresa M. Thompson compare The Village in the Jungle and The Voyage Out, but nei-
ther addresses the former’s influence on the latter (Rosenfeld, Outsiders Together: Vir-
ginia and Leonard Woolf [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000]; Thomp-
son, “Confronting Modernist Racism in the Post-Colonial Classroom: Teaching
Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle,” in Re:
Reading, Re: Writing, Re: Teaching Virginia Woolf: Selected Papers from the Fourth Annual
Conference on Virginia Woolf, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, June 9 – 12,
1994, ed. Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer [New York: Pace University Press,
1995], 241– 50). George Spater and Ian Parsons write as if the couple never read
Melymbrosia, a reconstructed version of the novel as it existed prior to

the Woolfs’ engagement in late May 1912, reveals that many scenes,
including the crucial scenes upriver in which Virginia describes her vil-
lage in the jungle, were radically revised after her honeymoon.7 Yet
even DeSalvo, who maps the relationship between the revision process
and the progress of the Woolfs’ engagement, never mentions The Vil-
lage in the Jungle during her discussion of the many intertexts that haunt
The Voyage Out.8
By proposing that Virginia Woolf’s debt to Conrad offers insight
into her response to Leonard’s novel as she was rewriting her own, I
one another’s work (A Marriage of True Minds: An Intimate Portrait of Leonard and Vir-
ginia Woolf [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977]). Peter F. Alexander notes
that when Leonard and Virginia were finishing their novels, they were living in the
same house on Brunswick Square on separate floors; they “would each write about
500 words in the morning and spend the afternoon walking, sitting in parks and
talking about their work.” But he then argues that Virginia could only have influ-
enced Leonard, not vice versa, because the “form and content [of The Voyage Out]
were fixed long before Leonard entered her life” (Leonard and Virginia Woolf: A Lit-
erary Partnership [New York: St. Martin’s, 1992], 72, 73). Lyndall Gordon writes in a
similar vein: “Although she completed two drafts of The Voyage Out after her engage-
ment, they were the last of numerous drafts and not much affected by the new
relationship” (Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984],
109).
7 See Louise A. DeSalvo, ed., introduction to Melymbrosia: An Early Version of “The
Voyage Out” (New York: New York Public Library, 1982), xii–xliv; and DeSalvo, Vir-
ginia Woolf’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield,
1980), 8, 75. Elizabeth Heine has also done extensive work on these revisions (“The
Earlier Voyage Out: Virginia Woolf’s First Novel,” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities
82 [1979]: 294 – 316; “New Light on Melymbrosia,” in Virginia Woolf Miscellanies: Pro-
ceedings of the First Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, Pace University, New York, June
7 – 9, 1991, ed. Mark Hussey and Vara Neverow-Turk [New York: Pace University
Press, 1992], 227– 30). Also invaluable is Heine, “Virginia Woolf’s Revisions of The
Voyage Out,” in The Voyage Out, ed. Elizabeth Heine (London: Hogarth, 1990), 399 –
463. Often supplementing and correcting DeSalvo, Heine’s edition prints important
passages missing from Melymbrosia and others cut from late typescripts of The Voyage
Out.
8 Of all critics writing on The Voyage Out, only Heine acknowledges the possible
influence of Leonard, remarking in passing that “Virginia Woolf’s more sympathetic

later portrayal of the native village probably also reflects her husband’s first novel,
The Village in the Jungle” (“Virginia Woolf’s Revisions,” 435). Although Heine does
not explore intertextual relations between the two novels, she often notes how
Woolf’s relationship with Leonard can be felt in specific revisions (e.g., 402 – 3, 431,
434 – 35, 440).
do not mean to imply that she was indebted to Leonard on anything

like the same scale or to lend credence to attacks made on him as an
insidiously controlling husband by imputing a baleful influence to his
novel. Rather, Woolf’s engagement and marriage deepened her ambiva-
lence toward powerful male authorities, making her highly sensitive to
writers such as Conrad, Edward Gibbon, and, new though he was to the
profession, Leonard. The story of Rachel Vinrace’s attempt to voyage
out into the world is clearly a surrogate for Woolf’s efforts to establish
herself as a novelist, and Leonard’s parallel efforts could not but affect
her own story of a young woman who becomes engaged to an aspiring
novelist, Terence Hewet. Given Leonard and Virginia’s anxieties about
the prospect of marrying, it is not surprising that both of their novels
feature young women who resist male sexual predators and often seem
uncomfortable with heteronormative sexuality. As a Jew, Leonard was
highly conscious of his status as an outsider courting across what was
understood as a racial divide, and Woolf’s sexual trauma at the hands of
Gerald Duckworth had given her good reason to doubt that she would
ever feel sexually compatible with a man. But my interest lies less in
structural affinities deriving from biography than in textual traces of
Woolf’s response to Leonard’s novel that throw into relief the intersec-
tion of biography and literary history.
Literary history alone would not assign much weight to Leonard’s
novel. Had Virginia not read The Village in the Jungle while revising The
Voyage Out, the novel would be of interest mainly to postcolonial critics
and students of colonial Ceylon.9 But for Virginia, The Village in the Jun-
gle was powerful because she found in it a disturbing version of the mar-
riage plot that bore directly on the problems of autonomy she was
exploring through Rachel Vinrace and living out in her relationship
with Leonard. How does a young woman establish her own authority in
a public sphere dominated by powerful male voices? How can she
9 In a critique of British colonial ethnography in Sri Lanka, Bruce Kapferer sin-
gles out The Village in the Jungle for its unusual empathy with the Sinhalese and Tamil
peoples while acknowledging Leonard’s expected aloofness as a colonial adminis-
trator (“From the Periphery to the Centre: Ethnography and the Critique of Anthro-
pology in Sri Lanka,” in Localizing Strategies: Regional Traditions of Ethnographic Writing,
ed. Richard Fardon [Edinburgh: Scottish Academic; Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1990], 280 – 302).
remain “untamed”? These questions bear in turn on the relationship

between the composition of The Voyage Out and the partially thwarted
emergence of female modernism from within a novelistic tradition that
Woolf associated with Austen. Conrad, I argue, served as a counterpoise
to Austen, and Leonard’s novel evoked Conrad even as it recast in luridly
erotic terms the most retrograde qualities of Austen’s marriage plots.
The discursive pressures exerted by Heart of Darkness and The Village in
the Jungle on The Voyage Out show that Woolf’s responses to Conrad and
Leonard brought her to the verge of a modernism from which she
retreated in her second novel, Night and Day (1919), before recovering
the modernist impulses that would shape the remainder of her career.
Rewriting the Pattern of Everyday Life: Rachel As Artist
The twin influences of Conrad and Leonard are best gauged by under-
standing Rachel as Woolf’s surrogate, for Rachel’s ambivalence toward
inherited forms of order mirrors Woolf’s struggle with literary tradi-
tion. Although Rachel despises “the imposition of ponderous stupidity,
the weight of the entire world,” and feels that “her own body was the
source of all the life in the world, which tried to burst forth here —
there—and was repressed,” she is also desperate to know how the world
works.10 Having led a sheltered life with her aunts in Richmond, Rachel
is eager to take in everything the worldly Dalloways (who make their
first appearance here) can tell her when she meets them on board ship
en route to South America. Veritable encyclopedias of conventional
attitudes, they whet her appetite for knowledge and leave her hungrier
than ever for new experiences. She is therefore easily hooked by Mr.
Flushing’s misleading promise to take her on a river expedition to a vil-
lage where “none but natives had ever trod,” a place of which “scarcely
anything was known” (224).
But Rachel’s desire for knowledge and experience becomes increas-
ingly problematic as the novel unfolds, for the more she voyages out
into the world, the more she feels circumscribed by what the novel
10 Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (London: Penguin, 1992), 244. Subsequent
page references are to this edition.

repeatedly terms the “pattern” of everyday life, not least because the
pattern turns out to be as firmly entrenched in the native village as it is
back home. While most characters find the predictable rhythms of
social life consoling and enabling, Rachel is deeply ambivalent. At one
moment she suspects that “things formed themselves into a pattern not
only for her but for [others], and in that pattern lay satisfaction and
meaning” (297); the next moment the rituals of everyday life seem to
her unbearable. When Rachel finally dies after a protracted illness that
disrupts the English colony in the hotel, Terence’s friend Hirst feels his
sense of relief turn into a “feeling of profound happiness” and, in the
last pages of the novel, is “content to sit silently watching the pattern
build itself up” (352). Although Hirst considers himself an iconoclast,
his feelings reflect the community’s secret satisfaction in reestablishing
the normal way of the world after Rachel’s death.
Before falling ill, Rachel is able to subvert the pattern of everyday
life only once, when she plays the piano at the engagement dance held
for Susan Warrington. Although fleeting, the moment is crucial, for it
reveals the potentially transformative power of her imagination. The
next day the disruptive energies of Rachel’s inventive performance are
reawakened, only to be bound again when she settles down to read Gib-
bon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, lent her by Hirst to “educate”
her. The tension between these two moments is fundamental to the
dynamic of self-assertion and assimilation that characterizes Rachel’s
relation to the world and Woolf’s relation to her predecessors at this
point in her career: Austen, whose fiction lies behind the engagement
dance and the picnic that precedes it, and Conrad, whose “moments of
vision” are linked to the disruption and ultimate dissolution of the mar-
riage plots perfected by Austen.11
Even before her performance at the dance, Rachel makes a habit
of sequestering herself in her room to play the piano and thus threat-
ens to subvert the social value of the cultured young woman by remov-
ing herself from the market in which her musical ability counts as an
11 “Mr Conrad: A Conversation,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew
McNeillie, 3 vols. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986 – 88), 3:378. Here-
after cited as Essays. Woolf took the phrase from a passage in Lord Jim, which she cites
in her 1917 review of the novel (Essays, 2:142). See n. 33.
asset.12 Woolf amplifies the subversive force of Rachel’s music during

