7—
"A Novel Devoted to Influenza"
Reading without Resolution in The Voyage Out

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing . . . how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads . . . it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

. . . Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected. . . . [T]he body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism. The public would say that a novel devoted to influenza lacked plot; they would complain that there was no love in it—wrongly however, for illness often takes on the disguise of love, and plays the same odd tricks. It invests certain faces with divinity. . . . [L]ove must be deposed in favor of a temperature of 104.
("The Moment " 9–11; my italics)

In her first novel, The Voyage Out, written between 1904 and 1913, Woolf explored the themes that pervade all her books: mothering, madness, and the universal human need for a meaningful therapeutic mirroring of selfcontinuity in a world that can, at any moment and for no reason, inflict pain, loss, and powerlessness. Although Lytton Strachey was right in calling it a "very, very unvictorian" book, it was not yet modernist.^[1] Woolf had been hoping to "re-form the novel and capture multitudes of things at present fugitive, enclose the whole, and shape infinite strange shapes" (Letters 1: 356), but she had yet to experiment with narration, point of view, and interior monologue as ways to dramatize her sense of the multiplicity of self and life. Instead, she used a rather traditional narrator to tell a story that seems conventionally biographical—the growth and education of a young woman—and her attention to detail, continuity of action, and dialogue were a far cry from her series of highly experimental and abstract books that began with Jacob's Room in 1921.

The Voyage Out is an uneasy mixture of the new and the old: "[W]e get a story with action and plot in the conventional sense, a story which by its form depends for its meaning on the sequence of events, whose real meaning nevertheless depends on the author's throwing, by a variety of devices, all sorts of contradictory meanings into the content. "^[2] The novel's aesthetic tension has been attributed to its irritating tendency to frustrate conventional expectations, illustrated best by the "apparently pointless sacrifice of Rachel."^[3] In general, critics tend to view its shapelessness and lapses as evidence either of Woolf's neuroses creeping into the text or her inexperience with plotting.^[4] But I will argue that the novel's inconsistencies are part of a deliberate strategy to invite the reader to experience a failed reading and to deal with the frustration of pointlessness when critical acumen meets an intractable text—the first step toward understanding the manic-depressive's world.

Although few critics agree on the meaning of The Voyage Out, its plot is fairly straightforward. Twenty-three-year-old Rachel Vinrace, naive, motherless, raised by a patriarchal father and thoroughly conventional Victorian aunts, embarks on a voyage of self-discovery to the little South American resort of Santa Marina. A small company of shipboard travelers influence her development: Richard Dalloway, former member of Parliament, masculine, domineering, suave, a grasper of objective fact and convergent thinking, furtively gives Rachel a kiss, her first lesson in a male's sexual desire and in depression; Clarissa Dalloway, Richard's idealized wife, adoring, feminine, maternal, seems to understand intuitively Rachel's inexpressible yearnings and fosters in the young girl an exalted faith in the goodness and bounty of life; Helen Ambrose, Rachel's depressive aunt, educates her niece in the deceitfulness of life and the brutality of emotion; Ridley Ambrose, Helen's husband, the remote scholar, hoarding, hypochondriacal, defensive, offers no nurturing to Rachel, for he is as needful as she is.

Throughout the voyage, Rachel's companions are unable to provide her with the answers she seeks—perhaps because she never seems able to form a coherent set of questions about the meaning of her life. The Dalloways have disembarked in Portugal before Rachel can resolve the ambivalent feelings of excitement and despair that Richard has aroused in her. Helen teaches Rachel through cool, ironic, detached observation, producing a sharper, more critical intellect and a more independent self, but one that feels isolated from others and disillusioned with the world. In Santa Marina, Rachel confronts the same dichotomy in feeling, first

by befriending St. John Hirst (who is so isolated and critical himself that he has become miserable and misogynist) and then by falling in love with Terence Hewet, would-be modernist, dreamer, and moody lover who yearns for a profound, benevolent fusion with the world and with a woman. In an Edenic tropical forest, where natural affections flourish and life seems most promising, she and Terence become engaged and try to work through the maze of feelings separating them. Rachel suddenly develops a high fever, suffers profound perceptual disturbances for ten days, and dies. The last two chapters of the novel focus exclusively on how the English colony there first mourns her death and the cruel termination of the lovers' plans and then settles back into mundane concerns.

Even in this short summary we can see several elements from Woolf's life exploited in fiction. Like Virginia, Rachel lost her mother before she could develop an adult's independence; now she seeks nurturing fusions with Clarissa, Helen, and Terence just as Virginia did with Stella, Vanessa, and Leonard. Richard Dalloway, like Gerald Duckworth, teaches the young woman a somber lesson about powerlessness and vulnerability as the male prerogative to make fumbling advances fills the object of his desire with anger and fear. The happy Clarissa, like the young Julia in love with the "stainless" and romantic Herbert Duckworth, does not remain long enough to counsel Rachel or to give her a lasting model of joyous selfhood to imitate, but instead leaves her in the care of the depressed mother-figure, Helen, an older Julia. St. John Hirst, Ridley Ambrose, and Willoughby Vinrace, sharing a number of Leslie Stephen's characteristics, are isolated, patriarchal male figures who, because they do not question their assumptions about what and who women are, fail to understand and nurture females; the inner lives of women remain as much a mystery to them as does the dense jungle. And, like "A Sketch of the Past," The Voyage Out presents moments of being, when self and world seem to fuse and enhance one another, as well as moments of failure, when self and world cannot join, when identity fragments, manic illusions spring up, or depression sweeps over the self like a suffocating wave.

At the heart of The Voyage Out is Stella Duckworth. She had been a dutiful Victorian daughter: selflessly she tended the family and supported Leslie emotionally, and she too declined in health from exhaustion, becoming "pale as a plant that has been denied the sun . . . bowing to the inevitable yoke of her sex."^[5] After Stella's death, Virginia and Leslie relied on the younger Vanessa for mothering, but Vanessa, like Helen Ambrose, was "as quick to detect insincerity of nature as fallacy of argument," and

she rebelled (Moments of Being 54, 56). When Stella died, the last living vestige of Julia's image died with her. It was an important loss for Virginia.

Like Stella, Rachel was a tintype of her mother, a minor likeness to the idealized Victorian original. Neither Stella nor Rachel felt at all idealized herself. Naive and inexperienced, with little self-confidence, both hoped an external change (a happy marriage) would fill internal needs. When Stella became engaged to Jack Hills, Virginia rejoiced in her good fortune in terms reminiscent of Julia's idyllic life with Herbert: love seemed to be like an exalted manic dream, and, indeed, coincided with what she remembered as her first hypomanic "vision":

And it was through that engagement that I had my first vision—so intense, so exciting, so rapturous was it that the word vision applies—my first vision then of love between man and woman. It was to me like a ruby; the love I detected that winter of their engagement, glowing, red, clear, intense. It gave me a conception of love; a standard of love; a sense that nothing in the whole world is so lyrical, so musical, as a young man and a young woman in their first love for each other. (Moments of Being 105)

In Jack, Stella had found "rest and support" as well as growth; she became "more positive, less passive" (Moments of Being 106). Stella, Virginia concluded, "had come to stand by herself, with a painful footing upon real life, and her love now had as little of dependence in it as may be . . . as though Jack had finally convinced her of her worth" (Moments of Being 50–52).

