Modern Language Studies

EXPLORING WOMEN: VIRGINIA WOOLF'S IMPERIAL REVISIONS from THE VOYAGE OUT to
MRS. DALLOWAY
Author(s): ASHLEY NADEAU and UMASS AMHERST
Source: Modern Language Studies, Vol. 44, No. 1, VIRGINIA WOOLF (SUMMER 2014), pp. 14-
35
Published by: Modern Language Studies
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24616749
Accessed: 28-10-2019 13:28 UTC

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 EXPLORING
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SBV

Maisie Johnson stumbles across

Septimus and Rezia Smith in the
Regent's Park segment of Virginia
Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), she is
given the fright of her life. Watching them, "[She]
positively felt she must cry Oh! (For that young man
on the seat had given her quite a turn. Something was
up, she knew.) Horror! horror! she wanted to cry. (She
had left her people; they had warned her what would
happen.) Why hadn't she stayed at home? she cried,
twisting the knob of the iron railing" (MD 26-27;
emphasis added). Despite the incongruous fact that
the speaker here is a young Scottish woman recently
arrived in London for work, Maisie Johnson's cry of
"Horror! horror!" immediately calls to mind the famous
last words of Joseph Conrad's Kurtz.1 In this scene, and
in the rest of the Regent's Park section, Woolf
Woolf'ss novel
novel
engages Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) sonically
and thematically to startling effect. Maisie's experience
being lost
of being lost and
and confused
confusedin
inthe
thepark
parkmirrors
mirrorsMarlow's
Marlows
disorienting voyage into the jungle, and the disquieting
sensation Maisie experiences at the realization of her
people's warnings matches Marlows
Marlow's remorse
remorse for
for
undertaking his nightmarish journey. The foreign figure
of Rezia, along with the old and ill lolling on Bath chairs
in the park, further underscores the allusion to Conrad's
work as Maisie's first impression of the city distantly
echoes Marlow's
echoes Marlows own discomfort
discomfort at
at the
the early
earlyimage
imageof
of

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 the slumping, half-dead slaves beneath the trees.2
Unlike Marlow, however, Maisie is not venturing into
the depths of colonial space. Instead, she has moved
to London, the metropole of the English empire.
Traveling to London from the semi-peripheral
Scotland,3 Maisie is shocked to discover that she could
know so little about the capital. Despite a shared
membership in the British Empire, the people of
Regents Park are complete others to Maisie, and she
realizes her estrangement from "her people." By
imagining them in this possessive, differentiated way,
Maisie highlights her dissimilarity and the great
distance she feels between her home and the metropole;
her sudden alienation reveals that prior to this journey
she was unconscious of the breadth of empire. Maisie s
naiveté in this scene expresses what Fredric Jameson
points out is at the heart of imperialism: a spatial
disjunction that results in a "systematic block on any
adequate consciousness of the structure of the imperial
system" (Jameson 50), where the periphery is unimag
inable to the metropole and vice versa.4 This inability
to grasp the totality of the imperial system is the
dilemma that Fredric Jameson argues is "the formal
contradiction, that modernism seeks to solve" (51).
For Jameson, the project of modernism is to negotiate
the experience of empire and the gaps in global
knowledge it produces.
Extending and elaborating on Jamesons argu
ment, Gabrielle Mclntire notes that one's knowledge
of, and relationship to, empire is specific to one's
identity. In her reading of Heart of Darkness, Mclntire
notes that while the men are free to roam the empire,
the women of the novel are moored in either the
metropole of Brussels, like Kurtz's "Intended" bride,
or in the periphery of the Dutch African colonies,
like the "barbarous and superb woman" by the river
(Conrad 83). In this text, knowledge of empire is
divided along gender lines, and Mclntire points out
that the isolation of women functions to preserve for
them the "saving illusion" of a benevolent colonialism.5
Though "crucial for sending off the men on their
16 Modem Language Studies 44.1
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travels" (Mclntire 271), the women of the novel are
fixed in domestic spheres and are unaware of the
exploitative capitalism at the heart of colonialism.
Despite (or perhaps because of) their roles as wives
and mothers—the dispatchers of their colonizing
men—the women of Heart of Darkness are blocked
from a full knowledge of the imperial system by the
spatial disjunction outlined in Jamesons work and
remain unconscious of their entanglement in imperial
systems of oppression.
By placing Maisie Johnson in Marlows role,
Virginia Woolf addresses this dilemma of spatial
disjunction through a re-articulation of the compli
cated ways in which women are connected to, complicit
in, and subversive of empire. Complicating the fixed
relationship of women and empire represented in
Heart of Darkness, Woolf explores the ways in which
class, sexuality, and marital status alter this intersec
tion, and she offers her female characters the possibility
of resisting their role as naive dispatchers or repro
ducers of male agents of empire. To do this, Woolf
focuses on the fixity and naiveté of Kurtz's Intended
and her position as an unmarried woman, and she
revises this figure, first through Rachel Vinrace in
The Voyage Out (1915), and later through Maisie
Johnson and Elizabeth Dalloway in Mrs. Dalloway.
While scholars have established a relationship
between Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, and
Conrad's plot,6 and while they have noted the con
nections between Mrs. Dalloway and Heart of
Darkness,7 they have neglected how women, specif
ically, mediate Woolf's allusions to Joseph Conrad.8
Particularly significant are the ways in which both of
Woolf's novels draw upon Heart of Darkness in order
to recast women in the role of the roving colonial
explorer. However, scholars have yet to fully explore
this trope and read Woolf's The Voyage Out and Mrs.
Dalloway s shared deployment of the exploration
theme as a continued project of testing potential
female subversion of imperial patriarchy. This essay
posits that Rachel, Maisie, and Elizabeth are not
separate echoes of Conrad's protagonists and their
journeys; they are continued revisions on the theme
of women, imperial space, and knowledge. As young
women on the cusp of marriage, their lives parallel
each other and Kurtz's Intended, though these new
daughters of empire are not trapped in the drawing
rooms of the metropole. Each new iteration of the
young woman figure is an expansion of possibilities,
and Woolf s women become increasingly mobile and
knowledgeable in response to the previous generations
limited horizons and limited choices as Woolf sounds
the limits of imperial patriarchy.
Central to these revisions of Kurtz's Intended is
an exploration of the conditions for women's resistance
to empire and, particularly, the sexual reproduction
empire requires. In general, Woolf s work is consis
tently interested in marriage and maternity as a
constitutive force of empire and in the development
of alternate female possibilities.9 By specifically
focusing on young, unmarried women in her revision
of women's relationship to imperial space and power,
Woolf is able to test female possibility at its climax,
before marital and familial obligations take their toll.
As an early exploration of these themes, Rachel
Vinrace is limited in her relationship to empire because
her only option for her future is marriage, of which
the primary object in the early twentieth century
would have undoubtedly been the imperial "repro
duction of the race."10 Because of this paucity of
options, Rachel is equally limited in possible responses
and resistance to this role. In Mrs. Dalloway, the
intersection of the young woman and empire is
multifaceted and ambivalent, and it is greatly deter
mined by class position and ethnic identity.
Furthermore, the close of the First World War had
begun to open new possibilities and professions for
women outside of motherhood, and this is reflected
in the multiplicity of female roles in the novel. In
depicting two young women—the dark and orien
tal-looking Elizabeth and her foil Maisie—Woolf
displays more than one possible position within and
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response to empire, and she presents her characters
with the faint opportunity for resistance.
In representing Rachel, Elizabeth, and Maisie as
colonial explorers, Virginia Woolf anticipates Jameson
and Mclntire, and she demonstrates the centrality of
questions of space in plotting the individual's rela
tionship to empire. In both novels, the acquisition of
the knowledge of one's place within the imperial
system is figured as a sexual awakening, and this is
represented by a physical or symbolic move between
the metropole and the periphery. This movement is
inflected both by Woolf s developing modernist style
and through the revision of Kurtz's Intended. While
The Voyage Out employs the tropes of the bildungs
roman and the romance adventure in order to address
the distance between metropole and periphery,11 the
more mature Mrs. Dalloway employs a modernist
play of space, time, and simultaneity to answer the
problem of spatial disjunction. As Woolf's work
develops and becomes increasingly modernist, the
center and periphery are drawn closer together. While
Rachel must voyage across the Atlantic to gain
knowledge, Maisie and Elizabeth Dalloway can move
throughout the city of London and experience a
layering of colonial and metropolitan narrative spaces
and times.12
But this shift in spatial representation is significant
not just for its indication of Woolf's stylistic devel
opment: it also throws into relief the ways in which
Woolf's literary resistance to imperial patriarchy is
more invested in a subversion of patriarchy than in
a subversion of empire. As Gayatri Spivak bemoans,
"It seems particularly unfortunate when the emergent
perspective of feminist criticism reproduces the axioms
of imperialism" (243). Despite Woolf's gestures in
Three Guineas (1938) towards a transnational bond
between women in their subjection,13 Woolf's literary
revisions of young women as colonial explorers
nonetheless reproduce the axes of imperial power
and exclude the native female from the feminist
individualist project14—first, through the employment
articles 17
 of the native woman as a voiceless foil to Rachels Woolf s and Rachels simultaneous interpellation into
awakening, and second, through an elision, absorption, adult sexuality and the British Empire.15
and distortion of the colonial subject in Maisie and One of the earliest echoes of Heart of Darkness
Elizabeth's exploration of London as métonymie in The Voyage Out arrives in the form of Richard
empire. In Woolf s modernist compression of imperial Dalloway's version of the "saving illusions" that
space, figurative interactions with empire replace Marlow s aunt and Kurtz's Intended hold dear. Seeking
direct ones, and racial alterity is uncritically deployed companionship and guidance on the deck of
as a flag of female empowerment. Ultimately, Woolf s Euphrosyne, Rachel reveals to Mr. Dalloway that she
exclusion of the colonial subject in her efforts to grant "know(s) nothing!" and hopes that he will talk to her
her young female characters an escape from imperial about his world. But rather than initiate Rachel to his
patriarchy suggests two possibilities. First, that Woolf political ideas, Dalloway explains to her that it is "far
too is hampered by the spatial disjunction of empire better that you should know nothing." He states:
she seeks to rectify, and that her own position as an
upper-middle class and metropolitan female imperial "I never allow my wife to talk politics," he said
subject inhibits her knowledge and perspective of seriously. "For this reason. It is impossible for
empire; and/or second, that Woolf actively negotiates human beings, constituted as they are, both to
and even participates in imperialist rhetoric in order fight and to have ideals. If I have preserved mine...
to purchase an alternative relationship to patriarchy it is due to the fact that I have been able to come