the engagement party by restaging her tactical retreat as a public per-
formance. When the band packs up for the night before the dancers
are ready to quit, Rachel sits down at the piano, but she exhausts her
dance repertoire after a few tunes. She then begins to play a random
medley of “old English hunting songs, carols, and hymn tunes” at a fast
tempo while commanding the nonplussed dancers to “invent the steps”
(152). Releasing Dionysian energies from the Apollonian confines of
the social, Rachel’s rescripting of traditional English tunes — it is a
species of quodlibet, or musical collage — transforms a dance that
began as if lifted from Austen into a raucous approximation of modern
eurythmics. Hirst hops with “incredible swiftness” from one leg to
another; Terence swims through the room, imitating “the voluptuous
dreamy dance of an Indian maiden”; Mr. Pepper executes “an inge-
nious pointed step derived from figure-skating . . . while Mrs. Thorn-
bury trie[s] to recall an old country dance.” The “romp” culminates
spontaneously in a “great round dance” that swings faster and faster
until “one link of the chain — Mrs. Thornbury —[gives] way,” sending
the rest “flying across the room in all directions” (152). If the usual
engagement party can be considered a centripetal affair, in which soci-
ety pulls together to celebrate the prospect of its own reproduction,
Rachel accents the countervailing force of the centrifugal, a pulling
apart that contests Susan’s ecstatic vision of a world in which there will
be no more marriages because everyone is already hitched: “Marriage,
marriage, that was the right thing, the only thing, the solution required
by every one she knew” (164). Rachel, in contrast, has announced to
Clarissa Dalloway that she will never marry.
The presiding spirit of the dance is Austen, but an Austen pushed
beyond herself. When Rachel’s performance unwinds the “tight plait”
of social constriction she associates with Clarissa’s favorite novel, Austen’s
Persuasion (49), Rachel momentarily becomes a surrogate for the exper-
imental novelist Woolf herself later became. Throughout the first half
of The Voyage Out Woolf’s satiric tone, particularly her mocking presen-
12 Woolf later returned more caustically to the gender politics of the piano in
connection with the plight of “the educated man’s daughter”: “It was with a view to
marriage that she tinkled on the piano, but was not allowed to join an orchestra”
(Three Guineas [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938], 37, 38).
tation of the Dalloways, echoes Austen’s comedy of manners. The pic-

nic during which Susan becomes engaged is indebted to the famous
Box Hill outing in Emma, a novel whose eponymous heroine claims that
she will never marry. Unlike Rachel, who never stops struggling with
Terence, however, Emma ultimately subordinates her wayward imagi-
nation to the greater maturity of Mr. Knightley. In a 1913 review Woolf
leavens her praise of Austen as one of the three greatest English nov-
elists by suggesting that “she has too little of the rebel in her constitu-
tion.” Far from bridling at the imposition of ponderous stupidities,
Austen “seems at times to have accepted her life too calmly as she found
it,” despite all that was “smug, commonplace, and . . . artificial.”13 Yet
Woolf sensed the potential for more in Austen. In an essay written after
she had broken new fictional ground with the experimental techniques
of Jacob’s Room (1922) and as she was writing Mrs. Dalloway (1925),
Woolf suggests that in Persuasion, her last novel, Austen began to intro-
duce a new range of emotion and feeling into her fiction owing to her
intuition that “the world is larger, more mysterious, and more roman-
tic than she had supposed.” In The Voyage Out Woolf already seems to
acknowledge this capacity in Austen through Rachel, who owes some-
thing not only to Emma but to the piano-playing heroine of Persuasion,
Anne Elliot. Looking back at Persuasion from the vantage of her own
increasingly bold career, Woolf asks, “Was [Austen] not beginning . . .
to contemplate a little voyage of discovery?”14
Rachel’s performance at the dance thus disrupts Austen from
within and dramatizes the capacity for emotional release and growth
that Woolf sensed in Persuasion. Had Austen continued to write, accord-
ing to Woolf, her novels would have become “deeper and more sug-
gestive,” and she would have been “the forerunner of Henry James and
of Proust”— in other words, of narrative modernism (“Jane Austen,”
145). Against this background Rachel can be seen as the locus of mod-
ernist sensibility in a novel suspended between Austenian (what Woolf
probably would have called “Edwardian”) and modernist modes. Gaz-
13 “Jane Austen,” in Essays, 2:11.

14 Virginia Woolf, “Jane Austen,” in The Common Reader, First Series, ed. Andrew
McNeillie (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 144, 143. Hereafter cited
as “Jane Austen.”
ing from an armchair out the window and thinking about her life as
“only a light passing over the surface and vanishing” (Voyage Out, 114),
Rachel anticipates Woolf’s famous evocations of the ephemerality of
existence in “Modern Fiction,”15 and as she plays the piano, Rachel
remains in the moment, breaking up and reassembling older social
and aesthetic forms in a virtuoso performance of her independence. If
Rachel’s sensibility were permitted to structure the entire novel, an aes-
thetic of interruption might make The Voyage Out look more like Woolf’s
last novel, Between the Acts (1941), in which social and narrative frag-
mentations are barely contained by the shared spectacle of a local
pageant;16 or perhaps, foreshadowing Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness
techniques in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse (1927), the disorient-
ing interpenetration of memory and imagination in Rachel’s delirium
would permeate the story. But Rachel’s release from tradition is only
momentary. Thereafter Woolf allows Terence to assert himself at Rachel’s
expense by, for example, criticizing her music as a distraction from the
more important labor of his novel writing and comparing her playing
to the spectacle of “an unfortunate old dog going round on its hind legs
in the rain” (Voyage Out, 276).
It would make for a neat critical narrative if Woolf had emerged as
a distinctively post-Austenian novelist after killing off Rachel, who
begins to die as soon as she is drawn into a marriage plot. But in fact
Woolf’s sacrifice of Rachel did not immediately reopen the space of
experimentation that Rachel enjoyed at the dance. Much to Woolf’s
annoyance, Katherine Mansfield offered her a backhanded compli-
ment by describing Night and Day, with reasonable accuracy, as “Miss
Austen up-to-date.” Mansfield’s image of the book “sailing into port
serene and resolute . . . [lacking] any sign that she has made a perilous
voyage” invokes The Voyage Out (although perhaps not intentionally) as
15 “The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or

engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant show of
innumerable atoms. . . . Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life
is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning
of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying,
this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit [?]” (Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in Common
Reader, 150).
16 For Astradur Eysteinsson, such an aesthetic of interruption is fundamental to
modernism (The Concept of Modernism [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990]).
the bearer of modernist impulses disavowed in the new novel: “We had
thought that this world was vanished for ever, that it was impossible to
find on the great ocean of literature a ship that was unaware of what has
been happening. Yet here is Night and Day, fresh, new, and exquisite, a
novel in the tradition of the English novel. In the midst of our admira-
tion it makes us feel old and chill.”17 Another reviewer made the same
comparison with Austen, mocking Woolf for her preoccupation with
social banalities and deriding her overly deliberate characters as snails.
After rehashing these responses in painful detail in her diary, Woolf
finally asserts, “I had rather write in my own way of ‘four Passionate
Snails’ than be, as [Mansfield] maintains, Jane Austen over again.”18
Woolf soon began to write novels more attuned to “what has been hap-
pening,” but in The Voyage Out she advances and retreats at the same
time. She lends Rachel the power to transform conventions but ends
up subordinating the disruptive force of Rachel’s music to the power of
the word, ultimately by shifting her own future as a novelist to Terence,
but first by dramatizing the weight of literary and imperial history in
Rachel’s reading of Gibbon.
Through Gibbon, Rachel enters into a form of male discourse that
is, paradoxically, both inhibiting and liberating, and it is through Gib-
bon as well that Conrad will enter as an alternative to Austen’s marriage
plots. Hirst insists that Rachel read The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, and the morning after her piano performance he sends her the
first volume. Later that morning, still warm in the afterglow of the
dance, Rachel wanders through an oddly charged landscape with
Balzac in one hand and Gibbon in the other. She turns to Gibbon first:
Never had any words been so vivid and so beautiful — Arabia Felix —
Aethiopia. But those were not more noble than the others, hardy bar-
barians, forests, and morasses. They seemed to drive roads back to the
very beginning of the world, on either side of which the populations of
all times and countries stood in avenues, and by passing down them all
knowledge would be hers, and the book of the world turned back to
17 Katherine Mansfield, review of Night and Day, Athenaeum, 21 November 1919,

rpt. in Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage, ed. Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 80, 79 – 80, 82.
18 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, 5 vols. (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1978 – 84), 1:316. Hereafter cited as Diary.