Stella was betrayed, however, just as life seemed most promising. Pregnant, she died of peritonitis contracted (perhaps during sexual intercourse) while abroad on her honeymoon.^[6] In The Voyage Out, Rachel contracts a fever after she and Terence acknowledge their love for one another. Love and death, optimism and pessimism, are tied together in a disturbing, bipolar way, violating our conventional expectations of romance. In her diary, Virginia recorded feeling a terrible rage followed by inertia and depression—both reactions, she said, to the "stupid damage" Stella's death inflicted. It was, she wrote in 1940, a "shapeless catastrophe" (Moments of Being 55) because it seemed so meaningless in comparison with her expectations of

Stella's happiness, and the promise it held for her and for us of escape from that gloom [after Julia's death]; when once more unbelievably—incredibly—as if one had been violently cheated of some promise; more

than that, brutally told not to be such a fool as to hope for things; I remember saying to myself after she died: "But this is impossible; things aren't, can't be, like this." (Moments of Being 124)

I remember saying to myself this impossible thing has happened:—as if it were. . . against the law, horrible, as a treachery, a betrayal—the fact of death. The blow, the second blow of death, struck on me tremulous, creased, sitting with my wings still stuck together, on the broken chrysalis.^[7]

Stella's death was a violation of desire (for a world responsive to our inner needs, for a real landscape in which to realize our dreams) and self-confidence (would the young Virginia even be given the chance to try her own wings?). But, as such, did this shock not also hold a lesson to be learned, one especially valuable for a manic-depressive?

I would reason that if life were thus made to rear and kick, it was a thing to be ridden; nobody could say "they" had fobbed me off with a weak little feeble slip of the precious matter. So I came to think of life as something of extreme reality. (Moments of Being 137)

Are we deluded to expect good out of life simply because we can conceive of a benevolent pattern we think it should follow? Two more deaths in 1904, and a third in 1937 may help illustrate the meaning this unanswerable question held for Woolf. In one week, two acquaintances died. One death was an accident: Margaret Hills (significantly, Jack Hills's sister-in-law) was riding a bicycle when it slipped on a wet road. The other resulted from a chronic illness: Charles Furse succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of thirty-six. "Of the two," wrote Woolf, "Margaret's death is the sadder," because "her death seems merely aimless and cruel," whereas an identifiable and predictable disease explained why Furse died. His widow, Woolf reasoned, "must have known what a risk she was taking when she married him" (Letters 1: 150): she did not fall victim to an illusory expectation of happiness. In 1937, Vanessa's eldest son, Julian Bell, died in the Spanish Civil War. It was "as if he were jerked abruptly out of sight, without rhyme or reason: so violent & absurd that one cant fit his death into any scheme" (Diary 5: 122).

Woolf objected, not to the necessity of death, but to its pointlessness. We feel betrayed by accidental death because it appears so unrelated to the individual's personality or character. Apparently arbitrarily imposed, it destroys our conventional expectations about what life means, who we are, and what destiny we deserve. The life that has ended is, in a way, trivialized because chance—a slippery road, a shallow tread, a tropical germ

picked up somewhere—predominates. Have we been deluded all along, like the overconfident manic, about our power over our lives, about our ownership of ourselves and our identity? And this phenomenon we call the human self, the whole fascinating and significant inner universe of consciousness which legislates what rules life should follow and what destiny character deserves, is this too proven to be ephemeral when a rise in temperature or a change in blood chemistry can distort it until self seems barely recognizable, until we are quite mad? Whenever the physical world intrudes on our existential sense of self-integrity, our identity, we lose ownership of ourselves until we can integrate the traumatic event into a rationale that implies a consistency in life's events and self's understanding of those events. We are continually engaged in the effort to see design in the real world. Religion, philosophy, art, literary theory—so much of civilization is meant to protect us from the haunting suspicion that life may have no transcendent direction that can explain why things happen as they do.

This is the real subject of The Voyage Out: how do we deal with a death that threatens us and with a reading that defies us? When life (or a novel) is so intractable that it defies even our wish to understand, we may feel compelled to keep our guard up always, to impose meaning where we cannot find it, to wrench the text if need be, lest we throw down the book in despair. One critic complains that the plot of The Voyage Out "is so slack, woven with such slender threads, that if one tries to analyse it one is caught between two dangers either to see it disintegrate, or to see it stiffen into a coarse, inflexible framework whose pattern confuses or even destroys the essential lines of the work."^[8] Manic-depressives are most familiar with these two reactions, but we need not suffer a mood disorder ourselves to recognize how Woolf felt about the meaninglessness of Hills's death or her own illness. We need only read a novel that resists our habitual interpretive strategies.

The Voyage Out undermines our control by inviting us to face an intractable fact: that seeking the bliss of subject-object fusion, the ruby of love, may for no reason at all make one pregnable, a word that, like this novel, is disturbingly equivocal. The novel's themes are connected to Rachel's infected body. As a metaphor for the self, it signifies a frightening vulnerability:

If Woolf thought her mother's early death was due to her womanhood—the many births, the energy absorbed by her large family and relentlessly demanding husband—, then how much more must Stella's

death have given her forebodings about sexuality, about marriage, about the ability of her body to change and her inability to control that change?^[9]

Woolf's body imposed bipolar disorder and gender on her without her permission, and with these irreducible biological facts came arbitrary cultural determinations of what madness and femaleness meant that threatened to reduce and trivialize her inner life. We should not, as readers, try to explain away this threat to Woolf or to ourselves when death or madness or sexism makes no sense. When we feel helpless in the face of an intractable fact, we share Woolf's experience as a female manic-depressive victimized by what she could not change.

Is Woolf suggesting that we retreat into a pessimistic stoicism, because life is aimless and we are too vulnerable?^[10] She certainly took her mother's death seriously and generalized from it, especially when she was depressed, ominous propositions about the world's treachery. Yet she also believed, especially when manic, in life's potential for happiness. When, a year before she began to write The Voyage Out, her closest friend and lover, Violet Dickinson, lay ill with fever for ten days (the length of Rachel's illness), Woolf described fate in depressed terms, as "a brutal sledge hammer, missing all the people she might knock on the head, and crashing into the midst of such sensitive and exquisite creatures as my Violet. I wish I could shield you with my gross corpse" (Letters 1: 81). Yet, other letters from this same period reveal a profound love of life, a joyful curiosity about it, a willingness to abjure shielding. In January of 1913 Vanessa praised Virginia's ability to cheer her up:

I am sometimes overcome by the finest qualities in her. When she chooses she can give one the most extraordinary sense of bigness of point of view. I think she has in reality amazing courage & sanity about life. I have seen so little of her lately that it has struck me here.^[11]

Obviously, any observer's impression of Woolf's worldview would depend on what mood she was in at the time, but Vanessa's evaluation at least demonstrates that at some points her sister was anything but pessimistic or morbid. Virginia's own letter of August, 1906, attests to the same attitude: "Really it is worth while to take a spirited view of the future. Things are bound to turn up" (Letters 1: 233). It was only four months later that Thoby died of typhoid fever contracted on holiday in Greece.