for a particular set of women. This essay seeks to map home to my wife in the evening and to find that
Woolf s exploration of the threads that bind young she has spent her day calling, music, play with
women in imperial patriarchy and the potential for children, domestic duties—what you will; her
freedom from these ties, and it further endeavors to illusions have not been destroyed." (VO 62;
explore who remains on the periphery of Woolf's emphasis added)
project for female liberation.
Woolf begins her exploration of the connection Like the Kurtzes of the world, Richard Dalloways
between colonial knowledge, women's sexual repro imperial ideals are kept intact because he keeps the
duction, and their position within empire in her first realities of empire attached to these ideals hidden
novel, The Voyage Out. In this novel, Woolf directly from his wife. Clarissa Dalloway is a woman of
responds to the fixity of Kurtz's Intended with a woman illusions, who can view two British warships on the
who can travel and gain knowledge of the "other open water and marvel at their stateliness and exclaim
world." The novel follows Rachel Vinrace, chronicling how glad she is to be English without noticing the
her sexual awakening as it unfolds during her journey "sinister" quality and "sadness" that the narrator
across the Atlantic and reaches its climax deep in the attaches to them. Clarissa never questions why the
jungle. This voyage from England to South America warships are there or why they might be needed; she
(and from naiveté to womanhood) is plotted along does not negatively associate the hostile purpose and
the same lines as Marlows journey up the Congo, and presence of the ships with her experience of empire.
the venture leads Rachel to a Kurtz-like revelation and Instead, she acts the hostess at dinner and entertains

her subsequent death. Tracing the course of Rachel's her fellow passengers by reciting poetry about valor,
transformation from girlish ignorance, as Richard never acknowledging the violence attached to that
Dalloway puts it, to the adult rite of being engaged, valor.16 As Erica Johnson points out, in Rachel's
we can follow both the echo of Conrad's novel within conversations with Richard Dalloway, "Woolf shows