the very first page. Such was her excitement at the possibilities of
knowledge now opening before her that she ceased to read. (160)
Caught up in a sensual experience of empowerment, Rachel imagines

herself as the central figure in a display of royal authority. The image of
being flanked by “the populations of all times and countries” draws on
contemporary conventions of royal spectacle, such as those observed at
the coronation of Edward VII in 1904. Yet this power is as threatening
to her as it is uplifting, for the erotic charge of Rachel’s exaltation (cap-
tured in Woolf’s description of the books lying in the grass, “a tall stem
bending over and tickling the smooth brown cover of Gibbon, while the
mottled blue Balzac lay naked in the sun”) soon produces an urgent
need to stride away from the books “faster and faster, her body trying
to outrun her mind” (160, 161). Beyond expressing her conflicted attrac-
tion to the young men suddenly in her life, Rachel’s response crystal-
lizes the difficulty of locating herself in relation to the history they urge
her to read. Later, in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf cites Gibbon as one of
the chief architects of the “male sentence” that women writers must
learn not to write (79). By entering into Gibbon’s history, Rachel risks
losing her distinctively female perspective by becoming implicated in a
masculine form of knowledge that she finds seductive yet abhorrent.
But in recoiling from Gibbon, she cannot simply embrace Austen,
whom Woolf cites in the same passage from A Room of One’s Own for her
ability to devise an alternative to the masculine sentence, because Austen
is just as limiting, if in a different way. Rachel ultimately runs away from
Gibbon, but not before luxuriating in the experience of becoming mas-
ter of all she surveys.19
The tension between release and constraint in these scenes corre-
sponds to the discursive pressures exerted by other writers on Woolf’s
novel and illuminates her conflicted relationship to inherited forms
of order. This tension increased during her prolonged revisions of The
Voyage Out. Indeed, the writing and rewriting of the book almost ended
19 Woolf’s essay on Gibbon not only reveals her deeply mixed response to The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire but makes clear that she must have relished the
irony in attributing a repressive effect to so subversive a writer (“The Historian and
‘the Gibbon,’” in The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf, 4 vols. [New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966 – 67], 1:115 – 23).
Woolf’s career before it began. Woolf may have rewritten The Voyage Out
as many as twelve times and at one point was developing at least two ver-
sions at the same time. Whenever she rewrote the scene of Rachel’s fatal
delirium, she was in danger of lapsing into madness, and in September
1913, some months after she had finally finished the manuscript, she
became delusional and attempted suicide, delaying its publication by
several years. Then, just as the book was released in February 1915,
Woolf again became so deranged that she was confined for most of the
year and did not see Leonard for eight weeks.
DeSalvo has demonstrated that during the tumultuous process of
composition and revision Woolf in effect censored herself by censoring
Rachel, who becomes less and less forthright and outspokenly feminist,
and by recasting moments that revealed too much of her own inner life
(First Voyage, 102 – 4).20 But it is a fundamental irony that in moderating
Rachel’s voice Woolf began to find her own. On the verge of modern-
izing Austen by breaking the marriage plot’s hold on the young artist,
The Voyage Out becomes instead a compromise formation in which the
interpellative power of male discourse symbolized by Gibbon over-
shadows Rachel’s idiosyncratic intelligence; at the same time, however,
the influence of Conrad as mediated by Leonard helps break up the
established novel form that Woolf inherited from Austen.
Conrad between Leonard and Virginia
Any exploration of intertextual relations between The Voyage Out and

The Village in the Jungle must take into account their common debt to
Conrad. Woolf held Conrad in the highest regard, paying her respects
to “the spell of Conrad’s prose,” his “moments of vision,” “the astonish-
ing solidity” of his fictional world, and the “lasting importance” that
made him a “giant” among living writers.21 Woolf felt that Heart of Dark-
ness in particular revealed “the most complete and perfect expression
20 Given that Woolf toned herself down in revision, it makes sense that Rachel’s
performance at the dance is already substantially present in Melymbrosia and that the
scene of reading Gibbon, which rechannels the innovative energies of the earlier
scene, is barely developed.
21 See “Mr Conrad: A Conversation,” 378; “Mr Conrad’s Crisis,” in Essays, 2:227;
and “Mr Conrad’s ‘Youth,’” in Essays, 2:158.

of one side of his genius — the side that developed first and was most
directly connected with his experience. It has an extraordinary fresh-
ness and romance” (Essays, 2:159). It had, in other words, precisely what
Woolf thought was lacking in Austen, the romantic qualities she appre-
ciated in the gothic fiction of Ann Radcliffe. Conrad’s novella, to which
Woolf returned in the opening and closing pages of Between the Acts,
haunted her first novel from its inception, providing, among other
things, a model for the journey upriver that effectively initiates and
ends Rachel’s marriage plot. Leonard was indebted to Conrad, too.22
The Village in the Jungle echoes Conrad’s florid descriptions of the evil
lurking in the jungle to such a degree in its rather forced opening
pages that Leonard’s indictment “runs counter to the real nature of the
jungle” as the characters know it.23 Not long after finishing The Village
in the Jungle, Leonard gave a public lecture in which he displayed wide-
ranging familiarity with Conrad’s work as well as a tendency to identify
with him as an adventurer turned writer.24 In particular, Leonard praised
Youth (1902), the volume in which Heart of Darkness appeared, as exem-
plary of Conrad’s ability to blend realism and romance.
This triangular literary-historical relationship is complicated fur-
ther by the likelihood that Woolf experienced Leonard as a double for
Conrad, who was very much in the news at the time. Back in London
after serving as a colonial administrator in Ceylon, Leonard was the
writer-adventurer returning to the metropole after having been, like
Conrad, “directly connected” with the exotic periphery. In letters to
friends Woolf was inclined to exaggerate her fiancé’s doings in Ceylon
22 Elleke Boehmer discusses the Conradian qualities in Leonard’s letters home
from Ceylon between 1905 and 1911 and in his later short story, “Pearls and Swine,”
published in 1921 but drafted as early as 1912 (“‘Immeasurable Strangeness’ in
Imperial Times: Leonard Woolf and W. B. Yeats,” in Modernism and Empire, ed.
Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000],
esp. 95 – 98, 104 – 6).
23 E. F. C. Ludowyk, introduction to The Village in the Jungle, by Leonard Woolf
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), ix. Subsequent page references are to this
edition.
24 See Leonard Woolf, “Conrad’s Vision: The Illumination of Romance,” English
Literature in Transition 36 (1993): 286 – 302. For commentary on the lecture and
Leonard’s interest in Conrad see J. H. Stape, “The Critic As Autobiographer: Conrad
under Leonard Woolf’s Eyes,” English Literature in Transition 36 (1993): 277– 85.
by embellishing them with heroic incidents out of Conradian romance.

“He spent 7 years in Ceylon, governing natives, inventing ploughs,
shooting tigers,” she wrote to Madge Vaughan; “He has ruled India,”
she added to Lady Robert Cecil. This letter then links Leonard’s colo-
nial administration to his writing by immediately turning to The Village
in the Jungle: “He has a written a novel; so have I: we both hope to pub-
lish them in the autumn” (Letters, 1:628, 629).
Woolf’s hope for her own book went unfulfilled; the first time Vir-
ginia Stephen’s new name was attached to a published novel, it was
appended to her husband’s in a dedication to “V.W.” Hermione Lee
speculates that Woolf felt threatened by the comparative ease with
which Leonard finished The Village in the Jungle, published two years
before The Voyage Out.25 There can be no doubt that she envied his
achievement: “Its [sic] no use,” Woolf remarked to Lady Cecil, “for me
to say that I’m glad you liked Leonard’s book, as you know too well the
profound and secret vices of Authors” (Letters, 2:18).26 The same vice
shows through occasionally in Woolf’s lavish praise of Conrad. After
calling him one of two living giants — the other was Thomas Hardy —
Woolf compares critics to naturalists who “put their specimens into ant
heaps to be eaten clean of unnecessary flesh” and opines that the
“innumerable critics” armed with “pick and shovel” have managed to
“clear away a few encumbrances,” but “Mr Hardy and Mr Conrad are
the only two of our novelists who are indisputably large enough to
engage the services of a whole anthill” (Essays, 2:158). Stopping short
of outright hostility, Woolf’s mordant wit nevertheless reveals a com-
petitive need to assert herself in response to accomplished male col-
leagues.27
If Woolf did associate Leonard, the “penniless Jew” who seemed
so “foreign” to her (Letters, 1:500, 496), with Conrad, the Pole (imper-
fectly) turned Englishman, this association may explain why Conrad
25 Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996), 326.
26 Woolf repeated the sentiment a week later to Katherine Cox: “I’m glad you
liked Leonard’s novel —(you can’t see how insincerely I say that. . . .)” (Letters, 2:19).
27 Woolf’s anxious competitiveness was not confined to her relations with male
authors. She confided to her diary that after Mansfield’s review of Night and Day she
had refused to review the latest volume in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage sequence:
“If she’s good then I’m not” (Diary, 1:315).
became an increasingly insistent presence in the massive revisions she

undertook after her marriage: as Leonard loomed in her mind, so did
Conrad.28 What is certain, at all events, is that during the transition
from Melymbrosia to The Voyage Out Woolf added some allusions to Con-
rad and elaborated others.29 Most telling is her revision of the passage
in which Rachel thrills to Gibbon’s prose, for here a new allusion shows
how a particularly charged image from Heart of Darkness became a nodal
point for Woolf’s troubled yet productive relation to masculine power
in The Voyage Out. In one of several evocations of a return to human ori-
gins, Marlow tells his audience that “going up that river was like travel-
ling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted
on the earth and the big trees were kings” (35).30 This passage lies
behind Rachel’s response to Gibbon’s words: “They seemed to drive
roads back to the very beginning of the world. . . . by passing down
them all knowledge would be hers, and the book of the world turned
back to the very first page” (160). The heightened consciousness that
characterizes Rachel’s response is often linked to the trees that repeat-
edly thrust themselves into her awareness and to Conrad’s conjunction
of explosive energy (“vegetation rioted”) and constraining male author-
ity (“the big trees were kings”). The trope recurs, for instance, when in
a moment of “startling intensity, as though the dusty surface had been
peeled off everything, leaving only the reality and the instant,” Rachel
sees a group of people seated at tables: “A massive green tree stood over
them as if it were a moving force held at rest” (245). After reading
Ibsen, Rachel gazes out the window at a landscape that, in a phrase
anticipating Woolf’s praise of Conrad’s “astonishing solidity,” suddenly
appears “amazingly solid and clear”; she then sees “men on the hill
28 For Woolf’s thoughts about Conrad’s foreignness see also Diary, 2:49.
29 For one of many examples see the transformation of an incidental Conradian
cadence into a complex allusion in Woolf’s revision of the scene in which Helen
reads aloud a letter from Rachel’s father (Melymbrosia, 144; Voyage Out, 180). Underly-
ing the revised passage is the scene in Heart of Darkness in which Marlow first encoun-
ters the Chief Accountant (21– 22).
30 Woolf’s 1917 essay on Lord Jim suggests that such descriptions made a deep
impression on her: “The sea and tropical forests dominate us and almost overpower
us” (Essays, 2:143).
washing the trunks of olive trees with a white liquid” (112).31 This last
detail, added only after Woolf had returned from her honeymoon to
read The Village in the Jungle, partakes of the erotic charge found more
generally in The Voyage Out’s trees, which, rising “massively in front of
her,” make Rachel shiver “with anger and excitement” (142).32
Woolf’s fascination with the Conradian conflation of riot and
restraint in the image of the big trees corresponds to Rachel’s violent
swings between rebellion and anxious acquiescence, and their con-
junction is repeatedly marked by moments of vision. The most detailed
of these epiphanies is also the most revealing. Just before she stops
to read Gibbon, Rachel, wandering aimlessly, is filled with “one of those
unreasonable exultations which start generally from an unknown
cause”:
So she might have walked until she had lost all knowledge of her way,
had it not been for the interruption of a tree, which, although it did
not grow across her path, stopped her as effectively as if the branches
had struck her in the face. It was an ordinary tree, but to her it appeared
so strange that it might have been the only tree in the world. Dark was
the trunk in the middle, and the branches sprang here and there, leav-
ing jagged intervals of light between them as distinctly as if it had but
that second risen from the ground. Having seen a sight that would last
her for a lifetime, and for a lifetime would preserve that second, the
tree once more sank into the ordinary ranks of trees, and she was able
to seat herself in its shade. (159 – 60)
The “unknown cause” of this exultation lies in its contiguity to Rachel’s