An irresolvable uncertainty pervades The Voyage Out: should we or should we not embrace life, untrustworthy as it is? It is a difficult question

for a manic-depressive to answer. Woolf's youthful spirits were dashed by tragic deaths at fairly regular intervals: 1895 (Julia), 1897 (Stella), 1904 (Leslie), and 1906 (Thoby). In each case, death seems to have followed moments of great promise and evident security,^[12] and the resulting uncertainties, the cyclic highs and lows, could appear in nonpsychotic forms in any personality that experienced such successive losses. The complication here is that these shifting perspectives are also specific to, and magnified by, manic-depressive illness, with or without actual losses, for mood shapes the evaluation of events. How are we to read Woolf's philosophy of life, when biography and biology blend indistinguishably into one another? How are we to view pessimistic or even suicidal statements about the meaninglessness of life when certainly the deaths she endured, the breakdowns she experienced, the sexual abuse she suffered—all senseless, incomprehensible, undeserved—might convince even a non-manic-depressive that existence was periodically a hard business? And what do we do with the other passages in her diaries and letters: the ecstasies, the triumphs, the exultant sense of life's abundance and her own creative power to surmount obstacles? Are these merely hypomanias, or are they the pleasures of a flourishing and productive creative genius enjoying life when it is good? Seeking one totalizing answer offers us too great a temptation merely to impose upon life's discord the false orders of our own unexamined, mood-mediated, need-fulfilling assumptions. Fate is difficult to read for both external and internal reasons. But it is this difficulty that makes doubly interesting a fiction written by a manic-depressive about reading fate. Woolf's novels will not present us with congruent answers to separate "real" from "unreal" events, perceptions, feelings, or ideas. They will only help us appreciate the problem of asking unbiased questions:

I don't admit to being hopeless though—only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; & as the current answers don't do, one has to grope for a new one; & the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one. (Diary 1: 259)

Hope is a bias, but then so is hopelessness; both induce a false sense of certainty in "reading" life. A novel that confronts the aimlessness of life and death will necessarily be a puzzling and frustrating exploration of just how difficult it is to read anything.

Because reading should be a struggle, The Voyage Out contains a rather large number of flat characters whose primary function is illustrate simplistic object-relations: they either surrender—becoming passive, selfless, hapless,

or hopeless—or fight—becoming unmergeable hard cores that deny vulnerability and uncertainty. One who immediately succumbs without contest is the servile and featureless Susan Worthington, reputed to have "no self" (134), who becomes engaged to the equally dull Arthur Pennington. Proper, fossilized, neither wrestles with uncertainty; culture has provided them with ready answers to every problem, so that even Rachel's tragic death can be "smoothed over" with "tactful" conversation (363). By surrendering individuality immediately, Susan and Arthur become blessed nonentities wrapped in cotton wool, an institutionalized form of nonbeing. Without depth, there can be no drowning.

Rachel herself periodically succumbs to selflessness. After reading a perplexing play by Ibsen, she feels as if she has shrunk:

"What's the truth of it all?". . . It was all very real, very big, very impersonal, and after a moment or two she began to raise her first finger and to let it fall on the arm of her chair so as to bring back to herself some consciousness of her own existence. She was next overcome by the unspeakable queerness of the fact that she should be sitting in an arm-chair, in the morning, in the middle of the world.

. . . And life, what was that?. . . Her dissolution became so complete that she could not raise her finger any more, and sat perfectly still, listening and looking always at the same spot. It became stranger and stranger. (123–25)

Rachel's dissolution reduces her to paralysis and magnifies the impersonal world; it is perceived as queer and unreal, because she cannot believe in her own subjective reality. James Naremore is correct in reading such events as frightening examples of loss of self, though he has wrongly seen them as Woolf's urging us to seek purely objective knowledge—if that were even possible.^[13] The death of the soul is not Woolf's moment of being. When Rachel as subject is a mere blank, an empty container incapable of contributing meaning to her perceptions, the world is alien and unreal to her. The only advantage to anhedonic depression lies in the fact that it empties one of illusion;^[14] it allows Rachel to ask the most fundamental questions of existence. Her periodic dissolutions cleanse the soul—an asset if one is adaptive enough to understand how such cleansing comments on the unexamined assumptions of sanity.

Other minor characters fight despair and vulnerability, not by dissolution and surrender, but by imposing themselves. The determined Miss Allan orders her environment, preferring the security of closed curtains to the open night sky (151) and the hoarding of a bottle of crème de

menthe as a "charm against accidents" (254). Like Leslie Stephen, Miss Allan seems perfectly suited temperamentally to the large task of categorizing the lives of great writers for her Primer, yet at the same time she finds it difficult to express their originality, to say "something different about everybody" (316). The agitated depressive has a knack for imposing order, but at the same time tends to obliterate individuality by constraining responsiveness—an unfortunate lesson to be giving readers new to the study of great literature. Ridley Ambrose likewise stifles emotion with "the continuity of the scholar's life," closeting himself for hours like a misanthropic hoarder of self, caring deeply only about Pindar, food, and digestion (199). Mrs. Flushing, "upright and imperious" (259), assaults art (198); in her own paintings, "all perfectly untrained onslaughts of the brush upon some half-realised idea suggested by hill or tree," her highly organized and inflexible personality dominates, permitting little of the external world to show through (234).

Perhaps most revealing is the intensely defensive William Pepper, gloomy, cross, severe, who has disciplined himself until his heart has become "a piece of old shoe leather" (19) and who abjures the freedoms of life in a spacious villa for the constraints of the hotel because he fears infection from improperly cooked vegetables. Pepper may seem just a crank, a petty academic at whom Woolf can poke fun for his ludicrous egotism,^[15] but he serves a very important function in the novel: he expresses before an assembled company of major characters what seems to be a convenient piece of narrative foreboding. At first, when he withdraws from his friends, Helen fears she has somehow angered him. She would have tried to change his mind

if William had not shown himself inscrutable and chill, lifting fragments of salad on the point of his fork, with the gesture of a man pronging seaweed, detecting gravel, suspecting germs.

"If you all die of typhoid I won't be responsible!" he snapped.

"If you die of dullness, neither will I," Helen echoed in her heart. (93)

Pepper's paranoia seems justified by Rachel's subsequent death by fever, and this connection might lead some readers to conclude hastily that Pepper's survival and Rachel's death are linked to how they live their lives, for it is conventional to presume that a fictional character's fate comments on his/her wisdom or folly, sanity or morbidity. Does Pepper's caustic contraction of spirit save him? If so, then does Miss Allan's bottle of crème de menthe actually prevent accidents? Assuming that Pepper is rightly

defensive, why does the novel avoid specifying the origin of Rachel's fever to substantiate his attitude? But if Rachel's death is unrelated to Pepper's defensiveness, why does Woolf have him specify typhoid fever, which Rachel's illness seems to resemble? To complicate matters even more, Helen's silent retort rings true: Pepper is dead inside. So what does this novel want to say? Is a safe life worth living? Or is a romantic adventure up tropical rivers worth dying for? Susan stands as proof that nonbeing is not always actually fatal, but she scarcely invites the reader's admiration. Throughout, Woolf remains curiously noncommittal, making suggestions that are indirectly and invariably undercut.