18 Modem Language Studies 44.1

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how the British man's prerogative to colonize the
world and to carve up geographical boundaries stems
from his creation of concomitant domestic boundaries
based on career, class, and educational boundaries at
home" (69). These parallel boundaries—between
metropole and periphery, domestic and political—that
govern the life of the Dalloways are the same divisions
that mark Conrad's text and imprison the Intended.
Rachel, as an echo of the Intended, begins the
novel as closed off and contained. When Dalloway
attempts to explain the imperial system to Rachel—
despite his earlier protestations against female
knowledge—she cannot imagine the whole, or the
"Unity," that he identifies as a fundamental to imperial
progress. He tells her to "Look at it in this way, Miss
Vinrace; conceive the state as a complicated machine;
we citizens are parts of that machine" (VO 63). Rachel,
in response, tries to imagine the role of a single woman
in the imperial machine, but she cannot do it. For
her, "It was impossible to combine the image of a lean
black widow, gazing out of her window, and longing
for some one to talk to, with the image of a vast
machine, such as one sees at South Kensington,
thumping, thumping, thumping" (63). Rachel's
inability to see the connection between the single
woman and the system hinges upon her identification
with the lonely "widow." Released from the marriage
market and its attendant sexuality through death, the
widow does not function in the machine of imperi
alism in the way that Mrs. Dalloway does. She does
not "play with children" or fulfill domestic duties; she
is not the comforting wife or nurturing mother. Her
loneliness and leanness suggests an absence of mater
nity that resonates with the sexually innocent Rachel,
and also represents a potentially bleak future should
Rachel find herself outside of the vast machine.
Rachel, though, will not remain sexually innocent
or disconnected from the great machine of empire;
her father s desire to train her as a housewife precludes
her from becoming an old maid like her aunts. Her
induction into the system begins shortly after her
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conversation with Richard Dalloway on the deck of
the ship. After identifying Rachel's ignorance about
what he means by love,17 Dalloway continues the
discussion of politics and her education in the machine
of empire in her room, a space that, were they not on
a ship, would not under normal circumstances be
available for private meetings between middle-aged
administrators and upper-middle class young women.
This private lesson in empire culminates with Richard
telling Rachel that she has the world at her feet and
with him kissing her passionately. Though Rachel has
a girlish attraction towards Dalloway, the kiss frightens
her: "Her head was cold, her knees shaking, and the
physical pain of emotion was so great that she could
only keep herself moving above the great leaps of her
heart" (VO 73-74).
By tying together Rachel's possession of the whole
world with the sexual feelings of the passionate
embrace, Dalloway interpellates Rachel into her role
in the "Unity" of the British Empire and its machine
like operations. Though Rachel does not fully under
stand or recognize this interpellation into adult
sexuality and her future role as a mother of empire,
she does realize that Dalloway has shown her some
thing that young women are usually kept unaware of
by their containment in the metropole. She feels "as
if she and Richard had seen something together which
is hidden in ordinary life" (VO 74). What they have
seen in Rachel's cabin room is the connection between
sex and empire: that Rachel's body is an appropriate
location for the sexual desire of agents of empire like
Dick—Mrs. Dalloway's nickname for her husband,
revealed with the warships—and that it will be a
productive piece of the imperial machine, much like
the trading port the Euphrosyne is en route to.
Though Rachel reacts traumatically to this first
interpellation into womanhood, and though this
prevents her from fully recognizing the permanence
and scope of her imprisonment in this position, her
education in the imperial machine is completed later
in the novel via her engagement to Terence Hewett.
articles 19
 This engagement takes place in an almost dream-like
haze during the second major echo of Conrad's novel
in The Voyage Out, the river journey deep into the
South American wilderness. Though scholars have
read the narrative voyage away from the colonial
center as a move away from imperial rhetoric,18 the
constant comparison between the jungle and an
English park suggests that Terence and Rachel's
journey up the river operates more figuratively as a
journey back to England and its values.19 Terence calls
upon England to resituate Rachel in the dominant
rhetoric of family life. Indeed, after confirming to
Rachel that "Yes, marriage" is their future together,
Terence cannot help imagining "walking with her
through the streets of London" as they travel along a
jungle footpath (VO 299). In the engagement scene,
the future environment of matrimony and family life
in the metropole supplants their jungle surroundings
and the geography of the periphery. Terence and
Rachel are only awakened from their English fantasy
and returned to the South American jungle when
they realize that they have nearly stumbled into the
native village. Here, they are confronted by the stares
of the native women as they go about their work:
As they sauntered about, the stare followed them,
passing over their legs, their bodies, their heads,
curiously not without hostility...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.. .But soon the life of the village took
no notice of them; they had become absorbed
into it. The women's hands became busy again
with the straw; their eyes dropped. If they moved,
it was to fetch something from the hut, or to
catch a straying child, or to cross the space with
a jar balanced on their heads; if they spoke, it
was to cry some harsh unintelligible cry.. .Peaceful
and even beautiful at first, the sight of the women,
who had given up looking at them, made them
now feel very cold and melancholy.
20 Modem Language Studies 44.1
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'Well,' Terrence sighed at length, 'it makes
us seem insignificant, doesn't it?'
Rachel agreed. So it would go on for ever
and ever, she said, those women sitting under
trees, the trees and the river. They turned away...
They had not gone far before they began to assure
each other once more that they were in love,
were happy, were content; but why was it so
painful being in love, why was there so much
pain in happiness? ( VO 303-04)
This moment of realized insignificance disrupts the
pleasure of engagement for Rachel and Terence, and
it further reveals that their new relationship is not
unique. The narrators focus on the women and their
maternally coded labor in this scene—on the plaiting
of straw, preparation of food, and breastfeeding of
children—alongside Rachel's claim that "it would go
on for ever and ever...those women sitting under
trees," suggests a moment of identification between
Rachel and the native women. The economic mission
at the heart of the voyage allows Rachel to recognize
this scene as part of the imperial machine of their
world, and to suddenly realize that she too is part of
a world-system of women and children that would
go on forever. Mark Wollaeger has pointed to the
image of the native women plaiting straw as a repe
tition of Rachel's complaint that Austen's marriage-plot
novels are "so like a tight plait," and he further suggests
that Rachel identifies with the native women and
desires a freedom from the prescribed heterosexual
desire on display in the village and the hotel.20
However, this repetition and displeasure in the tight
weave also signals a rejection of the entanglement of
motherhood and the binding third thread of a child,
as indicated by the conspicuous presence of the naked
breast and nursing baby, and Terence and Rachel's
later conversations about family. Rachel should be
happy with her engagement to Terence, should be
happy at the sight of a suckling babe—a reflection of
her expected future as a mother—but she feels only
pain, much like the earlier pain of her first kiss. Because
this moment of recognition arrives on the heels of
Terence and Rachels kiss and engagement, and because
the stares of the native women cannot be avoided,
the process that began with Richard Dalloway's kiss
on the ship—Rachel's education in the link between
sexuality and empire—is completed.
Whereas in Heart of Darkness the "horror" of
colonial exploration and exportation, and its incom
mensurability with metropolitan experience, is
revealed to Marlow through Kurtz's death, what Rachel
discovers in the jungle before she dies is sexual
knowledge and a level of commensurability between
the native woman's experience and her own place in
the patriarchal system of the British Empire. Maternity
is the primary labor of the woman in the village, and
maternity will be Rachel's expected duty and labor
in her coming role as a wife in London. Both Rachel
and the native women are essential cogs in the imperial
machine, as the bodies that produce agents of empire
and subjects of empire, respectively. What Rachel
learns on her river voyage is the specifically female
horror that Kurtz's Intended is denied knowledge of:
that while men like Marlow only see the economic
and physical exploitation of the colonized native,
women in the periphery and metropole are exploited
as the (re)producers of empire and imperial labor.
It is necessary to point out, however, that this
moment of realization and recognition does not take
into account the double exploitation of the colonial
female subject as a foil and midwife to Rachel's feminist
individualism and patriarchal resistance. Though
their hostile stares confront and discomfit the English
tourists, the native women of the village are not given
a voice to respond to the imperial discourse of
exploitation. They remain silent for most of the scene,
and "if they spoke, it was to cry some harsh unintel
ligible cry" (VO 303-04J. While Erica Johnson points
to the alignment between the natives' relative speech
lessness and Rachel's earlier "estrangement from
language" and failure to "interrupt imperialist
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discourse,"21 we might also read the natives' silence
as a necessary foil against which Rachel eventually
finds her voice to resist Terence s efforts to domesticate
her. Chandra Mohanty has pointed to the ways in
which third-world women are often characterized as
"sexually constrained," "uneducated," "domestic," and
"tradition-bound," in comparison to Western white
women who define themselves "as educated, modern,
as having control over their own bodies and sexualities,
and the freedom to make their own decisions."22
Though Rachel's ability to control her body or make
decisions is fraught because it is only fully realized
in her death, without her confrontation with the
women in the jungle she might not have realized her
position and entrapment. Despite their ability to
foment Rachel's feminist awakening, the women in
the jungle remain tools rather than subjects of Woolf s
feminist project. Problematically, Woolf imagines
neither subjectivity nor a future for the women outside
of the current colonial condition. As Rachel claims,
the native women will remain under the trees, by the
river, forever.
Leaving behind the women who have made her
aware of her position in the British Empire, Rachel
begins to resist the patriarchal binds that have been
promised by her engagement. Though Rachel and
Terence outwardly appear as a happy couple to the
other hotel guests, behind closed doors they struggle
over Rachel's new role and the distance she reasserts
between herself and the world. Arguing over con
gratulation notes and their courtship, Rachel insists
that she "never fell in love" with Terence and crumples
the notes in a rejection of conformity. She wants to
believe that no one "had ever felt what she felt" ( VO
313), and that her life would be different from those
well-wishing women who send her cards. She wants
an out from the imperial machine. However, Terence
rebuts her rejection, and he reclaims and redirects
the conversation. He tells her that Mrs. Thornbury,
with her "too many children" is still "a kind of beauty"
and that she is "rather like a large old tree murmuring
articles 21
 in the moonlight, or a river going on and on and on
and in the same breath announces that Ralph has
been promoted in the colonial system (VO 313).
Terences repetition of the native village image of a
tree by the river passing through time, paired with
his support of Ralphs gains, reads like an effort to
situate Rachel within imperialist discourse and in her
future role as a wife and mother.
Nonetheless, Rachel continues her resistance
and, interjecting into his small talk, asserts, "I wont
have eleven children." Terence, continuing his efforts
this battle ultimately codes Rachel's death as a rejection
of this patriarchal imperial order. This rejection seems
particularly clear when we take into account Rachel's
fever dreams before her death, with their mixed images
of metaphorical wombs and metropolitan London.23
As Laura Doyle points out, through death Rachel
escapes from her nightmares and "retreats specifically
from a sexuality supported and regulated by Empire"
(144). Furthermore, Rachel's death removes her from
the marriage market and provides her with an escape
from a future that devalues her musical and creative