reading of Gibbon, which takes place in the shadow of the uncanny
tree. Stopping her in her tracks, the tree keeps Rachel from losing “all
knowledge of her way” just before Gibbon drives her back to “the very
31 Woolf may have gleaned this odd detail about olive trees coated with lime or
whitewash to protect them against pests from a tiresome man she had met in Flo-
rence who bored her with agricultural talk (Passionate Apprentice, 397), or she may
have seen it for herself during her 1909 trip to Italy and Greece.
32 Heine suggests that in “the expansion of Rachel’s character that occurs in the
later typescript, it is much more apparent than in the finished novel that Virginia
Woolf is adding her own new sexual knowledge to Rachel’s consciousness, or sub-
consciousness”; she also notes that in revision some of Woolf’s trees become “more
phallic and mythically ritualistic” (“Virginia Woolf’s Revisions,” 435, 439).
beginning of the world.” Rachel’s “only tree in the world” is thus linked
to Gibbon’s promise that “all knowledge would be hers.” Yet the irrup-
tion of the tree also acts as a block to knowledge, as if in a moment of
sublimity the expansion of Rachel’s mind were simultaneously catalyzed
and arrested, “a moving force held at rest,” by the resistant solidity of
the tree. The collision of consciousness and the overwhelming there-
ness of a reality that exceeds consciousness is at the heart of the sub-
lime, and this phenomenon finds grammatical expression in the last
sentence of the quotation, in which the tree displaces the proper gram-
matical subject for whom the “sight” of the tree would last a lifetime,
Rachel. As the tree momentarily fills her mind, to the exclusion of
thought, for one extraordinary moment Rachel seems to experience
reality without mediation. So powerful is the experience that she thinks
back to it later in the novel (211), when its association in her mind with
Terence makes clear that the power she both thrills to and resists when
seeing the tree or reading Gibbon is, in the logic of the novel, essen-
tially phallic.
Rachel’s experience of defamiliarization while gazing at one of the
trees that Helen had said “it was worth the voyage out merely to see”
(159) betrays the intensity of Woolf’s ambivalent attraction to Conrad.33
Although the tree elicits the kind of “moment of vision” that Woolf val-
ued in Conrad, the repetition of such a moment in Rachel’s reading of
Gibbon sends Rachel running away from “the discovery of a terrible
possibility in life” (161). On the level of plot, Rachel is fleeing from her
sexual attraction to Terence, perhaps from sexuality altogether. Step-
ping back, we can also see Woolf struggling with a powerful male pre-
decessor, for although she found quintessentially modernist moments
33 Of Marlow’s moment of revelation in response to the French lieutenant in
Lord Jim, Woolf wrote: “That, so it strikes us, is the way in which Mr Conrad’s mind
works; he has a ‘moment of vision’ in which he sees people as if he had never seen
them before; he expounds the vision, and we see it, too. These visions are the best
things in his books” (Essays, 2:142). Oddly, T. S. Eliot, who wrote that removing the
figure of the strong, isolated European male from Conrad’s novels would yield the
equivalent of Woolf’s, missed this fundamental connection between the two: “Elle
n’illumine pas par éclairs soudains mais répand une lumière douce et tranquille”
[She does not illuminate with sudden flashes but casts a soft, gentle light] (“Les let-
tres anglaises: Le roman anglais contemporain,” Nouvelle revue française 28 [1927]:
673).
of vision in Conrad, the experience of thinking back through him

could not have been entirely congenial to a woman who advised other
women (on the same page that she proscribed Gibbon’s “male sen-
tence” and praised Austen’s alternative) to think back through their
mothers (Room, 79). Rachel’s flight from Gibbon also parallels Woolf’s
impulse to withdraw from Leonard’s sexual advances. Many have
argued that Woolf’s deeply troubled response to sex on her honey-
moon led to a sexless marriage; Lee, surveying the key accounts, con-
cludes that it was “not an a-sexual marriage” but was grounded in “affec-
tionate cuddling and play” rather than in intercourse or other forms of
explicitly sexual behavior (331– 33). What is clear is that Woolf shied
away from conventional heterosexual relations and yet found a way to
make her marriage with Leonard work. Woolf’s response to The Village
in the Jungle was comparable: however much the book might have trou-
bled her, she engaged productively with it. She ultimately had good rea-
son, that is, to return her husband’s favor by dedicating her first novel
to him.
In Leonard’s Jungle
Critics often have read The Village in the Jungle as Leonard’s anxious
expression of inferiority as a Jew engaged to a woman such as Woolf; he
is the black ram tupping the white ewe.34 Although for readers today the
novel may seem comic when viewed as Bloomsbury in blackface, if one
reads it through Virginia Woolf’s eyes, the tales it tells of the domestica-
tion of wild native women are enough to make one wonder why she did
not run screaming into the night. Writing to Leonard after reading it in
manuscript, she says only that it seems to her “amazingly good” (Letters,
1:12). Yet there is reason to suggest that the anguished ambivalence in
Woolf’s letter “accepting” Leonard’s marriage proposal—“I feel angry
sometimes at the strength of your desire” (Letters, 1:496)—could stand
also as her response to the erotic violence of his novel. Although there
is no reason to question Leonard’s motives for writing, The Village in the
Jungle reads as if it were written to get under his bride’s skin.
34 See Roger Poole, The Unknown Virginia Woolf, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 74 –78; and Alexander, 73.

Rewriting The Voyage Out after reading The Village in the Jungle,
Woolf radically changed three crucial, tightly linked scenes: the
moment in which Rachel and Terence declare their love while deep in
the jungle; the ensuing moment, in which Helen wrestles Rachel to the
ground and stuffs grass into her mouth; and the culminating moment
of the expedition, the entry into a native village. In Melymbrosia the love
scene is rendered in the lifeless language of pulp romance; in the final
text this scene becomes uncanny and dislocated, suffused with highly
charged yet alienated desire. In Melymbrosia Helen and Rachel’s embrace
is powerfully erotic, much more so than Rachel and Terence’s first kiss;
in The Voyage Out it is elliptical, more obscurely motivated, and discor-
dant. Finally, the tableau of staring native women in The Voyage Out —
the scene on which, in my view, the entire narrative hinges — is twice as
long as the corresponding moment in Melymbrosia, and the women’s dis-
turbing stare, along with the responses it elicits, is much more detailed.
Other critics have noticed these changes, but they have attributed them
to biography alone, leaving Leonard’s novel out of the equation. In fact,
the revised text of The Voyage Out betrays its clear influence.
The Village in the Jungle tells the story of twin sisters, Punchi Menika
and Hinnihami, each of whom has a “strangeness and wildness” asso-
ciated with the jungle (27). Despite Amazon-like independence, each
is brought under the thumb of a dominant man. Imagine Woolf, newly
returned from her honeymoon, reading Leonard’s description of the
near rape through which a young man, Babun, claims Punchi Menika
as his mate: “She allowed him to take her into the thick jungle, but she
struggled with him, and her whole body shook with fear and desire as
she felt his hands upon her breasts. A cry broke from her, in which joy
and desire mingled with the fear and the pain” (30). However fright-
ening Babun’s lust, Punchi Menika’s married life may be more chilling,
for soon her “wildness” becomes “dimmer and vaguer”: “She became
the man’s woman, the cook of his food, the cleaner of his house, and
bearer of his children” (40). One waits in vain for an acknowledgment
of the loss that this domestication entails.
Hinnihami fares worse. A hideously scarred old shaman, Punchirala,
begins to hanker for her, and despite her elaborate efforts to resist him,
Hinnihami finds that the old man’s magic is potent enough to endanger
her father’s life. Reluctantly, Hinnihami agrees to be given to Punchirala,
but she defiantly interprets the agreement to mean that she will be his
sexual partner for only one night. Nevertheless she becomes pregnant,
and soon after giving birth she begins to suckle an orphaned fawn along-
side her daughter, Punchi Nona. The girl dies, and Hinnihami comes
to think of the deer, which she continues to nurse, as her son. When
drought and other ills descend on the village, its superstitious inhabi-
tants, blaming Hinnihami’s aberrant behavior, surround the deer to
stone it. Hinnihami tries to intervene, but they throw her to the ground,
tearing her jacket to shreds, and beat her. The deer dies later that day;
Hinnihami is dead by the next morning. The narrative then turns back
to Punchi Menika. She is soon pursued by a powerful older man, Fer-
nando, who has her husband sent off to prison, where he dies; Fernando
himself is shot dead by Punchi Menika’s father, who is then imprisoned
for life. The novel ends with Punchi Menika alone in the deserted
village, waiting for death, which comes in the ambiguously metaphoric
form of a wild boar gliding into her hut with gleaming white tusks.
In an imperial romance such as The Village in the Jungle or Heart of
Darkness, one expects to find metropolitan subjects who see, at the
boundaries of civilization, their own desires mirrored in the face of the
other. Officially committed to duty and discipline, Marlow finds Kurtz,
a mass murderer he is willing to see as a visionary, and Kurtz’s native
mistress, “savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent” (60), redolent
of the sexuality missing from Kurtz’s virtually disembodied intended
back home. Leonard creates an exotic land of violently untrammeled
desire in which two superb sisters meet their match in desires even
more powerful than their own. By dressing the untamed noblewomen
of Norfolk, Virginia and her sister, Vanessa, in native garb, Leonard in
effect recapitulated the common trope of the male colonizer project-
ing his desire onto the female colonized. He did not need to strain his
inner eye for an image of this racial masquerade: the 1910 photograph
of the Dreadnought hoax that Quentin Bell reproduces in his biogra-
phy of Virginia Woolf no doubt served well, with Virginia and the rest
of the Abyssinian entourage gathered in blackface to record their dup-
ing of the British naval authorities.35
35 For the photograph of the costumed pranksters see Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf:
A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), between 140 and 141.
Leonard would have been shocked at the suggestion that his