As readers, we find ourselves forced into a corner by Woolf's unwillingness to resolve this problem about the relative value of different states of mind. The novel shows that pernicious defensiveness and self-destructive surrender can, under certain circumstances, work equally well. Each mood, even those we may find repellent, has certain assets. (Who would be more likely to survive a first-strike nuclear attack than the paranoid depressive whom we dismissed as a kook because he moved his family to southern Oregon to live in a well-stocked bomb shelter?) What a manic-depressive feels exaggerates what we all feel—and should feel—about life's essential equivocation. "There is no irony in Nature," the elderly George Meredith wrote to the dying Leslie Stephen in 1904. "We who have loved the motion of legs and the sweep of the winds, we come to this. But for myself, I will own that it is the Natural order."^[16]

The Voyage Out re-creates this most lifelike condition of contingency whenever it deals with how characters find meaning in their lives. Thus, Clarissa may extol life's abundance ("when you're my age you'll see that the world is crammed with delightful things" [58]) with an exuberance that infects Rachel briefly ("it seemed indeed as if life which had been unnamed before was infinitely wonderful, and too good to be true" [61]), but in fact, in this particular case, it is too good to be true: Rachel dies, and Clarissa's own exalted visions of a noble husband and an ennobling England are undercut by the tawdry realities of his philandering and the spiritual emptiness of his politics. Yet we cannot use these tragedies as evidence for the opposite conclusion, that life is inherently bad, for Rachel benefits as much by Clarissa's idealized image of life's goodness as she does by Richard's demonstration of its badness, and the novel does not specifically reduce the paradox. Both views, irreducibly contradictory, help Rachel realize what the world is like and what she needs from it.

It is significant, then, that Rachel's object-relational style can at times seem closely related to Pepper's; by creating an unmergeable self, she defensively rejects communion with the world. When, for example, she realizes that prostitutes are desired by men as sexual objects, and that the same instinct which exploits them is the desire Richard Dalloway felt toward her (remember Ralph Partridge's desire for power mixed up with his desire for sex), she immediately recoils. "It is terrifying—it is disgusting," she asserts with considerable hatred, and then concludes suddenly: "So that's why I can't walk alone!"

By this new light she saw her life for the first time a creeping hedged-in thing, driven cautiously between high walls, here turned aside, there plunged in darkness, made dull and crippled for ever. (82)

This is essentially the conclusion reached in her dream, the night of Richard's kiss, of lying as still as death before the gibbering man. Freudian critics often focus on the dream as a neurotic disguise for Rachel's (and Woolf's) fear of sex: the gibbering man is identified as Gerald hiding at the end of a moist vaginal tunnel. But such an interpretation presumes that symbolism works in only one direction, from manifest image toward repressed sexual desire, supposedly where the "real" meaning lies. If, instead, we follow recent advances in sleep research suggesting that dreams are transformative and adaptive ways of thinking rather than the products of an unconscious censor,^[17] we can see that this fictional dream may be using sexual imagery to represent something nonsexual: the walled-in "no exit" hell of depression with all its attendant helplessness, terror, and despair. Replicating Pepper's leathery interior, Rachel must pretend to be dead, emptied of a living self, or the dwarfish man will attack her. The fear of vulnerability to such a depressive state is an agony that ruins sleep, because selflessness is a nightmare. Unfortunately, Rachel's initial response to attack is to create a defensive image of the self as unassailable:

The vision of her own personality, of herself as a real everlasting thing, different from anything else, unmergeable, like the sea or the wind, flashed into Rachel's mind, and she became profoundly excited at the thought of living.

"I can be m-m-myself," she stammered, "in spite of you, in spite of the Dalloways, and Mr. Pepper, and Father, and my Aunts, in spite of these?"

"In spite of every one," said Helen gravely. (84)

This idealization of individualism at first seems positive, because it emboldens Rachel, but control is a defensive denial of vulnerability, not a solution to it, and it must obstruct a beneficial and creative fusion with others.^[18]

Against a backdrop of minor characters embodying elements of various fixed moods, Rachel moves, a sensitive, unformed human being, indefinitely drawn, gathering experiences. Because of her vagueness as a character, she is plastic enough to be intensely aware of subtle changes in her own moods.^[19] This is her function in the novel—to be difficult to pin down, to chart the aimless waters of mood shifts, life's ambiguous nature, and self's constantly changing relationship to it, as the ship Euphrosyne, to which she is often compared, plies the waters to an uncertain fate: "The sea might give her death or some unexampled joy, and none would know of it. She was a bride going forth to her husband, a virgin unknown of men; in her vigour and purity she might be likened to all beautiful things, worshipped and felt as a symbol" (32). Deliberately obscure, this image of veiled purity is not simply a foreboding of Rachel's death; it also predicts the equal possibility of unexampled joy. It is the noncommittal omen of an "inscrutable destiny."^[20]

Thus, The Voyage Out is a hodgepodge of emotions and views that do not sort themselves out into any convenient order. Rather, reading this novel invites us to see that the subjective world of perception, mood, and judgment is one of organized and organizing "meaning," whereas the objective realm of physical nature is one of "truth" we glimpse only occasionally and then find disconcertingly divergent and unresolvable. This is why the omniscient narrator philosophizes about the myriad bootless activities of landbound Britons who cut flowers, fell in love, admired the day, and "prognosticated pleasant things about the course of the world," none of which seems to carry much weight. "Some said that the sky was an emblem of the life they had had," the narrator notes without emphasis; "others that it was the promise of life to come" (31). Terence himself, desperate to deny the seriousness of Rachel's illness, also indulges in unsupported interpretations, one of which seems meant for the reader to apply to this novel: "According to him, too, there was an order, a pattern which made life reasonable. . . for sometimes it seemed possible to understand why things happened as they did" (299). There may indeed be a meaningful pattern behind the chaos of events in our lives, but our understanding of it is marred by the limitations of our psychic apparatus, by invisible moods largely outside our control, by the way we order our

rooms, wash our vegetables, and digest our food. Consciousness is shaped in so many ways. How, then, can we discern the pattern that will make Rachel's destiny "reasonable"?

