Elisa1: Flowers in The Voyage Out
The Voyage Out
As
Amy King has pointed out in her brilliant exegesis of the flower story in
Victorian literature, Bloom, the narrative of the marriage plot which
underlies so many novels is often metaphorically presented as a vegetative
process of budding and coming to fruition. A number of critics analyze The Voyage Out novel as a failed female
initiation quest or Bildungsroman[i]. Madeline Moore explicitly sees Rachel as
a kind of failed Persephone whose Demeter (either seen as her dead mother or as
Helen Ambrose) is unable to resurrect her from the underground world of her
sexual terrors (44).
Following the flowers in The Voyage Out confirms these critical
paradigms. From a floral point of view, The
Voyage Out is all about flowers being clipped or snipped or decapitated. For
me, one of the most important passages in The
Voyage Out is not included in the final published version. In her book
about the composition of the novel, Louise Desalvo quotes a passage from the
1908 draft about Cynthia (a.k.a Rachel)’s mother “pulling down a branch
weighted with apple blossom and shaking it so that the petals dropped in a long
chain to the ground and the whole burden of autumn fruit vanished in a moment”
(qtd by DeSalvo, First Voyage, 17). This deflowering of the possible fruition of
the future seems to me to be a foretelling of the structure of the whole novel.
Within
the novel as published, there are numerous references to flowers, often red
ones being cut off just as they bloom. (DeSalvo also notes that Mr. Ambrose was
originally named Geranium, and that Rachel herself began as Rose). At the very beginning of the novel,
there is a last view of England where:
In thousands of
small gardens, millions of dark-red flowers were blooming, until the old ladies
who had tended them so carefully came down the paths with their scissors,
snipped through their juicy stalks, and laid them upon cold stone ledges in the
village church. (31)
The image of Rachel herself as a flower who
is cut off before the moment of her full bloom, before any fruit can, set is
also presaged early in the novel when Helen Ambrose pulls the tight little buds
of chrysanthemums out of a vase on board ship and lays them on the table cloth
“arranging them fastidiously side by side” while accusing the servants of
mistreating them (15); one assumes that they did not condition them before
putting them in the water, so they will not open out into full bloom, which is
precisely Rachel’s problem. Rachel
repeats this clipping and arranging action in the middle of the novel when she
sits in the shade of a tree and “pick[s] the red flowers with the thin green
leaves which were growing beneath it,” laying “them side by side, flower to
flower and stalk to stalk” (174).
Throughout the
novel floral imagery is deployed using a rudimentary and somewhat diagrammatic
color symbolism: red blossoms seem to evoke passion, energy, and at times
sexuality, while white flowers are associated with both virginity and death. In Melymbrosia, the association of white
flowers with death and virginity is explicitly stated. Rachel recalls thinking that her one proposal
of marriage had been ridiculous because “she half expected to come up next year
as a bed of white flowers” (38); an early death somehow seems more probable
than marriage. In The Voyage Out, however, the connection is a little more subtle.
Named or not, the gigantic white flowers of the magnolia are often described as
waxy (103, 208) and as such seem almost preserved or artificial. When Rachel and Hewett return from their
visit to the jungle, newly engaged:
The red flowers in
the stone basins were drooping with the heat, and the white blossoms which had
been so smooth and thick only a few weeks ago were now dry, and their edges
were curled and yellow. (326)
Another poem associated with death and white flowers is Milton’s Comus, which
Terence reads to Rachael as she begins to fall ill on the eve of the
announcement of their engagement and which continues to haunt her as she slips into her final coma. As Lisa Low points out, Comus, like The Voyage Out, is a work “about the sexual violation of a female
heroine” (119). The story of The Lady’s entrapment by a bestial sexual predator
and her subsequent rescue by the drowned water nymph Sabrina, herself a
motherless victim of male predation, can be read as another version of the
Persephone story; and interestingly Low sees a similarity between its use in
the novel and the counter-myth of Philomela: “like the story the tongueless and
mutilated Philomela tells her sister in her tapestry, Comus reveals the rape story buried in Woolf’s narrative”
(122). In Comus The Demeter figure, Sabrina, is pictured in the poem sitting:
Under the glassy, cool,
translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lilies
knitting
The loose train of [her] amber
dropping hair (VO 327 ; Comus ll.
322-4).
While these aqueous lilies replace the
desiccated magnolias in the villa gardens, they do not signify Rachel’s
rebirth, but her death into that bed of white flowers she imagined as her fate
in Melymbrosia.
Rachel can survive neither as the waxy
preserved virgin nor as the independent, passionate red blossom.
[i]
See Fleishman (3),DuPlessis, “Amor Vin” (115) and Froula
“Chrysalis”(136).
Works Cited for Voyage
Out Free Write
DeSalvo, Louise, ed and
intro. Melymbrosia by Virginia Woolf. San
Fransico: Cleis Press, 2002.
Fleishman, Avorm. Virginia
Woolf: A Critical reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1975.
Froula, Christine. “Out of the Chrysalis: Female Initiation and Female Authority in Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 5.1 (Spring 1986): 63-90.
Low, Lisa “'Listen and Save': Woolf's
Allusion to Comus in Her Revolutionary First Novel.” pp. 117-35 IN: Greene, Sally (ed. and
introd.) Virginia Woolf: Reading the Renaissance. Athens, OH: Ohio UP; 1999.
Moore, Madeline. The Short Season Between Two Silences: The Mystical and the Political in the Novels of Virginia Woolf. Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1984
Moore, Madeline. The Short Season Between Two Silences: The Mystical and the Political in the Novels of Virginia Woolf. Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1984
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