novel in any way reproduced the uneven flow of power in colonial dis-
course. He felt that The Village in the Jungle expressed his growing anti-
imperialism after leaving the civil service, and the respect he shows the
native people of Ceylon in the novel could be construed as an attempt
to subvert the Eurocentrism of most colonial literature. Leonard later
wrote that he tried “somehow or other vicariously to live their lives”
(Beginning Again, 47), and the story is related almost entirely through
the perspective of indigenous characters. Yet Douglas Kerr’s compari-
son of The Village in the Jungle with Leonard’s Ceylon diaries and letters
suggests that, however unusual it is in granting the villagers such auton-
omy, the novel in effect reinstates colonial domination at a higher level.
The European magistrate, a relatively marginal character, cannot get to
the bottom of the cases over which he presides, but the bulk of The Vil-
lage in the Jungle plumbs “the life lived by the native people of Ceylon
when there was no colonial presence to observe them.” Kerr concludes that the
novelistic power to see into indigenous lives whose opacity frustrated
Leonard the colonial administrator appealed to Leonard the novelist
as “a sheer compensatory fantasy of omniscience.” The novel thus exer-
cises “a more complete discourse authority” over the natives than “the
most missionary of colonial powers ever aspired to.”36
The omniscience of The Village in the Jungle may be its least Conra-
dian feature. James Clifford, who finds in Heart of Darkness “a paradigm
of ethnographic subjectivity,” helps position it in relation to narrative
authority in The Voyage Out and The Village in the Jungle. Unpacking Mali-
nowski’s desire to become the Conrad of anthropology, Clifford argues
that the frame narrator who listens to Marlow, recording and evaluat-
ing the incomplete revelations of the participant narrator, represents
“the achieved perspective of the serious interpreter of cultures, of local,
partial knowledge.”37 The authority of this narrator rests on his privi-
leged access to Marlow’s narration of his experience in “the field” and
yet is limited by his historical situatedness as a listener on board a ship
36 Douglas Kerr, “Stories of the East: Leonard Woolf and the Genres of Colonial
Discourse,” English Literature in Transition 41 (1998): 272, 270, 273.

37 James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning: Conrad and Malinowski,”
in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cam-

bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 100, 99.
anchored in the Thames. Leonard occasionally tried to write in a simi-

lar vein, but his framed narration in “The Two Brahmans” was criticized
by E. M. Forster as too derivative of Conrad. The antithesis of Conrad’s
ethnographic subjectivity, the omniscience of The Village in the Jungle is
consonant with the voice of anthropology that Malinowski wishes to
move beyond, one which erases the subjectivity of the observer as it lays
claim to objective knowledge of everything under its purview.
Leonard’s anthropological omniscience may lie behind a conver-
sation in The Voyage Out in which Rachel recoils from Terence’s “deter-
mination to know” (201). As Rachel describes daily life with her aunts
back in Richmond, she reverts to “a childlike state of interest and plea-
sure” (200), but she immediately becomes unhappy when Terence
explains why he is so eager to hear what she has to say: she is a woman,
and as a budding novelist he seeks knowledge of the “curious silent
unrepresented life” of women as a prelude to broadening the scope
of English fiction. His seemingly anthropological attention to her as a
specimen of womanhood makes her feel “at once singular and under
observation” (200). Indeed, Terence’s desire to find out “what on earth
the women [are] doing inside” the houses he passes on the streets
(200) by talking with Rachel echoes Leonard’s attempt to live vicari-
ously through the natives of Ceylon. Rachel shakes off her dismay but
still feels uncomfortable: “Why did he [Terence] sit so near and keep
his eye on her?” (203). Closely watched, Rachel might be one of Leonard’s
characters, always under the author’s hidden eye.
The contrast between narrative authority in Heart of Darkness and
The Village in the Jungle also throws into relief a telling anomaly in the
narration of Melymbrosia and The Voyage Out. Although both versions
of Woolf’s novel use omniscient narrators, their knowledge is undercut
in a pivotal sequence that connects Rachel and Helen to the hotel
where the other Europeans are staying. One night Rachel and Helen,
who live in a nearby villa, spy on the hotel lounge through a window
until Hirst notices them and they scurry away. The narrator soon enters
the hotel and surveys the people going to bed, pausing over Miss Allan
reading Wordsworth and Susan Warrington writing in her diary, before
making a curious transition into William Pepper’s room: “A glance into
the next room revealed little more than a nose, prominent above the
sheets. Growing accustomed to the darkness . . . one could distinguish
a lean form, terribly like the body of a dead person” (95). The suddenly
embodied narrator, having cast off the guise of omniscience, seems to
outdo the eavesdropping women by creeping into the unsuspecting
Pepper’s room.38 If Leonard’s characters are in effect being watched
without their knowing, for a moment Woolf’s narrator is in danger, like
Rachel and Helen, of being discovered in the act of watching.
This blip in the narrative mode is symptomatic of Woolf’s desire to
devise an alternative to Leonard’s narrative omniscience (probably
modeled on Hardy, whom Leonard greatly admired).39 Although the
narrative mode remains conventionally omniscient throughout most of
The Voyage Out, the countercurrent felt in the fleetingly embodied nar-
rator registers also in the way that vision presses on the body in Woolf’s
rewriting of the jungle and in the flux of irrationality subsequently
introduced into the narrative by her fever.
In Virginia’s Jungle
For the tightly linked episodes that lead into her native village, Woolf
uses the same narrative sequence in Melymbrosia and The Voyage Out. On
the river expedition Rachel and Terence declare their love to one
another while walking through the jungle; when they return, Helen
pounces on Rachel; the reassembled group then visits a native village.
Yet Woolf altered each scene greatly in revision.40
In the love scene between Rachel and Terence, the romantic cli-
chés of Melymbrosia are replaced by a prolonged moment of surreal dis-
38 Pepper’s name alone seems to have triggered a Conradian digression when
Woolf was engaged in her most Conradian revisions. In chapter 7 a random remark
by Pepper leads to a historical reverie on English trading vessels that recalls Marlow’s
rhapsody in Lord Jim on the lost heroism of the pepper traders.
39 In Beginning Again Leonard writes that around the time of his marriage to Vir-
ginia, Conrad, Galsworthy, and Wells were major figures, “but Hardy stood by him-
self, an Olympian surviving from a previous age” (123). He also felt that Hardy had
no peer in the representation of poor villagers (67), which suggests, as Kerr specu-
lates, that he would have turned to Hardy as a model for representing the Sinhalese
in The Village in the Jungle.
40 For a reading of these scenes in the context of turn-of-the-century exhibi-
tionary culture see my “Woolf, Picture Postcards, and the Elision of Race: Colonizing
Women in The Voyage Out,” Modernism/Modernity 8 (2001): 43 –75.
location in which the pair seems drugged and confused, the landscape
uncanny and disorienting. When in Melymbrosia Rachel opens her arms
in answer to Terence’s whispered declaration of love, the embrace
might be lifted from a romance by Ethel Dell, Barbara Cartland’s early-
century soulmate: “More as people who grope, who push away a veil
between them than as man and woman in midday they sought each
other’s arms. They embraced passionately” (197). In The Voyage Out
they walk as if “at the bottom of the sea” before pausing to sit down,
“unable to frame any thoughts” in a heavy silence (256). The acknowl-
edgment of shared feeling (if that is what it is) when Terence declares
his love is almost lost in Rachel’s benumbed echoing, which drains Ter-
ence’s words of sense. “‘You like being with me?’ Terence asked. ‘Yes,
with you,’ she replied” (256):
“That is what I have felt ever since I knew you,” he replied. “We are
happy together.” He did not seem to be speaking, or she to be hearing.
“Very happy,” she answered.
They continued to walk for some time in silence. Their steps uncon-
sciously quickened.
“We love each other,” Terence said.
“We love each other,” she repeated. (257)
Their first embrace then takes place in a space reminiscent of Arthur