to domesticate Rachel, responds, "We must have a abilities in favor of her ability to mother the next
son and we must have a daughter.. .because, let alone generation of English men who, like Terence, can
the inestimable advantage of being our children, theyd travel and survey the world. She escapes the fate she
be so well brought up" (VO 314). And while he carries discovers through the reflection of the women of the
on imagining an education that would rob his daughter native camp; she rejects not only sexual experience,
of practicality and teach his son to laugh at "great but also the suckling English babe.
men," Rachel simply insists that her children be In the end, Rachel's freedom of movement
nothing like the fine English gentleman, St. John Hirst. between the poles of the British Empire does not
Though Clarissa DaOoway once told Rachel, "'I grant grant her freedom from a global sexual economy of
that the English seem, on the whole, whiter than most reproduction, but it does provide her with the vantage
men, their records cleaner'" ( VO 61), Rachel's illicit point to recognize her engagement as catalyzing her
kiss from Mr. Dalloway and her voyage up the river imprisonment within it. Rachel "experiences travel
have made clear to her that English men's records are as a potential shift in her overall frame of reference...
not cleaner and are no model for future children. that reflects her experience and understanding of her
This scene of tense negotiations about the future new location in history, in society, and in the world"
finally culminates in Terence's assertion (behind (Johnson 81). Unfortunately, this new understanding
clenched, shaking fists) that he likes Rachel in part arrives moments too late. Like Kurtz's Intended,
because if they "stood on a rock together, [Rachel Rachel is committed to her imperial role by her
would] throw [him] into the sea" (VO 317); this engagement; she and Terence cannot break it off,
subsequently leads them to wrestle on the floor, ripping though she tries. And, with inverted symmetry to the
Rachel's dress in pseudosexual passion. Ultimately, Intended, Rachel is only freed from her engagement
this scene is a figurative and physical battle between by death. While Rachel's end is certainly not an
Rachel's freedom and Terence's efforts to initiate her optimistic revision of the Intended, it is a subversive

into her new role as mother and progenitor of the one. She does not wait for her fate in a sitting room;
English race and empire. Rachel's repeated thrusts at she is not continually mourning the almost-marriage
difference both refuse her future as just another she lost. Her death instead takes on the color of choice
mother of empire and yearn for a state of innocence and suggests willful departure from the imperial
before her awakening in the jungle to her sexuality machine by the only means available.
and future reproduction. Though Rachel's position is bleak, it is the first
Occurring as it does just before Rachel's illness, step in a series of possible new relations between

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women and empire. In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
continues to explore this relationship through two
contrasting models of experience embodied in Maisie
and Elizabeth. Because these young women remain
unengaged in the novel, Maisie and Elizabeth are not
yet cemented in the standard woman's role in empire,
and remain still-flexible explorations of the possibility
of resisting women's prescribed position within the
imperial system.
Published thirteen years later and after the First
World War, Mrs. Dalloway presents a world that is
very different from that of The Voyage Out. While
Rachel and Terence may spend their time looking at
clouds, the people of London are instead looking at
the contrail of a plane, spelling advertisements in the
sky. In a world brought violently in contact by the
war, or through imperial exhibits featuring a "colonial
contact-zone" like 1924's Wembley (Cohen 90),24 the
distances experienced by Marlow are diminished,
and the women of Mrs. Dalloway need not travel to
South America to experience the empire and revise
the figure of the Intended. Instead, Woolf attempts
to bring the empire home by laying it upon the streets
of London, much like she imposed the streets of
London on the South American jungle. As Maisie
and Elizabeth move throughout the city, their journeys
echo the colonial explorations of previous generations
and provide them with the opportunity and perspective
to view how their lives are part of the imperial system.
Their voyages reestablish the periphery's connection
to the metropole as they navigate the possibility of
escaping imperial patriarchy.25
Maisie Johnson's voyage through Regent's Park
in search of the tube station is a reversal of the standard
"grand tour" narrative and of the romance adventure
of The Voyage Out. It not only imaginatively locates
the colonial space within the park through the invo
cation of Marlow and Kurtz, but it also reverses the
direction of colonial movement from metropole to
periphery, as Maisie has just arrived from the eco
nomically semi-peripheral Scotland in order to work.
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Because Maisie is traveling to a new and foreign place,
her eyes are wider and more perceptive than the other
visitors to the park. Her newness to London makes
the city and its people an object of study for Maisie,
much like the native village was for Rachel. Confused
and traveling alone in the natural environment of the
park, Maisie is more aware of others' behavior, making
her easily terrified by her odd confrontation with the
foreign-looking Rezia.
When Maisie asks Rezia for directions to the
tube station, Rezia practically yells the way and dis
misses Maisie abruptly while attempting to shield her
from Septimus's deranged behavior. Maisie intuits
that "something was up" with this couple, and she
predicts that the run-in would "jangle again among
her memories" for fifty years to come; she cries
"horror" moments later (MD 26).26 Shirley Neuman
argues, "What Maisie recognizes in Septimus as
'horror' is such insanity, born of the experience of
war" and a loss of faith in the "saving ideal" of empire
(65). While Neuman is correct that Maisie's horror
is in part recognition of an imperial system's ability
to destroy its subjects, it is not only Septimus and his
disturbing behavior that scares Maisie. Septimus's
wife Rezia accompanies him, and she is the one who
interacts with Maisie. Furthermore, Maisie remarks
that they "both seemed queer" (MD 26). It is the
image of the two of them together, the unhappy and
unsuccessful marriage that elicits Maisie's "horror."
Maisie recognizes that the corrupting powers of
empire and conquest reach beyond the men that
enforce them and consequently touch the lives of
their wives.
That Maisie's fears are directed towards matri
mony is further suggested by Mrs. Dempster's
observations of her:
That girl, thought Mrs. Dempster.. .don't know
a thing yet.. .Percy drank. Well, better to have a
son, thought Mrs. Dempster. She had a hard time
of it, and couldn't help smiling at a girl like that.
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 You'll get married, for you're pretty enough, She might not know men, but her physical and
thought Mrs. Dempster. Get married, she thought, metaphorical journey across colonial space has allowed
and then you'll know. Oh, the cooks, and so on. her to observe Rezia and perceive her acquiescence
Every man has his ways. But whether I'd have and servility to a husband ravaged by war. Maisie has
chosen quite like that if I could have known, gained access to a knowledge that was withheld from
thought Mrs. Dempster, and could not help an older generation of women within the empire.
wishing to whisper a word to Maisie Johnson... Like Rachel, she has discovered that women are the
Ah, but that aeroplane! Hadn't Mrs. Dempster exploited buttresses of empire. Because Mrs. Dempster
always longed to see foreign parts? She had a never traveled, because she remained home while the
nephew, a missionary. (MD 27) men around her headed off to uphold the "saving
illusion," she could not recognize a woman's role
Mrs. Dempster identifies with the working-class before she committed to her husband, and she could
Maisie, and she recognizes that Maisie is identifying not choose as she would have liked; it is suggested
with Rezia, another transplant, and that the married that she would have chosen not to get married.
couple is making an impression on the young woman. We never definitively learn what choices Maisie
This moment of identification is not unlike Rachel's makes for her life and whether she does marry. The
experience with the native women by the river. Rezia's novel does not return to her. What we do know is
marked foreignness (as well as her former occupation that despite granting Maisie the knowledge of her
weaving flowers, feathers, and colored wires rolled position within the patriarchal imperial system before
in beads into hats) suggests that she is a new iteration she becomes engaged like the doomed Rachel, Woolf
of the native women. And though Rezia might not does not promise Maisie an escape. Instead, Woolf
be a mother caring for a suckling babe, she is mater leaves her frozen, paralyzed in fear, and the narrator
nally caring for her damaged husband. In the trauma voices through Mrs. Dempster a prediction of Maisie s
of the post-war world, the imperial order has shifted, fate: that she will get married because she is pretty
and a sick husband can fill the role of a child; though enough, and there is no other option. Maisie's horror,
Rezia wants a baby of her own, the doctors instruct then, is in part tied to her lack of available responses
her to play a version of the game eye-spy with her to her newly acquired knowledge of her position.
husband.27 So while Rachel identified with the native Like Rezia she has left her people, is vulnerable, and
women through the shared labor of motherhood, will likely marry an English man and become fully
Maisie is likely identifying with Rezia through a shared absorbed within the machine of the British Empire.
outsider status (Rezia is from allied Italy), and through Woolf s depiction of Maisie and her power of sub
Maisie's potential future labor of caring for a war version is ambivalent at best. Playing the part of
wounded husband. colonizing explorer in the Regents Park scene, Maisie
While Mrs. Dempster realizes that Maisie is
is ultimately as disillusioned as Marlow because of
fascinated with the couple—as a potential reflection
her subject position. Her class, suggested by her need
of her future—what she does not recognize is the
to emigrate for work and by Mrs. Dempster s recog
nition of herself in Maisie, compacted with her
revelation in Maisie's horror. Mrs. Dempster assumes
Maisie is naive, that she does not know yet about men
immigrant status, grants her little agency and precludes
and their ways and what it means to be married, her
to from the social mobility to make it in a man's
world without a husband.
be tied to and subservient to a husband and a son.