No one in this novel possesses an "authoritative" reading of events. At first Rachel (and the reader) looks to Helen for guidance. Mild depressives do have a special and, at times, valuable talent for debunking illusion, which the inexperienced Rachel requires, for she "would believe practically anything she was told, invent reasons for anything she said" (34). Helen's perspective on Richard Dalloway's kiss helps Rachel understand that it was both stimulating and banal, not a transcendent event but not a fatal one either. However, Rachel finds that even the formidable Helen has her limitations. Halfway through the novel, Helen falls into a deeper, more debilitating depression which seems to have no cause and against which she has no defense:

Always calm and unemotional in her judgments, Mrs. Ambrose was now inclined to be definitely pessimistic. She was not severe upon individuals so much as incredulous of the kindness of destiny, fate, what happens in the long run, and apt to insist that this was generally adverse to people in proportion as they deserved well. Even this theory she was ready to discard in favour of one which made chaos triumphant, things happening for no reason at all, and every one groping about in illusion and ignorance. (221)

Mrs. Ambrose looked and listened obediently enough, but inwardly she was a prey to an uneasy mood not readily to be ascribed to any one cause. . . . She did not like to feel herself the victim of unclassified emotions, and certainly as the launch slipped on and on, in the hot morning sun, she felt herself unreasonably moved. (277–78)

Helen's depression consists of "unclassified emotions" she cannot analyze or name, a vacuum she finds uncomfortable. Just as she had played Freud to Rachel's Dora by interpreting Rachel's depression after Dalloway's adulterous kiss as "the most natural thing in the world" (81), so now Helen explains her own depression as the result of having seen beneath appearances to a truth seldom glimpsed. But she cannot name that truth.

Although Helen's worst fears are eventually realized by Rachel's death, it would be a mistake to view them as a clumsy narrative device of foreboding,^[21] or as Woolf's only philosophy of life. Helen is no "fate figure" (though depressives typically fear that they are), just as Pepper's phobia about germs is no virtue offered for our imitation (though he would argue so). Helen exhibits symptoms typical of depression, which Woolf

knew by experience could occur independently of life events—even though life does occasionally prove the depressive's view to be correct. There can be no reliable litmus test for how realistic our feelings are when feeling itself distorts the results. The text tests our ability to interpret, not by giving us a heavy-handed Freudian disguise to decode, but by underscoring the fundamental dilemma of all perception: the need to avoid solipsism on the one hand and meaninglessness on the other, even though both are necessary components of reading. When Freudian critics interpret Helen's foreboding morbidity as evidence of Woolf's inability to keep her neurotic fears out of the text, they undermine not only the author's control over her story but our responsiveness to it. When we must wrest artistic control from Woolf in order to explain away the sense of uncertainty and multiplicity that she deliberately creates, then we have become defensive ourselves. We have become Pepper.

One such defensive posture is Mitchell Leaska's argument that Helen's bleak outlook is really an attempt to punish Rachel for deserting her to form a heterosexual attachment with Terence. Helen's despair is a

desperate, unconscious effort to poison the atmosphere with irrationality and gloom and death; her inclination to feel victimized and defeated, and hopelessly to want to massacre all that is, or could be, happy and flourishing. Whatever satisfaction in life or in love Helen Ambrose may have been denied must also be denied to others, particularly to Rachel whose increasing independence deprives Helen of her most cherished substitute for real satisfaction: transitory fulfillment through others."^[22]

Leaska does not feel the need to sympathize with Helen's pointless suffering or to examine the possible truth of her tragic vision; he dismisses both as evidence of veiled aggression, a sick need to control others. Psychotherapists often experience similar countertransference reactions when dealing with depressed patients, whose despair (which they often generalize into gloom-and-doom predictions for the whole world as well as for their families) can be interpreted as disguised, self-destructive rage. A physician's own anger and frustration at what he perceives to be the patient's resistance to therapy may be manifested as a defensively vindictive condemnation of the depressive's seeming collusion with his disease.^[23] It is hard to sympathize with someone whose victimization seems global, unnecessary, and self-advertised. But sympathize we must if we are to see that Helen's morbidity is neither jealousy nor Woolf's supposed unconscious fears about lesbian love (is it likely that a woman who seemed

so conscious of, and so satisfied with, her feelings about other women would have much to repress?). We must prepare ourselves for the possibility that the text means what it says—that consciousness is a puzzle without resolution.

Terence Hewet also seems to be constantly victimized by his unclassified emotions. Although initially enthusiastic about organizing an expedition up a mountain, he loses his desire as he walks to meet his companions:

"But why do we do it?—is it to prevent ourselves from seeing to the bottom of things. . . making cities and mountains and whole universes out of nothing, or do we really love each other, or do we, on the other hand, live in a state of perpetual uncertainty, knowing nothing. . . ?" (127)

What is "the bottom of things" he should be seeing? Once he starts the climb he quickly forgets his depressive speculations, recovers his spirits, and gains the hilltop. But no sublime conclusion awaits him at the overview. Instead, he "became, for no reason at all, profoundly depressed" and fell to meditating once again on how insipid and cruel all his guests really were (134), though moments before he had judged them "noble" (132). He had climbed the mountain but gained no ground in the struggle to read his own feelings.

Whereas Helen's mood swings are gradual and chronic, Terence endures many brief shifts between depression and exultation that illustrate how even rapid alterations of mood escape detection when the individual assumes that his present interpretation is always the right one. Having eavesdropped on Helen and Rachel, Terence excitedly stumbles down a path, shouting happily, "Dreams and realities, dreams and realities, dreams and realities" (188), exultant that life seems to be combining the mysterious and the real in the beloved figure of Rachel. In the next paragraph, he falls into a depression, feeling "as if he were enclosed in a square box, and instantly shrivelled up" when he enters his room. Slowly he regains some equanimity, but Evelyn's flirtation leaves him again depressed, overwhelmed by "the mystery of life and the unreality even of one's own sensations" (194), though only minutes before, with boundless optimism, he had shouted his joy at just such a mixture of subjectivity and objectivity. Mood makes all the difference: to the manic, "unreal" sensations seem a miraculous synthesis of self and world promising exciting new realms of experience; to the depressive, they are frightening confusions of self and world that minimize him and imprison him in dark cells of pain and

disappointment. Terence may feel quite powerful, superior to Hirst's fear of risking contact with women, but he can also perceive his desire for communion with Rachel as a fearful prospect that makes him feel helplessly miserable. His most rapid shifts occur with Rachel, when "at one moment he was clear-sighted, and, at the next, confused," and so, when he confesses his faults to her, he concludes that he is indeed "moody." "I'm overcome by a sense of futility—incompetence" (280), he tells her, though later he boasts of inflated feelings of self-esteem and power, describing himself as "immensely solid" and claiming that the "legs of my chair might be rooted in the bowels of the earth" (293).