Conan Doyle’s “lost world”: “Sounds stood out from the background
making a bridge across their silence; they heard the swish of the trees
and some beast croaking in a remote world” (257). No dinosaurs lum-
ber out from the trees, but their kiss elicits fear: “‘Terrible — terrible,’
she murmured after another pause, but in saying this she was thinking
as much of the persistent churning of the water as of her own feeling.
On and on it went in the distance, the senseless and cruel churning of
the water” (257). Later Mrs. Flushing’s crass intuition that something
has happened between them comes closest to naming Rachel’s inner
turbulence as the frightening rush of desire. “One reads a lot about
love,” Mrs. Flushing observes. “But what happens in real life, eh? It ain’t
love!” (259). Seemingly stunned by desire and alienated from language,
by the next day Rachel and Terence must talk themselves into accept-
ing their engagement as if it had happened to someone else: “They
faded far away from each other, and neither could remember what had
been said” (267).
If her revision of the engagement scene suggests that Woolf was try-
ing to cope with anxiety stirred up by her marrying Leonard, the revi-
sion of the next scene suggests that she was struggling to renormalize
a narrative that had become very weird indeed during Rachel and Ter-
ence’s walk in the jungle. In both Melymbrosia and The Voyage Out Helen
intuits that Rachel and Terence are engaged and wrestles Rachel to the
ground in a sea of grass, but the two versions read very differently. In
Melymbrosia Helen chases her until Rachel suddenly stops to open her
arms; Helen then rolls her down to the ground, “stuffing grass into her
mouth,” and orders her to say, “You worship me!” When Rachel exclaims
that she loves Terence “better,” Helen confesses: “I’ve never told you,
but you know I love you, my darling.” Rachel reminds Helen of Rachel’s
dead mother, Theresa, whom Helen also loved (209). Melymbrosia’s
intensely realized moment of desire —simultaneously lesbian, sororal,
and maternal —survives in The Voyage Out only as a glimpse of poten-
tially dissident desire in a scene so dislocated that more than one edi-
tion of the novel offers an explanatory footnote.41 As Rachel and Ter-
ence walk along, comparing notes on their experience of happiness, “a
hand . . . abrupt as iron” knocks her to the ground without warning or
explanation; her fragmentary impressions gradually reveal that Helen
is “upon her,” rolling her about in tall grasses that whip across Rachel’s
eyes and fill her mouth and ears: “She was speechless and almost with-
out sense.” Recovering her mental equilibrium, Rachel looks up to see,
in an almost parodic vision of the cultural hegemony of heterosexual-
ity, “two great heads, the heads of a man and woman, of Terence and
Helen”: “Broken fragments of speech came down to her on the ground.
She thought she heard them speak of love and then of marriage. Rais-
ing herself and sitting up, she too realised Helen’s soft body, the strong
and hospitable arms, and happiness swelling and breaking in one vast
wave” (268). As in Melymbrosia, here too Helen’s embrace moves Rachel
in a way that Terence’s kiss does not, but Helen’s perspective (and thus
her declaration of love) has disappeared altogether, leaving only Rachel’s
subjectively rendered experience of confusion, which distorts her
41 For a detailed reading of the lesbian subtext in this and other scenes see
Patricia Smith, “‘The Things People Don’t Say’: Lesbian Panic in The Voyage Out,” in
Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, ed. Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer (New York:
New York University Press, 1997), 133 – 40.
potentially errant desires almost beyond recognition. As if predicting

Rachel’s reentry into the narrative of heterosexual love and marriage
that Helen and Terence seem to break over her like an egg, the para-
graphs immediately following the engagement show Rachel beginning
to follow Terence’s lead, “stopping where he stopped, turning where he
turned, ignorant of the way, ignorant why he stopped or why he turned”
(258). The process of normalization is complete by the time they fol-
low Mr. Flushing into the native village, “falling into line” in his wake
(268).
It is this sort of revision that makes The Voyage Out read like a
palimpsest. Not only does an earlier version of the novel show through
a later one, but in both drafts one detects, behind the “swishing of the
grasses” and the “trail of whitened grass,” the “soft grass paths” of Nor-
folk in Woolf’s journal, the “undulating” land that reminds her of an
untamed woman (see Passionate Apprentice, 312; Melymbrosia, 209; Voyage
Out, 268).42 The “noble untamed woman” in the journal can remain
untamed because she is “conscious that she has no beauty to vaunt, that
nobody very much wants her.” She stands apart, that is, from the erotic
demands and interpersonal pressures that threaten Rachel, who always
feels the desiring eyes of others.
Undoubtedly, the partial erasure of Rachel and Helen’s erotic
entanglement exemplifies what DeSalvo describes as Woolf’s retreat
from self-revelation in revision. But this awkward rebinding of errant
desire was written only after Woolf had read Leonard’s account of how
wild women are tamed in the jungle. The horrifying scene of Hinni-
hami’s comeuppance is a cautionary tale about the fate of those whose
desires deviate from communal norms:
The sight of the bleeding deer and the woman lying on the ground,
naked to the waist, seemed to send a wave of lust and cruelty through
the men. They tore Hinnihami’s cloth from her, and, taking her by the
arms, dragged her naked up to the deer.
“Bring [her] to her child,” they shouted. . . . “Is there no milk in
your breasts for him now?”
42 The “undulating” field of the journal appears more distinctly in a canceled
typescript version of the scene in which Helen runs through “the waving ground” to
reach Rachel. See Heine, “Virginia Woolf’s Revisions,” 440.
They held her that she might see what they did. The deer was
moaning in pain. One of the men cut a thick stick and struck him upon
the hind legs until they were broken. Hinnihami fought and struggled,
but she was powerless in their hands. At length, when they had become
tired of torturing them, they threw her down by the deer’s side and
went away. (Village, 83)
Stripping her naked in a moment of cruel lust, the “jeering knot of

men” (83) reestablishes the sexual dominance visited on Hinnihami by
Punchirala, the father of her child, and reclaims her body for “normal”
motherhood. Although none of the pressures brought to bear on
Rachel’s body produces the violence of this scene, Woolf’s revision of
Rachel’s encounter with Helen reads as if it were written to preempt just
such a “correction.” In light of these revisions, Rachel’s frustration ear-
lier in The Voyage Out, when she feels the weight of worldly conventions
repressing her body, reads like a complaint against Woolf, who gives
Rachel more discernment than power.
In her revision of the ensuing scene in the village, which the
tourists enter right after Helen has wrestled Rachel to the ground,
Woolf again introduces the overwhelming power of the normative. In
Melymbrosia the scene goes by quickly. Barely two pages long, the chap-
ter devotes as much attention to Mr. Flushing’s negotiations for native
goods as it does to Rachel’s response to the women carrying the goods
back and forth for his inspection. The opening paragraph sets the
scene: “The Indian women were squatting at the doors of their huts
making baskets and did not stir from their triangular position when the
strangers arrived though their long narrow eyes slid round and fixed
upon them. As no one except Mr Flushing could speak to them the
silent stare had to be continued” (211). As the English move past, peer-
ing into the natives’ huts, “eyes seemed to follow them without hostility
but without great interest.” Rachel feels that her newfound intimacy
with Terence ought to enable her “to understand their faces,” but she
is forced to own that “she knew nothing about them,” and her happi-
ness is “dashed” (211, 212). After a paragraph describing Flushing’s
efforts to buy some artifacts, Terence asks Rachel why she is sad and is
told, “Because it [the women] makes us seem small.” But Rachel imme-
diately retreats from this feeling by adding, “But what I have in my heart
is as great as anything in the world” (212). As the chapter ends, Rachel
is overwhelmed by the intensity of her love for Terence, and they embrace,
sobbing.
Unremarkable in Melymbrosia, the scene in The Voyage Out becomes
highly charged and more than doubles in length. Most striking is the
intensity now attributed to the native women’s stare. Squatting on the
ground, the women again appear triangular, echoing Marlow’s horror-
struck vision of Africans dying in the shadows as “bundles of acute
angles” in Heart of Darkness (21); this time, however, after the English
look “for a moment undiscovered,” their bodies fall under the women’s
unrelenting gaze:
Their hands paused for a moment and their long narrow eyes slid
round and fixed upon them with the motionless inexpressive gaze of
those removed from each other far far beyond the plunge of speech.
Their hands moved again, but the stare continued. It followed them as
they walked, as they peered into huts where they could distinguish guns
leaning in the corner, and bowls upon the floor, and stacks of rushes; in
the dusk the solemn eyes of babies regarded them, and old women
stared out too. As they sauntered about, the stare followed them, pass-
ing over their legs, their bodies, their heads, curiously, not without hos-
tility, like the crawl of a winter fly. As she drew apart her shawl and
uncovered her breast to the lips of her baby, the eyes of a woman never
left their faces, although they moved uneasily under her stare, and
finally turned away, rather than stand there looking at her any longer.
(Voyage Out, 269)
The steady stare is commonplace in European accounts of “primitive”

peoples. In Women in Love, for instance, D. H. Lawrence draws on a
common lexicon when his narrator invokes “the unwearying stare of
aborigines” to describe the downtrodden wives of miners.43 But in The
Voyage Out the stare is unusually charged and unnerving. Regarded
“without hostility” in Melymbrosia, the English here are watched “not
without hostility.” In response, Hirst feels bitter, unhappy, and alone;
Helen, perhaps roused to maternal solicitude by the sight of the nurs-
ing mother, experiences “presentiments of disaster” (270). Rachel and
Terence, having felt at first that the women were “peaceful, and even
beautiful,” now feel “very cold and melancholy” (269). Woolf’s empha-
sis on staring and the dread of falling under scrutiny, which she greatly
43 D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (London: Penguin, 1995), 12.