But Maisie does not need to get married to "know." This attention to class is a significant shift in

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Woolf's depiction of this young woman figure and intersection with empire is not signaled through an
her characterization as colonial explorer. While echoing of Conrad; it is instead encoded upon her
Rachels travel is figured as an educational journey body. Elizabeth, just two years younger than Maisie
or pleasure trip, economic pressures instigate Maisie s Johnson, is described as dark and "Oriental." The
geographic mobility. Furthermore, while the depiction narrator, musing on Elizabeth's dissimilarity from her
and interaction between Maisie and Rezia recalls mother, suggests a long history of cultural contact as
the cause:
Rachel's encounter with the native women, Maisie's
central moment of identification and subsequent
enlightenment hinges more upon class-consciousness Was it that some Mongol had been wrecked on
than racial alterity. Rachel's brief resistance is fueled the coast of Norfolk (as Mrs. Hilbery said), had
by her racial difference from the women in the village, mixed with the Dalloway ladies, perhaps, a
which encourages Rachel's claim for difference in hundred years ago? For the Dalloways, in general
regards to her marital future. Maisie is not granted were fair-haired; blue-eyed; Elizabeth, on the
resistance—the most she can voice is her despair— contrary, was dark; had Chinese eyes in a pale
precisely because the Regent's Park scene lacks the face; an Oriental mystery. (MD 122-123)
exoticizing difference encouraging female individu
ation. Though Rezia's role is structurally analogous
In implicating miscegenation and racial fusing in the
to the native women, she is not a colonial subject; she
creation of Elizabeths features, Woolf creates a figure
is Western European and working class, just like
whose body can physically register the effects of
globalization and cultural and racial mixing. In
Maisie. While this development rectifies The Voyage
choosing to date this interaction at "perhaps, a hun
Out's imperial feminist problem of using the colonial
subject as simply a foil, it nonetheless excludes the
dred years ago," Woolf challenges the concept that
colonial subject and demonstrates a shift in Woolf's
these global connections were only possible through
the new technologies of the modernist age.28
politics towards an emphasis on class over colonial
concerns. In plotting the movement and awakening
Furthermore, by suggesting that cultural interaction
of the young women of Mrs. Dalloway within the
has long been experienced in Britain, Woolf also
geographically tighter yet stylistically expanded spaceundermines the very existence of the historic spatial
disjunction expressed in Conrad's novel. Woolf s
of London, Woolf continues to engage the intersection
account of a cultural interaction that predates twen
of empire and patriarchy while exploring the diversity
of class positions within the imperial patriarchal tieth-century technology forms a figure that not only
revises Kurtz's Intended but also contests the isolation
system that are largely overlooked in The Voyage Out.
If Maisie is the portrait of a young woman who
she represents.
knows her position within the British Empire but has Of Virginia Woolf s young, unmarried women,
Elizabeth Dalloway has the most potential to be
few options for subverting its influence on her life,
then Elizabeth is the portrait of a young woman with
transgressive. Beyond suggesting global interaction,
numerous options and little knowledge. Thoughthe racialization of Elizabeth's body distances her
Elizabeth neither directly echoes Heart of Darkness
from the expectations of her bourgeois post-war
society and physically expresses political difference.
nor roams through Regent's Park, she too is implicated
in the system of women and empire, rendering her Her anomalous appearance and its repeated emphasis
in the text act as a shorthand for Elizabeth's break
another symbolic figure for testing women's ability
to subvert this system. In the case of Elizabeth, her
from her mother's generation and prime the reader