Mood swings are volatile: Terence is most depressed by the least incident. When Rachel complains of a headache, he is overwhelmed by depression out of all proportion to the occasion: "[H]is sense of dismay and catastrophe [was] almost physically painful; all round him he seemed to hear the shiver of broken glass which, as it fell to earth, left him sitting in open air," vulnerable, exposed (327). Our hindsight of Rachel's death tempts us to regard his depression as a conventional narrative stratagem.^[24] Like the Britons, we find it all too easy to read meaning even in the equivocal sky, to suppose with unexamined confidence that life would not have given sunsets such an important function as that of ending the day with extravagant beauty if it had not intended them to symbolize something more. But what is that "more"? And on whose authority do we descry its meaning? Not Terence's, certainly. Desperate to deny the seriousness of Rachel's illness (and of his own despair), he overlooks Dr. Rodriguez's incompetence and is shocked when suddenly his evaluation changes: "His confidence in the man vanished as he looked at him and saw his insignificance, his dirty appearance, his shiftiness, and his unintelligent, hairy face. It was strange that he had never seen this before" (337–38). Strange indeed, but is this a shift in perception to a more objective view, or just another misinterpretation? What has facial hair to do with medical expertise? Has a subjective impression merely coincided accidentally with Rodriguez's actual incompetence? Why is reading this novel as problematical as reading Rodriguez's face? And where is the omniscient narrator when we need her? She remains silent on the issue here, but in her memoir to her niece and nephews, Woolf recounts how friends of her family read into Stella's face her mother's visage and character:

People who must follow obvious tokens, such as the colour of the eye, the shape of the nose, and love to invent a melodramatic fitness in life, as though it were a sensational novel, acclaimed [Stella's] now the

divinely appointed inheritor of all womanly virtues, and with a certain haziness forgot your grandmother's sharp features and Stella's vague ones, and created a model of them for Vanessa to follow, beautiful on the surface, but fatally insipid within. (Moments of Being 55)

With expectations of perfect happiness for her, they wished Stella well on her honeymoon. From her journey, however, she returned fatally ill; from divine guarantee came only a "shapeless catastrophe. . . death making an end of all these exquisite preparations" (Moments of Being 55).

Rachel's emotional vacillations enlarge her experience of life, but they also shape belief, the premises by which she evaluates these experiences. Like Helen and Terence, she is unable to compensate for the distortions, though she does note them. One day, having walked alone along a river bank, she is suddenly "filled with one of those unreasonable exultations which start generally from an unknown cause, and sweep whole countries and skies into their embrace[;] she walked without seeing" until interrupted by a solid object, the perception of which is momentarily intensified and falsified by her energized brain. "It was an ordinary tree," the narrator tells us, "but to her it appeared so strange that it might have been the only tree in the world." This illusion of miraculous singularity is temporary; the tree "once more sank into the ordinary rank of trees" as Rachel sank out of her hypomanic state (174). Sitting in the shade and reading Gibbon, Rachel again experiences an elevated mood, but this time she attempts to understand it: "Slowly her mind became less confused and sought the origins of her exaltation." With effort, she narrows down the probable cause to Terence and St. John. Yet she cannot analyze and so control their power to affect her so drastically, because for her they are still enveloped in an idealizing "haze of wonder": "From them all life seemed to radiate; the very words of books were steeped in radiance" (175).

Questioning belief in the midst of hypomania proves to be useless. Mood manipulates belief and colors facts, even individual words, to fit itself: "She could not reason about [Terence and St. John] as about people whose feelings went by the same rule as her own did, and her mind dwelt on them with a kind of physical pleasure such as is caused by the contemplation of bright things hanging in the sun." Knowing objectively that Terence and St. John do not radiate "all life" or that the words of books are not "steeped in radiance" will not lead her to insight until she identifies the source of the reflected, blinding brightness. This Rachel does not do. Like the early Freudians, she focuses on the object of her distorted perception in the hope that it has somehow caused the shift in mood, but this

gets her nowhere. Soon her mood drops again, she loses the manic ability to "juggle with several ideas," and "a kind of melancholy replace[s] her excitement," destroying even the illusion of significance: "She sank down on to the earth, clasping her knees together, and looking blankly in front of her," wondering, "What is it to be in love?" (175).

What does it mean for Rachel to be in love when she cannot be sure of her beliefs or her emotions? How can this novel be judged a tragic love story or a failed bildungsroman when the most basic issues about perception and self have yet to be resolved? Rachel thinks she sees clearly that the preacher Bax's complacent listeners have confused their notions of God with their own self-images, but it is an agonizing struggle for her merely to determine what she feels about Terence and whether or not it is even love. Each time they meet, conflicting emotions assert themselves ("when they met their meeting might be one of inspiriting joy or of harassing despair" [224]). Helen's counseling only confuses the two women further when Rachel's bipolar mood swings occasionally, but only temporarily, coincide with Helen's depression:

[Rachel's mind] was so fluctuating, and went so quickly from joy to despair, that it seemed necessary to confront it with some stable opinion which naturally became dark as well as stable. Perhaps Mrs. Ambrose had some idea that in leading the talk into these quarters she might discover what was in Rachel's mind, but it was difficult to judge, for sometimes she would agree with the gloomiest thing that was said, at other times she refused to listen, and rammed Helen's theories down her throat with laughter, chatter, ridicule of the wildest, and fierce bursts of anger even at what she called the "croaking of a raven in the mud."

"It's hard enough without that," she asserted.

"What's hard?" Helen demanded.

"Life," she replied, and then they both became silent.

Helen might draw her own conclusions as to why life was hard, as to why an hour later, perhaps, life was something so wonderful and vivid that the eyes of Rachel beholding it were positively exhilarating to a spectator. (221–22)

Helen's attempt to understand Rachel's moods is doomed because she too assumes that ideas or events arc behind them, that if she could only "discover what was in Rachel's mind," she could counteract the cognitive changes.

Like many other manic-depressives before her, Rachel suffers as much from her own moodiness as from the world's inability to understand her

inner world. Frustrated and tearful, her pulse "beating, struggling, fretting" against a world of degraded human beings who cannot comprehend her emotional tumult or satisfy her demands (which mania intensifies so much that her desires cannot be adequately formulated or appeased), she becomes convinced that other people are against her, imposing their "ponderous stupidity" upon her, like Leslie Stephen drenching Anny's exuberant imagination with his "cold bath" of logic:

All day long she had been tantalized and put off. . . . For the time, her own body was the source of all the life in the world, which tried to burst forth here—there—and was repressed now by Mr. Bax, now by Evelyn, now by the imposition of ponderous stupidity—the weight of the entire world. Thus tormented, she would twist her hands together, for all things were wrong, all people stupid. Vaguely seeing that there were people down in the garden beneath she represented them as aimless masses of matter, floating hither and thither, without aim except to impede her. (258)

Driven and visionary, the manic cannot understand that indefinable requests are impossible to fulfill. Though desire is vivid and expansive, the real world and its limitations are only "vaguely" seen through the blinding light of exalted mood.^[25] Manic confidence, intensified by scattered creativity and unrealistic goals, is easily diverted into egotism and hostility.

But this denial of her aimless moodiness cannot last. Rachel's paranoid rage soon settles into its opposite, a "melancholy lethargy." Her imagined vision of a persecutory world dims, and with it the illusion of unlimited energy and profound purpose. "It's a dream," she concludes, and she subsequently discovers that the rusty inkstand, the pen, the ashtray, and the old French newspaper arc really only "small and worthless objects [that had] seemed to her to represent human lives" bursting with vivacity and malice. Rachel has arrived at a momentary insight into this particular instance of mania, but has she achieved a lasting understanding of all the mood swings she has experienced? This moment of micro-depression is not definitive; it merely disillusions her of one false belief by replacing it with another. Within seconds she moves on to the next shift in mood. As before, she is overwhelmed by elevated mood, energy, and perception: the landscape seems covered with "a haze of feverish red mist," and her friends have a

startling intensity, as though the dusty surface had been peeled off everything, leaving only the reality and the instant. It had the look of

a vision printed on the dark at night. White and grey and purple figures were scattered on the green; round wicker tables; in the middle the flame of the tea-urn made the air waver like a faulty sheet of glass; a massive green tree stood over them as if it were a moving force held at rest. (258–59)

But what is this unpeeled "reality"? Vivid and yet indefinite (Evelyn and Helen appear merely as unrecognizable "figures"), Rachel's vision lasts only an instant and is soon forgotten. Her exultation drops away, and she rejoins the hotel guests for a quiet tea, during which she considers and accepts Mrs. Flushing's invitation to the ill-fated expedition up the river.