amplified in revision, derives in part from her response to Leonard’s

narrative omniscience in The Village in the Jungle. But the vivid intensity
of the staring in Virginia’s native village also has roots in specific pas-
sages.
As she searches for her husband, for example, Punchi Menika suf-
fers the unsettling stare of villagers:
The stream of passers-by upon the road, the unknown faces and the
eyes that always stared strangely, inquiringly at her for a moment, and
had then passed on for ever, made her feel vaguely how utterly alone
she was in the world. And nowhere was this feeling so strong for her as
in the villages where she slunk through like a frightened jackal. Every-
where it was the same; the crowd of villagers and travellers staring at
her from in front of the village boutique, the group of women gossiping
and laughing round the well in the paddy field — not a known face
among them all. (Village, 171)
Here is the link between staring and the intense experience of alien-
ation that the English feel in The Voyage Out. The specific form of Rachel’s
melancholy response to the stare also can be traced to The Village in the
Jungle. Before Punchi Menika leaves to find her husband, she looks into
the face of the woman who raised her, Karlinahami:
The jungle had left its mark on her. Her body was bent and twisted,
like the stunted trees, which the south-west wind had tortured into
grotesque shapes. The skin, too, on her face and thin limbs reminded
one of the bark of the jungle trees; it was shrunken against the bones,
and wrinkled, and here and there flaking off into whitish brown scales,
as the bark flakes off the kumbuk-trees. . . . And under the lined fore-
head were the eyes, lifeless and filmy, peering out of innumerable wrin-
kles. The eyes were not blind, but they seemed to be sightless — the
pupil, the iris, and even the white had merged —because the mind was
dying. It is what usually happens in the jungle — to women especially —
the mind dies before the body. Imperceptibly the power of initiative, of
thought, of feeling, dies out before the monotony of life, the monotony
of the tearing hot wind, the monotony of endless trees, the monotony
of perpetual hardship. (Village, 166)
This passage, which joins the staring to the tree imagery I have dis-
cussed, offers insight into what bothers Rachel so much about the
women in The Voyage Out: they are specular doubles for her future as a
wife; they bring home to her the pressures of domestication and nor-
malization against which she has struggled since she left England for
South America. The theme of unwanted scrutiny appears in the same
context in a long scene, canceled from the later typescript, in which
Rachel and Terence, “sounding very much more like Leonard and Vir-
ginia,” discuss the experience of speaking with Mrs. Thornbury and
others about their engagement (Heine, “Virginia Woolf’s Revisions,”
443). Terence remarks: “Well, Rachel, that wasn’t so very dreadful was
it?— the eyes of all those women?” (quoted in Heine, “Virginia Woolf’s
Revisions,” 443).
In response to The Village in the Jungle, finally, Woolf also alters the
words that Rachel and Terence exchange after wilting under the stare
of the native women. Where in Melymbrosia Rachel comments on how
small the women make her feel, in The Voyage Out that sentiment is
attributed to Terence, and her revised remark to him echoes “the
monotony of the tearing hot wind, the monotony of endless trees” in
Leonard’s jungle: “So it would go on for ever and ever, she said, those
women sitting under the trees, the trees and the river” (Voyage Out,
270). In the intertextual logic I have traced, to sit forever under the
trees is to risk turning into a tree, as Karlinahami essentially does. No
wonder that before leaving the native women far behind, Rachel and
Terence feel the need “to assure each other once more that they [are]
in love, [are] happy, [are] content” (270).
Turning into a tree hints at two ultimate fates. One is suggested by
Mrs. Thornbury, an emblem of motherhood as the loss of self, who
reminds Terence of “a large old tree murmuring in the moonlight, or
a river going on and on and on” (278). Her long life and her children
seem to Rachel, remembering Terence’s words, “to have rubbed away
the marks of individuality, and to have left only what was old and
maternal” (301). It is therefore appropriate that the potential power of
Rachel’s musical disruption of the engagement dance is realized in rela-
tion to Mrs. Thornbury, the broken “link of the chain” who sends the
rest of the dancers “flying across the room in all directions” (152). The
second fate complements the first: to become a tree is to be subordi-
nated to the phallic power that holds such ambivalent fascination for
Rachel. This ambivalence, sharpened by Woolf’s response to Leonard,
makes The Voyage Out a key text for the study of Woolf’s modernism.
From Male to Female Modernism
Female modernism is a vague term that nevertheless remains indispens-

able.44 For some, it refers to the recovery of women writers obscured by
the canonization of male modernists, Wyndham Lewis’s Men of 1914:
Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Lewis himself.45 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan
Gubar’s influential three-volume study of the woman writer in the twen-
tieth century, No Man’s Land, falls largely into this category by under-
standing “male modernism” as a cultural strategy for retarding the
social and literary progress of women and by showing how female writ-
ers have contested forms of aesthetic containment deployed by male
writers.46 Bonnie Kime Scott’s Refiguring Modernism contributes to the
project of restoring women’s place in modernist culture by proposing
the (female) trope of the web as a supplement to the (male) trope of
modernist “scaffolding” in order to restore a network of relations that
brings to the fore the “Women of 1928”: Djuna Barnes, Rebecca West,
and Virginia Woolf.47 Another approach understands female modernism
to refer to the notion that some forms of modernist innovation, irre-
spective of the gender of the writer, may have progressive, antipatriar-
chal implications. The most radical version of this approach posits a
principle of femaleness as fundamental to modernism and argues that
modernism’s subversions of received models — for instance, of self-
hood, signification, hierarchy, and epistemology — are cognate with
what Hélène Cixous and other feminist theorists have called écriture
féminine.48 This intrinsically feminist model of modernism has been
44 Cf. Michael H. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary
Doctrine, 1908 – 1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984): “Vague terms
still signify. Such is the case with ‘modernism’: it is at once vague and unavoidable”
(vii).
45 See Bonnie Kime Scott, ed., Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

46 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman
Writer in the Twentieth Century, 3 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1988 – 94).
47 Bonnie Kime Scott, Women of 1928, vol. 1 of Refiguring Modernism (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1995), xvi–xliii.

48 For a representative example see Karen Lawrence, “Joyce and Feminism,” in
The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), 237– 58.
most influentially advanced by Julia Kristeva, who understands linguis-

tic fragmentation in modernism as a subversion of male mastery.49
Marianne DeKoven surveys these competing understandings of
female modernism in Rich and Strange while situating herself in rela-
tion to debates over the political significance of modernism. Woolf,
DeKoven suggests, anticipated the argument for écriture féminine in A
Room of One’s Own and “Modern Fiction.” DeKoven bridges the differ-
ences among various understandings of female modernism by arguing
that modernism evolved as it did to offer adequate representations of
the “terrifying appeal” of turn-of-the-century feminism and socialism
(4). My understanding of female modernism harmonizes with DeKoven’s
in that I too attempt to synthesize potentially divergent approaches, but
where DeKoven, who also takes the relationship between Heart of Dark-
ness and The Voyage Out as an exemplary case, ultimately turns to a post-
structuralist model of modernism, I attend more closely to the tangle
of interpersonal and intertextual relations that informs literary produc-
tion. According to DeKoven, the reassertion of the repressed maternal
in modernist literature contributes to the subversion of prevailing social
hierarchies by deconstructing binary oppositions. My interpretation of
this constellation coincides at many points with DeKoven’s reading of
Conrad and Woolf, particularly with her claim that both Heart of Dark-
ness and The Voyage Out, despite their provisional deconstructions of
patriarchy, ultimately reinstate “the patriarchal maternal” (138), a
maternal principle not yet strong enough to commit to an expression
of its difference. But the recovery of The Village in the Jungle as a key
mediator of Conrad’s influence reveals three things: the crosscurrents
of desire that motivate and shape specific literary debts in The Voyage
Out; the degree to which violence against the mother is part of the
process of undoing subordination to the father; and the importance of
the scene upriver in the development of Woolf’s modernism. By rec-
ognizing the complex mediations of gender, sexuality, and literary his-
tory among the texts of Leonard, Virginia, Conrad, and Austen, we can
preserve the historical particularly of the literary-biographical web (to
borrow Scott’s trope) centered on the Woolfs’ marriage.
49 See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