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 to expect possibly deviant behavior. Urmila Seshagiri
argues that, "Racial alterity, freed from its dominant
association with colonized subjects, became in Woolf s
world—as it was for the English avant-garde—a
gateway into disruptive or subversive cultural possi
bilities" (146). However, I would argue that Elizabeths
racial alterity is not so much freed from association
with colonized subjects, but rather suggests a con
traction of the relationship between Rachel and the
native women into one figure. Either way, in giving
Elizabeth markers of race—her "fine, Chinese, oriental
The relationship of domination between First
and Third World was masked and displaced by
an overriding (and perhaps ideological) con
sciousness of imperialism as being essentially
between First World powers or the holders of
Empire, and this consciousness tended to repress
the more basic axis of otherness, and to raise
issues of colonial reality only incidentally (48)
In turning a battle over Elizabeths actions and future
into a battle between adult women, Clarissa and Miss

eyes" and dark hair, so different from her bird-like Kilman imagine Elizabeth devoid of agency and will.
and fair mother, Clarissa—Woolf rehabilitates the Elizabeths physical otherness is ignored in favor of
negative association of disruption and degeneration her behavioral otherness: she prays too much, accord
attached to miscegenation by deploying it as a signal ing to her mother, and is too willing to play the
for Elizabeths dissidence towards her mother and socialite, according to Miss Kilman. Both women
her potential positive subversion of her parents' wish her to act more like themselves, to be definitely
oppressive world of politics and parties.29 shaped by only one woman's influence. What both
Clarissa most keenly feels Elizabeths resistanceClarissa and Miss Kilman forget is that time has passed
in the form of Elizabeths tutor, the spartan and fanaticand that Elizabeth is on the cusp of adulthood. As a
Miss Kilman. Associated with Germany by heritagesymbol of colonialism in a post-Great War world, she
and education, Miss Kilman is an expert in moderncan begin to resist their influence and act for herself,
history and a devout Christian, and her influence over and perhaps even seek full independence.
Elizabeths behavior and spirituality deeply troubles Elizabeth's power of resistance and potential
Clarissa. Facing off at the top of the stairs directlyindependence from both women first becomes
before Elizabeth and Miss Kilman go shopping,30 theapparent when she abandons Miss Kilman in the
two older women experience a cold war of emotions,department store in favor of a voyage through London
each hating the other silently and desperately wishingthat her mother would disapprove of. During this
that Elizabeth will choose to side with her. Interestingly,trip, Elizabeth's oriental features are again emphasized,
it is right before Mrs. Dalloway and Miss Kilman'sreasserting her difference from her mother and Miss
standoff that Elizabeth is first described as "oriental,"Kilman, as well as her refusal of their codes of conduct.

and it is through this characterization that she is This second description of Elizabeth as "oriental"
figuratively territorialized and becomes the space does not continue the trope of Elizabeth as a colonized
upon which each woman wishes to mark her influence. land, however. Instead, it functions to personify
Here, the racialization of Elizabeth functions to suggestElizabeth as a voyaging other. Like Rachel and Maisie,
a reading of Elizabeth as a colonial territory, withElizabeth is also cast as a colonizing figure traveling
Clarissa and Miss Kilman as competing imperialthrough London; however, she is not depicted as an
powers, Britain and Germany in particular. This echo or reflection of an English colonizer wandering
figurative battle between aging empires is analogous through a park. Instead, she is an oriental pirate sailing
to Jamesons model of a pre-World War One systemon a pirate-ship omnibus through the streets:
of imperial interactions. He points out that:

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 Suddenly Elizabeth stepped forward and most
competently boarded the omnibus, in front of
everybody. She took a seat on top. The impetuous
creature—a pirate—started forward, sprang
away.. .for pirate it was, reckless, unscrupulous,
bearing down ruthlessly...And now it was like
riding, to be rushing up Whitehall; and to each
movement of the omnibus the beautiful body in
the fawn-coloured coat [Elizabeth] responded
freely like a rider. (MD 135-136)
Though initially losing her balance and grabbing
onto the railing, Elizabeth quickly masters the
quick-sailing bus and rides it masterfully up the
Strand into a working-class district. Because "no
Dalloways came down the Strand daily; she was a
pioneer, a stray, venturing, trusting," she is a colonial
explorer (MD 137). Surveying the world from above,
Elizabeth takes stock of the objects around, almost
as if she is appreciating a territory all her own. Dressed
in fine-cut clothes and looking down on the world,
Elizabeth's position in a vertical axis of space distin
guishes her from Maisie on the ground, looking for
a tube station, and emphasizes the class difference
that divides the two women and their positions within
the empire. Elizabeths class position and education
in modern history grants her a larger vantage point
or, symbolically, a global perspective. Furthermore,
Elizabeths association with a global power of the past
further frees her from the limitations of contemporary
British women, and her body's containment of multiple
racial markers might also allow it to be read as a
figurative empire of its own. Elizabeth might contain
masses rather than be one among them. While Maisie
is terrified and paralyzed in space by her journey
because of her limited semi-peripheral agency,
Elizabeth is inspired by her journey because she is
empowered to imagine possible control over the
world around her:
It was quite different here from Westminster, she subversion of patriarchy is ultimately revealed as
thought, getting off at Chancery Lane. It was so highly ambivalent.
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serious; so busy. In short, she would like to have
a profession. She would become a doctor, a farmer,
possibly go into Parliament, if she found it
necessary, all because of the Strand. (MD 136)
Remembering Miss Kilman's suggestion that
women could now enter professions that were pre
viously only available to men,31 Elizabeth surveys the
Strand and decides that "she liked the feeling of people
working" (MD 136) and that she herself should take
up a profession. Interestingly, Elizabeth's choice of
professions suggests that her subversion of societal
gender roles cannot entirely escape the imperial system
and its patriarchal underpinnings. Mark Wollaeger
notes that, "Woolf worrie[d] that Englishwomen
already colonized under patriarchy 'like slaves in a
harem' may become colonizers in their turn as they
follow 'the procession...of educated men' into the
public sphere" (45), and Naomi Black argues that a
central tenet of Woolf s Three Guineas is that "women
must earn their own livings, but do it in a way to
discourage hierarchy and militarism (96). Taking a
position in Parliament is a straightforward partici
pation in the administration of Empire, doctors are
a crucial component of an imperial system that
physically and mentally harms its subjects and men
like Septimus Smith, and the farmer's ownership,
ordering, and cultivation of land continues the colonial
metaphor. Elizabeth's list of acceptable professions is
a matrix of colonial control where territories, bodies,
and politics intersect. These connections and
Elizabeth's figurative colonial exploration are entwined,
suggesting that the network of imperial control is
strengthened even in attempts to escape patriarchal
order. Elizabeth may only escape her exploited role
within empire by becoming a cog in the exploitative
system of empire; she must become an imperialist
herself. Though hopeful in some respects—it would
grant her a freedom from marriage unavailable to
Rachel and Maisie—Elizabeth's possible professional
articles 27
 This ambivalence is largely due to the questions Once the young women of empire cement matrimonial
that surround Elizabeth. We do not know whether ties, motherhood is expected to follow, and the
Elizabeth will be able to escape the patriarchal imperial possibilities for resistance are summarily closed down.
system of exploitation because she is still ignorant of It is interesting and problematic to note that
her position within the system. Unlike Rachel and Elizabeths inability to fully know her position within
Maisie, she does not experience the flash of recogni imperial patriarchy is due to her failure to meet a
tion, the horrific revelation. Looking back on her colonized subject—real or symbolic—because that
journey through the city we can discover why it failed colonized subject has already been absorbed into the
to provide her with the knowledge so important to characterization of Elizabeths own body. This absorp
Woolf's other young women: Elizabeth is distanced tion continues to revise the problem of the necessary
from the space through which she travels. Though presence of the colonized other, like the distortion of
she eventually gets off the bus and walks along the colonized subject in the form of Rezia, and such
streets, Elizabeths initial encounter is from the vantage assimilation continues to be highly ambivalent. While
point of the voyeur; she is safely separated from the Woolf s deployment of other-raced characteristics as
world she observes. When Elizabeth does finally reach a symbol of Elizabeths potential evacuation of dom
the street, she is distracted by thoughts of her mother s inant and oppressive social constructions is a radical
upcoming socialite party. Unlike Rachel and Maisie, invocation of the raced body as a productive and
Elizabeth is not forced to come face to face with the positive figure, this artistic paradigm still only func
imperial subject; she does not make eye contact with tions to benefit white women. Elizabeths body registers
colonized natives or speak to a soldiers wife. Her race only so that she may escape the patriarchal system
position within a circle of colonial administrators of the novel by seeking to dominate others—either
blinds her; her class and social positions prevent her the working class below her on the street or the
from knowing life on the ground. subjects of empire ruled by Parliament. Even though
As demonstrated through Rachel and Maisie, in Elizabeth's racially marked characteristics suggest
order for Elizabeth to subvert empire, she must "know" power and domination in her voyage up the Strand,
her place within it, and this knowledge is granted in they still carry the sediment of her domination and
a sexual awakening fomented by a confrontation with territorialization by her mother and tutor.
the reflective other. What is crucial is that this sexual Though Elizabeths future and the future of the
awakening and the realization of one's place within young, unmarried woman in general is still an open
empire must take place before becoming engaged and question at the end of Mrs. Dalloway, the outlook is
committed to the patriarchal order. Mrs. Dalloway not positive. In the last pages of the novel, Elizabeth
ends before we learn whether Elizabeth will follow is continually sexualized, admired by the men around
the path of her mother and marry into the set of her, and described in the same terms that Marlow
imperial administrators that surrounds her, or whether applies to Kurtz's Intended, as ominously echoed in
she will complete the resistance gestured towards in The Voyage Out. Where Marlow heard "the ripple of
her voyage. It is clear that, in order to actualize her the river, the soughing of the trees swayed by the
resistance, she will need to learn the intersection of wind, the murmurs of the wild crowd" (HD 93), Willie
sex and empire, and she must understand that Titcomb thinks of Elizabeth that, "She was like a
becoming a doctor and healing the sick is not enough poplar, she was like a river, she was like a hyacinth"
to stem the damaging forces of empire and war if she (MD 188). Like the Intended, the novel ends with
is still a wife and mother, a reproducer of empire. Elizabeth still ignorant of the "other world." However,