Unable to connect present moments of intense feeling with conflicting past moments, Rachel learns nothing that can help her understand emotion. Although Clarissa confidently predicts that Rachel is "going to find out" why people marry (60), her engagement to Terence takes place without much enlightenment. Their love scenes seem deliberately cast as eerie and unreal, full of ambiguous silences and flat, unremarkable statements spoken with a dull, lifeless quality, the diminished inflection typical of depression:^[26]

"You like being with me?" Terence asked.

"Yes, with you," she replied.

He was silent for a moment. Silence seemed to have fallen upon the world.

"This 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 unconsciously quickened.

"We love each other," Terence said.

"We love each other," she repeated. (271)

A dreamlike unreality so overwhelms them that they question not only why they want to marry but whether in fact Terence had even asked her (282). Mood shapes what is recorded in memory and how it is recorded, making events apprehended as unreal more difficult to remember. Rachel and Terence therefore agree to review their previous conversation, to pin down what each one felt so that "together they would interpret her feeling" about what had happened. But their attempt at an intellectualized reconstruction proves futile. Rachel only becomes conscious of a new and

unfamiliar feeling running through her: "This is happiness, I suppose." This is not a Freudian novel about love or sex. This is a story about whether emotion is a fiction that can be read. Rachel accepts each of her different readings of the world because each carries with it a powerful force of conviction. Unable to analyze her perceptions, "it seemed to her that her sensations had no name," and she herself becomes a mere container for those sensations (223).

By refusing to name Rachel's fatal illness but foregrounding her delirium, which is inherently inchoate, Woolf focuses our attention on the physicality of Rachel's illness, showing us that a biological disorder has perceptual and psychological consequences that resist a "personal" explanation. When Rachel's head first begins to ache, the words of Milton, recited by Terence, begin to mean "different things" from the ordinary (as we should expect by now, Woolf does not specify what the difference is), and "the garden too looked strange" (327). Interpretation and perception have become indistinguishable; objects, especially words, have become malleable, plastic, obscurely symbolic, inexplicably significant. Rachel envisions her sickroom attendants taking flight above trees and high towers. The sickroom itself persecutes her: the walls lean malevolently toward her, harsh light assaults her, and the movement of the blinds in the wind terrifies her. These perceptions are convincingly vivid, but they fail to yield to analysis:

For six days indeed she had been oblivious of the world outside, because it needed all her attention to follow the hot, red, quick sights which passed incessantly before her eyes. She knew that it was of enormous importance that she should attend to these sights and grasp their meaning, but she was always being just too late to hear or see something which would explain it all. For this reason, the faces,—Helen's face, the nurse's, Terence's, the doctor's,—which occasionally forced themselves very close to her, were worrying because they distracted her attention and she might miss the clue. However, on the fourth afternoon she was suddenly unable to keep Helen's face distinct from the sights themselves; her lips widened as she bent down over the bed, and she began to gabble unintelligibly like the rest. The sights were all concerned in some plot, some adventure, some escape. The nature of what they were doing changed incessantly, although there was always a reason behind it, which she must endeavour to grasp. (340–41)

Confused, Rachel resorts to unlikely explanations validated only by mood, not by fact, and though her perceptions change incessantly, she

cannot stop to think that the fault lies with her. Woolf's metaphor for this most essential element of manic-depressive illness is the dream state. Both familiar and strange to readers, it emphasizes the paradoxical experience of Woolf's madness: it suspends the rules of "normal" waking mental functioning and yet sharply reveals the unexamined assumptions of those rules. Rachel's fevered mental state is described as "a transparent kind of sleep," as if she is trapped in Terence's dichotomy representing moodiness, "dreams and reality"; she is neither fully asleep nor awake and is unable to tell the difference. Though her premises are distorted, however, Rachel's mind does still function in a logical way. To paraphrase Leonard's reassurances to Woolf, Rachel is "terribly sane in three-quarters of her mind" (Beginning Again 164). She attempts to "cross over into the ordinary world," to know when she is experiencing a dream, when a reality, but it is difficult, for the fever has "put a gulf between her world and the ordinary world which she could not bridge" (329).

Unable to wake up, Rachel is imprisoned by subjectivity: "all landmarks were obliterated"; even the sounds of people walking on the floor above seem incomprehensible and can "only be ascribed to their cause by a great effort of memory. The recollection of what she had felt, or of what she had been doing and thinking three days before, had faded entirely" (329–30).^[27] The sight of Terence takes special effort "because he forced her to join mind to body in the desire to remember something" (347)—how she felt about him, with the same beliefs and conviction, an impossible task now. In this sense she is no longer Rachel, for she loses identity when she loses her past. She has "ceased to have any will of her own" and is unable to communicate with the rest of the world, for her mind has been "driven to some remote corner of her body, or escaped and gone flitting round the room" (347). Only body, the cause of the separation, can forge the link between self and world and end the nightmare. Woolf may not have understood how biology determined mood, but clearly she experienced the connection.

As the fever progresses the mood swings intensify, and Rachel begins to hallucinate vividly. Nurse McInnis now appears to be playing cards in a tunnel under a river, a vision Rachel interprets as "inexplicably sinister" (330). The next vision expands on the theme. A waking dream that repeats elements of Rachel's nightmare after Dalloway's kiss, it replays the same message that powerlessness and vulnerability are frightening:

Rachel again shut her eyes, and found herself walking through a tunnel under the Thames, where there were little deformed women sitting in

archways playing cards, while the bricks of which the wall was made oozed with damp, which collected into drops and slid down the wall. But the little old women became Helen and Nurse McInnis after a time, standing in the window together whispering, whispering incessantly. (331)

The women are McInnis and Helen, distorted by fever, sitting in her room; the oozing walls, her own skin shedding beads of sweat. The body's boundaries have melted and are mixed up with perceptions of separate objects. Depression and sexual abuse are connected here because each reduces Rachel to a helpless, paranoid object. Recapitulating a nightmare puts into words what is nameless and so difficult to explain—how Rachel feels when depressed.