Rachel’s encounter with the women in the native village, which

DeKoven reads as a last glimpse of a positive figuration of the maternal
(125), is better understood as a culminating instance of the discon-
nected connection Rachel has felt with mother figures throughout the
novel. Rachel sometimes gives in to a furious need to distance herself
from her nearest mother surrogate, Helen, and when she sees a pho-
tograph of an acquaintance’s mother, she remarks, “Well, I don’t much
believe in her” (237).50 This alienation from a mother she cannot ignore
becomes palpable as Rachel stands face to face with the women in the
village. Being situated “far far beyond the plunge of speech,” as the
native women are, might, in the logic of the novel, be a good thing, par-
ticularly given the suspicion of language that Rachel voices when dis-
cussing with Terence the relative virtues of words and music. Indeed,
in psychoanalytic terms, the native woman nursing her child to the
rhythms of nature suggests the pre-oedipal bond between mother and
child, and the violence implicit in the “plunge of speech” suggests the
alienating power of the symbolic order. Yet in The Voyage Out the
presymbolic bond between mother and child, idealized in psychoana-
lytic theory as a refuge of wordless connectedness, is tainted. For bond-
ing with Helen would mean joining with a male-identified woman who
is revealed as an agent of patriarchy well before she stands with Terence
over Rachel’s newly betrothed body. Inasmuch as in her later career
Woolf would draw on the rhythms of the pre-oedipal, this highly charged
scene holds out the promise of an enabling, rather than a fatal, identi-
fication with the mother.51 But these women, silent as trees, come from
Leonard’s jungle, and to think through them is not to tap into the flow
of female vitality that Woolf would posit in A Room of One’s Own but to
enter into the living death of Karlinahami.
50 In a particularly suggestive sequence, Rachel castigates Helen as “lazy” and
“only half alive” when she balks at the idea of an expedition upriver (248); then, as
they walk side by side, an ambiguous pronoun reference introducing a sequence of
free indirect discourse momentarily conflates the two women, as if the speculations
of Helen-Rachel about the existence of a “profound and reasonless law . . . moulding
them all to its liking” were being enacted in the merging of their thoughts (249).
51 Makiko Minow-Pinkney draws on Julia Kristeva’s appropriation of Jacques
Lacan’s distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic to trace the emergence
in Woolf of an écriture féminine dialectically engaged with the semiotic (Virginia Woolf
and the Problem of the Subject [Brighton: Harvester, 1987]). Minow-Pinkney does not
discuss The Voyage Out.
Remote from the English tourists and also “removed from each
other,” these women, then, are not positive representatives of a “pre-
oedipal sanctuary of semiotic utterance” but symbols of the mothers
that Rachel must reject and that Woolf, as she would argue in “Profes-
sions for Women,” must destroy.52 Woolf felt that to become a writer,
she had to dispatch “the angel in the house,” a figure adapted from the
Coventry Patmore poem and aptly described in a draft of Woolf’s 1931
talk as “the woman that men wished women to be”: “I turned upon her
and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her.”53 Woolf pleads
self-defense: “Had I not killed her she would have killed me” (“Profes-
sions for Women,” 238). During Rachel’s delirium, the portion of the
novel that always threatened to push Woolf into madness, Rachel too
comes face-to-face with a dangerous older woman. The “old woman
with the knife,” who surfaces in her fever right after she sees an unnamed
“they” “rolling off the edge of the hill” (314), embodies two figures from
earlier in the narrative: an old woman at the hotel whom Rachel has
seen cutting off a chicken’s head and the sight, upsetting to her, of
Susan Warrington and Arthur Venning rolling on the ground together
during the picnic. The old woman in her dream clearly represents
Rachel’s anxiety about heterosexuality, domesticity, and marriage. But
she also represents more.
When the old woman resurfaces after Terence has kissed Rachel,
Rachel does not imagine the woman as a threat to her; she sees “only
an old woman slicing a man’s head off with a knife” (320). Why a man?
A psychoanalytic perspective would suggest displaced hostility toward
Terence (and Leonard), but this iteration of the old woman also leads
back to the woman writer’s need to kill the angel in the house. In her
1925 essay Woolf comments on the “divine justice” Austen metes out to
characters such as Dr. Grant in Mansfield Park (1814): “Sometimes it
seems as if her creatures were born merely to give Jane Austen the
52 Suzette Henke, “Language, Memory, Desire,” in Virginia Woolf: Emerging Per-
spectives: Selected Papers from the Third Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, Lincoln Uni-
versity, Jefferson City, MO, June 10 – 13, 1993, ed. Vara Neverow-Turk and Mark Hussey
(New York: Pace University Press, 1994), 107.
53 Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women,” in The Death of the Moth, and Other
Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), 237; Woolf, The Pargiters: The Novel-Essay
Portion of “The Years,” ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (London: Hogarth, 1977), xxix–xxx.
supreme delight of slicing their heads off” (“Jane Austen,” 140). Simi-
larly, the old woman at the hotel cuts off the chicken’s head “with an
expression of vindictive energy and triumph combined” (239). The old
woman in Rachel’s delirium not only expresses a fear of heterosexual-
ity and its social institutions, then, but prefigures the “phantom” in
“Professions for Women” who will kill or be killed, a ghostly presence
who in The Voyage Out is named Jane Austen. In other words, the
restoration of the patriarchal maternal that in DeKoven’s reading sus-
pends The Voyage Out between the old and the new is driven in part by
a desire to slay the mother. In The Voyage Out Woolf allows Austen to kill
Rachel so that she herself can kill Austen.
It is thus fitting that Rachel’s delirium produces some of Woolf’s
most modernist writing in The Voyage Out. Lying outside the constraints
of plot, linearity, and conscious rationality, the passages evoking her hal-
lucinations and dreams monitor only the flow of Rachel’s unconscious;
they struggle to articulate her “unknown and uncircumscribed spirit,
whatever aberration or complexity it may display” (“Modern Fiction,”
150). Woolf later recognized that if The Voyage Out was “too loose” in
form, Night and Day was “too tight”— too like the “tight plait” Rachel
dislikes in Austen (Letters, 2:400). In a fascinating 1912 letter about the
future of the novel, Woolf struggles to explain to a fellow writer what
“we, in our generation” must do: “renounce finally the achievement of
the greater beauty: the beauty which comes from completeness, in such
books as War and Peace, and Stendhal I suppose, and some of Jane
Austen” (Letters, 2:599). In preparing to “attack the whole,” Woolf talks
herself into embracing something like the “fragments” and “splinters”
she has disparaged in reference to Joyce. What is the generation to do?
It must “break its neck in order that the next may have smooth going”
(Letters, 2:598 – 601). Any way you slice it, heads must roll before Woolf
can arrive at the “orts, scraps and fragments” of her last novel, Between
the Acts.54
But the violence of Woolf’s slicing, grabbing, and breaking of necks
should not obscure the less dramatic ways that she turns to Conrad as
an alternative to Austen. In terms of structure, Conrad’s adventure nar-
54Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1969), 188.
rative clearly intervenes to curtail Austen’s marriage plot. But the inter-
rogative, hesitating, yet authoritative quality of his ethnographic sub-
jectivity also makes possible a narrative stance different from Leonard’s
potentially oppressive omniscience and the cutting edge of Austen’s
satire. Rachel stands in for Woolf at the juncture between the two chap-
ters that describe the picnic ascent of Mount Rosa. Here, having noticed
Rachel “lying back rather behind the others,” but still within the group,
Terence asks what she is looking at: “She was a little startled, but answered
directly: ‘Human beings’” (123). This is Woolf viewing Austen through
Conrad, the Conradian ethnographer commenting on Austen’s Box
Hill.
The emotional cost of choosing domesticity, of identifying with the
angels in the hut, was brought home to Woolf not only by her decision
to marry Leonard but by the pressure of his text, which itself echoed
Conrad’s, on the embattled subjectivity of her own. But however threat-
ening Leonard’s tale of the jungle might have been, its influence on
The Voyage Out was not, ultimately, inhibiting, nor can their interrela-
tion be reduced to Gilbert and Gubar’s model of modernism as a bat-
tle between the sexes. Rather, the scene in the jungle that registers the
pressure of Leonard’s book marks a moment of recognition in which
Woolf, through Rachel, realized the possibility of finding her own voice
as a modern writer, able to ground her fiction on her “own feeling and
not upon convention” (“Modern Fiction,” 150). In “Professions for
Women” Woolf believes that she has not been able to solve the prob-
lem of how to tell “the truth about [her] own experiences as a body”
(241), but in The Voyage Out she begins the process by anatomizing the
pressures that place “the weight of the entire world” on Rachel’s body.
In the specular relation between Rachel and the native women, which
denies a connection with the mother even as it forms, a fault line opens
to reveal a glimpse into an unrealized future. Staring back at the
women, Virginia Woolf saw not only the monotony of bourgeois domes-
ticity, Gibbon’s history, Conrad’s trees, and Leonard’s jungle but, para-
doxically, the origins of her own modernism.

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MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, Volume 64, Number 1, March 2003,

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

Accessed 24 May 2014 11:27 GMT GMT

I n A Room of One’s Own (1929) Virginia Woolf advises women writers

1957), 79. Hereafter cited as Room.

Modern Language Quarterly 64:1, March 2003. © 2003 University of Washington.

Mark A. Wollaeger is associate professor of English at Vanderbilt Uni-

taming of women that are at issue in Woolf’s response to The Village in

Norton, 1988), 60. Subsequent page references are to this edition.

Melymbrosia, a reconstructed version of the novel as it existed prior to

influence of Leonard, remarking in passing that “Virginia Woolf’s more sympathetic

do not mean to imply that she was indebted to Leonard on anything

9 In a critique of British colonial ethnography in Sri Lanka, Bruce Kapferer sin-

remain “untamed”? These questions bear in turn on the relationship

Rewriting the Pattern of Everyday Life: Rachel As Artist

page references are to this edition.

11 “Mr Conrad: A Conversation,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew

asset.12 Woolf amplifies the subversive force of Rachel’s music during

tation of the Dalloways, echoes Austen’s comedy of manners. The pic-

13 “Jane Austen,” in Essays, 2:11.

15 “The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or

17 Katherine Mansfield, review of Night and Day, Athenaeum, 21 November 1919,

Brace Jovanovich, 1978 – 84), 1:316. Hereafter cited as Diary.

Caught up in a sensual experience of empowerment, Rachel imagines

Conrad between Leonard and Virginia

Any exploration of intertextual relations between The Voyage Out and

and “Mr Conrad’s ‘Youth,’” in Essays, 2:158.

22 Elleke Boehmer discusses the Conradian qualities in Leonard’s letters home

by embellishing them with heroic incidents out of Conradian romance.

became an increasingly insistent presence in the massive revisions she

The “unknown cause” of this exultation lies in its contiguity to Rachel’s

33 Of Marlow’s moment of revelation in response to the French lieutenant in

of vision in Conrad, the experience of thinking back through him

University Press, 1995), 74 –78; and Alexander, 73.

Leonard would have been shocked at the suggestion that his

Discourse,” English Literature in Transition 41 (1998): 272, 270, 273.

in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cam-

anchored in the Thames. Leonard occasionally tried to write in a simi-

38 Pepper’s name alone seems to have triggered a Conradian digression when

Their first embrace then takes place in a space reminiscent of Arthur

potentially errant desires almost beyond recognition. As if predicting

42 The “undulating” field of the journal appears more distinctly in a canceled

Stripping her naked in a moment of cruel lust, the “jeering knot of

The steady stare is commonplace in European accounts of “primitive”

43 D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (London: Penguin, 1995), 12.

amplified in revision, derives in part from her response to Leonard’s

From Male to Female Modernism

Female modernism is a vague term that nevertheless remains indispens-

44 Cf. Michael H. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary

ington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

ton: Indiana University Press, 1995), xvi–xliii.

most influentially advanced by Julia Kristeva, who understands linguis-

York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

Rachel’s encounter with the women in the native village, which

52 Suzette Henke, “Language, Memory, Desire,” in Virginia Woolf: Emerging Per-

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