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Elizabeth is not without the possibility of learning,
though the window of time for this revelation is
beginning to close.
Revising the figure of the young, unmarried
woman and the spatial disjunction between the
metropole and the periphery, Woolf grants her women
the potential to know what an imperial system entails,
to have the knowledge Kurtz's Intended so sorely
lacks. As her work becomes increasingly modernist
in the years between The Voyage Out to Mrs. Dalloway,
the disparate worlds of imperial center and colonial
outpost grow closer. As the metropole and periphery
meet and as the women in them learn how to navigate
their futures, what is discovered is the degree of nuance
in women's relationship to empire. A woman's future
is not only determined by her knowledge, but is also
determined by her class, social status, global position,
and racial identity. Though Elizabeth has the social
position Maisie needs to access the world of careers
and an escape from marriage, this same social position
prevents Elizabeth from discovering the conditions
of her position within the empire. Revising Kurtz's
Intended, through Rachel, Maisie, and Elizabeth,
Virginia Woolf admits to a greater world of possibility,
but not one that is more hopeful.
Significantly, in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf s efforts
to address spatial disjunction result in the erasure
of the confrontation with native peoples that imperial
travel and exhibits provided. Elizabeth and Maisie
may travel like Rachel, but their failure to meet the
native women by the river is important. Rather than
deploy the actual bodies of colonized subjects as foils
to her young women's development, Woolf draws
upon the class and white ethnic difference that are
featured in Three Guineas, and the novel only figu
ratively invokes the colonized other. Because this
figurative presence of the other is located in the
characterization of Rezia and is a reflection of Maisie's
own otherness, Maisie is able to achieve awareness
of her position but remains simultaneously limited
by her own imperial position as an other to the ruling
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class. Elizabeth contains the racial qualities of the
colonized other as symbol of mastery and as an
artistic trope of difference, rather than confronting
or embodying actual otherness; fascinatingly, as a
result, Elizabeth is described in the same terms as
the geographic location of The Voyage Out's native
women during Mrs. Dalloway's party scene. Her
comparison to a "poplar" and "river" indicates just
how much she remains bound by the intersecting
rhetoric and power of empire and patriarchy, despite
her subversive potential.
Ultimately, Woolf's elision of the colonized
subject in her later work reveals an awareness of the
breadth and scope of empire, rather than an unprob
lematic reproduction of these axioms of power. Her
evolving invocation of native women points to the
ways in which the resistance to patriarchy available
to her social class problematically reinstated the force
of empire. While the young, semi-peripheral, and
metropolitan woman gained mobility and freedom
over the course of Woolfs work, the native women
remain isolated and oppressed in the periphery.
Though Woolf s young women map the intersecting
threads of sexual reproduction and exploitation that
bind all women under the British Empire, the path
toward liberation is ultimately still closed for everyone
except the most privileged, and it is obscured even
for those with access.
articles 29
 NOTES

"The horror! The horror!" (Conrad 85).

See Conrad 19-20.

In Bardic Nationalism (1997), Katie Trumpener points out that Scotland shares a similar history to Ireland
and Wales in its early colonization and disenfranchisement by Britain: "In Scotland the dramatic political,
economic, and social reorganization of the Highlands in the wake of the failed 1745 Jacobite uprising
British military occupation and forced Anglicization, the introduction of land-intensive sheep grazing,
and the subsequent forced clearances' of large numbers of peasants whose labors were no longer mar
ketable—was matched by far-reaching changes in landholding and local government in the Lowlands..
(20). Though by 1923 Scotland was no longer a colony of the British Empire and was fully absorbed
within it, its colonial history is still sedimented in Maisie's journey and her experience of distance and
difference.

Jameson writes in "Modernism and Imperialism" that, "For colonialism means that a significant structural
segment of the economic system as a whole is now located elsewhere, beyond metropolis.. .in colonies
over water whose own experiences and life world.. .remain unknown and unimaginable for the subjects
of imperial power" (51).

See Mclntire 259.

Like Maisie's turn in Regent's Park, Rachel Vinrace's river journey reminds us of Marlow s own trip into
the jungle. For more examples of the connections made between Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Woolf s
The Voyage Out, see Kathy J. Phillips's book Virginia Woolf against Empire; Christine Froula's book Virginia
Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity; Urmila Seshagiri's book Race and
the Modernist Imagination; Mark A. Wollaeger's essays "Woolf, Postcards, and the Elision of Race:
Colonizing Women in The Voyage Out" and "The Woolfs in the Jungle: Intertextuality, Sexuality, and
the Emergence of Female Modernism in The Voyage Out, The Village in the Jungle, and Heart of Darkness";
Susan Friedmans essay "Virginia Woolfs Pedagogical Scenes of Reading: The Voyage Out, The Common
Reader, and Her 'Common Readers'"; and Nick Montgomery's essay "Colonial Rhetoric and the Maternal
Voice: Deconstruction and Disengagement in Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out"

For some examples of the connections made between Heart of Darkness and Mrs. Dalloway, see Shirley
Neuman's essay "Heart of Darkness, Virginia Woolf and the Spectre of Domination"; David Adams's essay
"Shadows of a 'Silver Globe': Woolf's Reconfiguration of the Darkness"; Danell Jones's essay "Mrs.
Dalloway and the Art of Death: Monuments, Merchandise, and Memoirs"; Jesse Wolfe's essay "The Sane
Woman in the Attic: Sexuality and Self-Authorship in Mrs. Dalloway"; and Elizabeth Clea's essay "Moving
Tropes: New Modernist Travels with Virginia Woolf."

David Adams marks Maisie's "horror," and he also points out the connection between Rezia's vision of the
London park as a Roman swamp and Marlows reflections on England's past as a Roman colony (Adams
177); Shirley Neuman notes the similarity of the nurse knitting beside a napping Peter Walsh and the
women knitting outside of the Brussels office (Neuman 60). Both critics focus on Septimus Smith as the

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 "sometimes-Kurtz figure" and the central connection between the two novels, but neither addresses the
degree to which the female characters mediate the allusions to Conrad's novel in the Regents Park scene.
9
Kathy J. Phillips successfully demonstrates Woolf s investment in exploring "the connections among
imperialism, war, and gender relations" as these "three topics interrelate through economics, school
training, professions, life-styles, sexual mores, religions, and so on" (ix).

As Anna Davin points out in her essay on empire and maternity, drops in birthrate, depreciation in
masculine health attributed to modern lifestyles, and the climax and impending decline of the British
Empire heightened anxieties about colonial rule in the early twentieth century. The fear that soon there
may not have been enough to men to run the vast empire became a prominent political concern of the
period. In response, women were encouraged to value motherhood above all else, and it was portrayed
as women's role to reproduce the future agents of empire. Davin demonstrates this shift in attitudes
towards reproduction through a comparison of manuals for young women. She writes, "In a manual of
the 1860s the young woman was advised to seek as partner for life someone able to support her, willing
to protect her, ready to help her, and qualified to guide and direct her—no mention of children—while
a 1914 book on young women and marriage gave as the three main objects for marriage the reproduction
of the race, the maintenance of social purity, and the mutual comfort and assistance of each married
couple" (Davin 91). In fifty years time, child rearing and imperial concerns have moved to the forefront
of marital issues above female fiscal and physical protection.
11
See Wollaeger, "Woolf, Postcards, and the Elision of Race: Colonizing Women in the Voyage Out," 44;
Friedman 105.

The young, unmarried woman and her relationship to empire is a repeated theme throughout Woolf s
body of work. In particular, both Jacob's Room (1922) and The Years (1937) feature young women facing
their position within the British Empire, and therefore merit greater scholarly attention in this regard.
Though these texts fall outside of the scope of this essay—primarily because they do not demonstrate
the same matrix of young women on the cusp of marriage, engaging in literal or figurative imperial
voyages and explorations, potentially achieving sexual awakening—future versions of this project would
need to consider their place within what I am identifying as Woolf s continued and related feminist
engagements with the young woman figure. Though Jacob's Room and The Years also participate in this
project, they do not parallel in the same direct ways that I argue The Voyage Out and Mrs. Dalloway do,
and it is those parallels that are the animating focus of this essay.

Woolf writes in Three Guineas: "'For,' the outsider will say, 'in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a
woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world'" (109), and, "And if he says he
is fighting to protect England from foreign rule, she will reflect that for her there are no 'foreigners,' since
by law she becomes a foreigner if she marries a foreigner" ( 108). Though not explicit, Woolf s disavowal
of citizenship in favor of being a member of the world community suggests that she sees the position of
women worldwide as commensurate.

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 "As the female individualist, not-quite / not-male, articulates herself in shifting relationship to what is
at stake, the 'native female' as such (within discourse as a signifier) is excluded from any share in this
emerging norm" (Spivak 245).

Laura Doyle characterizes Rachels journey across the Atlantic as a journey away from her mother-country
and towards female adulthood (Doyle 145), and Mark A. Wollaeger identifies the journey as, in part,
Rachel's initiation to imperial Englishness ("Woolf, Postcards, and the Elision of Race" 44).

See Woolf, VO 66.

See Woolf, VO 65.

Nick Montgomery writes, "The fact that the novel confounds this lurking expectation and withholds the
voyage back is one measure for its engagement with the rhetoric of colonialism and the discursive
mechanisms of empire, indicating that the outward movement has not merely been an exotic, voyeuristic,
or therapeutic sortie in pursuit of the rejuvenation of the paternal word, but a more permanent evacuation
of that dominant rhetoric. Once out, we remain out. In this sense, the novel is an act of extrication"
(36-37).

See Wollaeger, "Woolf, Postcards, and the Elision of Race: Colonizing Women in the Voyage Out," 44.

See Wollaeger, "Woolf, Postcards, and the Elision of Race: Colonizing Women in the Voyage Out," 64.

Johnson writes, "In fact, the villagers' speechlessness is highlighted by the narrative inclusion of sur
rounding 'voices,' 'cries,' and 'songs,' all of which are unintelligible and more emblematic of the jungle
landscape than of its human inhabitants. Rachel's estrangement from language aligns her—however
problematically—with people whose subjectivity lies very much outside of the British tourist's world
view" (76), and that "any parallels between Rachel and the South Americans rest solely on their respective
failure to participate in or interrupt imperialist discourse" (76).

"This average third world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read:
sexually constrained) and being 'third world' (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound,
domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.). This, I suggest, is in contrast to the (implicitly) self-repre
sentation of Western women as educated, modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities,
and the freedom to make their own decisions" (Mohanty 337).

David Adams describes the dreams as a blend of sex, empire, and the impotence of patriarchy (209),
and Mark Wollaeger describes them as a "sexual revulsion" and as an equation of Rachel's sexual awareness
with the prostitutes on the London streets whom she fears ("Woolf, Postcards, and the Elision of Race"
53).

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Kurt Koenigsberger points out that, "Within the walled bounds of Wembley, the British Empire Exhibition
sought to round out a view of the world as a whole, laying before the British the spectacle of an entire
empire in miniature" (99). This world as whole was a world wholly theirs, and it featured over twenty-five
lands under British rule and displayed plants, animals, art, architecture, and labor from its different
regions. As Scott Cohen notes, there were even "races in residence" that lived on-site in order to create
a "colonial contact-zone." (90)

Snaith and Whitworth point out that Woolf was "[a]lways attuned to the changing uses and signification
of urban spaces, her writing both reveals and creates the layered histories of spaces" (1), and that, "The
question of a woman's relationship to the city, particularly its public spaces, is central to [ Woolf s] spatial
politics" (2).

See Woolf, MD 26.

"'Look,' [Rezia] implored him, for Dr. Holmes had told her to make him notice real things, go to music
hall, play cricket—that was the very game, Dr. Holmes said, a nice out-of-door game, the very game for
her husband. 'Look,' she repeated" (MD 25).

The Wembley Exhibit emphasized the advantages of modern technology and endorsed the idea that now
the world could be in contact. As Scott Cohen points out, "The stuttered start of the Empire Exhibition
at Wembley was recorded in the newspapers as a 'marvel of modern science'.. .The band was playing as
the King read the seventy-odd letters typed on the enclosed Eastern Telegraph form reporting that the
sovereign's proclamation had just circled the globe in merely one minute and twenty seconds. This
technological stunt was a fitting beginning to an exhibition devoted to monumentalizing images of
imperial unity and demonstrating the British Empire's global reach" (85).

Urmila Seshagiri points out that "Disruptions in the continuity of racial identity—through miscegenation,
geographical displacement, religious conversion, or political upheaval, for example—engendered scientific
as well as cultural anxieties about hybridity, contamination, and degeneration" (8).

See Mrs. Dalloway 125.

Though Ms. Kilman suggests this opportunity is open to all women of Elizabeths generation, we should
remember that these early opportunities were more likely to be open to women with enough money and
education to enter the professional workplace.

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