A similar scene occurs when Terence next visits. Rachel hallucinates an old woman with a knife killing chickens (as she had earlier witnessed), a decapitation scene that has inflamed some Freudians with its lurid imagery. Shirley Panken maintains that this vision of castration expresses Rachel's (and Woolf's) neurotic and repressed fear of sexual intimacy with a man and her masked oral rage (Lust of Creation 83–85). But if Woolf did know what she was doing here, and if it was based on her experience of manic-depressive illness, then the focus should not be on decoding latent content for some tidy and reasonable message but on the structure of Rachel's hallucination. When Terence kisses her, she sees an old woman slicing a man's head off with a knife (339), but it is Rachel who has been cut off—by her own paranoia. She feels as if her mind is "flitting round the room." An attempt to touch, to communicate, is perceived not simply wrongly but as its opposite, as a separation, an alienation. The kiss's meaning is a florid unmeaning, just as Stella's death defied hope, just as manic-depressive illness undermines desire and character and judgment. Rachel's hallucinations and the novel's equivocations alike cry out for coherence and reduction, but at what price? If we save Rachel from an incoherent madness and a meaningless death by saving ourselves from the fundamental uncertainties of reading, are we not destroying the novel?

To tempt us further, in the characters who survive Rachel we are offered bad models for making interpretations, though no one voice rises above the rest with an authoritative, or even convincing, explanation of why Rachel dies. Miss Allan overgeneralizes sorrow into depressing pessimism: she feels "as if her [own] life had been a failure, as if it had been hard and laborious to no purpose" (356). The indomitable Mrs. Thornbury overcomes her sobs ("How could one go on if there were no reason?" [357]) by fabricating an order that beautifies death: "on the whole, surely there

was a balance of happiness—surely order did prevail. . . . they were saved so much; they kept so much. The dead—she called to mind those who had died early, accidentally—were beautiful" (360). Mr. Flushing is defensive too but lacks the imagination to idealize death: he fears that his wife feels "she was in some way responsible," a suspicion he argues is "unreasonable" in a series of unfinished assertions that cover all defensive bases: "We don't even know—in fact I think it most unlikely—that she caught her illness there. These diseases—Besides, she was set on going. . . . I've no doubt myself that Miss Vinrace caught the infection up at the villa itself." Mrs. Flushing counters her grief by stiffening, regarding death as a humiliating surrender:

When she was alone by herself she clenched her fists together, and began beating the back of a chair with them. She was like a wounded animal. She hated death; she was furious, outraged, indignant with death, as if it were a living creature. She refused to relinquish her friends to death. She would not submit to dark and nothingness. (359)

William Pepper blames Rachel's death on taking unnecessary risks with unwashed vegetables. Old Mrs. Paley agrees, referring to Rachel as "young people" who "always think they know better, and then they pay the penalty" (362). The sexist Arthur Pennington assumes that Englishwomen are too weak constitutionally to survive "roughing it," even though the soft and passive Susan flourishes physically. Evelyn denies contingency altogether: if Rachel's death were not a part of a Providential plan, she worries, "it need never have happened" (357). The rest of the hotel's inmates quickly forget their grief when a storm momentarily absorbs their attention, after which they return to their needlework and chess and novels, as if nothing fundamental had disturbed them at all.

In this way The Voyage Out trivializes its own ending, undermining the significance of Rachel's death by presenting contradictory interpretations ready-made according to each character's own psychological needs and strategies for dealing with threatening, pointless events. And critics have generally followed the models set out for their imitation. Some, like Mrs. Thornbury, accept the "apparent" arbitrariness of Rachel's death as evidence that some orderly pattern underlies all human experience but that it transcends the capacity of individuals to understand it; only in death will be found an idealized "vision" of truth or a perfect union with Terence—though what that vision is and why it should be so valuable is certainly not demonstrated in the novel.^[28] Perhaps Rachel prefers death

because it offers the illusion of perfect fusion with Terence, but the illusion belongs to Terence alone, not to the text, and it is subsequently exploded by a "necrophilic rage" once the reality of Rachel's death sinks in.^[29] Like Mr. Pepper and Mrs. Paley, some critics moralize that tragedy results when foolish risks are taken, death being the "inevitable end of romantic dreaming" that ignores the grim realities of the world.^[30] Or, like Miss Allan, they take a depressive, tight-lipped line, blaming Rachel's death on the "impossible barriers between people, barriers which in the end are triumphant."^[31]

Only the Freudians share Mr. Flushing's talent for rationalizations at any cost when they try to specify a latent origin for Rachel's fever: Shirley Panken argues that Rachel dies because she capitulates, in a kind of death wish, to insoluble inner conflicts; Louise DeSalvo and others contend that sexual knowledge and sexual guilt are the real causes of death; Rachel succumbs either from fear of sex or from an unresolved, latent lesbian desire for Helen.^[32] (And yet Hughling Eliot contracts a similar fever and is treated by the same Dr. Rodriguez: are we to assume he suffers from impotence or lurking homosexuality? Mrs. Thornbury reports that she fell ill with typhoid for six weeks on her honeymoon in Venice; was this too a psychosomatic reaction to intimacy? And what of the famous explorer, Mackenzie, who "had died of fever some ten years" before in the jungle [277]? Bestiality? How far are we willing to go to make sexual feelings fatal?) Finally, it has been suggested that Rachel sinks into fever because she does not resist surrender to the dark inner forces and social, sexual pressures; just as Mrs. Flushing feels that she survives by sheer will power, Leaska and Apter theorize that Rachel dies "a self-willed death," one that is "the ultimate expression other personality tendencies."^[33]

What are we to think about Rachel's death when so many convenient critiques have been provided us by the author herself? Rachel and Terence explicitly state that a life of happiness is a reasonable request to make of fate ("It isn't as if we were expecting a great deal—only to walk about and look at things" [301]), but it is apparently too much to ask, not only in this novel but frequently in real life as well. How are we to evaluate a thoroughly naturalistic event in fiction? Perhaps in response to other critics' frustration, one has voiced the inevitable conclusion that Rachel's death is arbitrary and essentially unrelated to the novel's thematic structure: "It does not seem convincing to treat the illness as the outcome of Rachel's emotional experiences—as a flight from sex or from the unsatisfactoriness of love." That significant admission is shared by others: the novel's ending is "unmotivated," seemingly "intended to upset all expectations

of 'pattern'"; it is "gratuitous," "pointless and unnecessary."^[34] And so our focus should be shifted onto why readers have such a difficult time accepting it as such, why, although admitting that Rachel's death defies analysis, striking the reader as a "blank fact," they try to analyze it anyway, filling in the blanks as if they were not meant to be there.^[35] Mitchell Leaska sees the "tragic pointlessness" of Rachel's death, accepts that it "is intentionally made ambiguous" ("the author, however, names no proliferating organism, specifies no unwashed vegetables") and yet concludes that it is "self-willed, " even while he wonders why we "are at liberty to speculate on why we are not able 'to give a reasonable explanation'" for it. Instead of enjoying this liberty to speculate on the meaninglessness of death, Leaska presumes that, since "everything is there not by chance, but by choice, " this narrative gap stands for something that is missing because it is latent, forbidden, repressed; some crucial element that will give the "real" reason for the novel's central event has been left out. Claiming that we can dip into Rachel's (and Virginia's) unconscious mind, Leaska finds discarded references to sexuality, violence, and bestiality in earlier versions of the novel and reestablishes them as motives for Rachel's withdrawal into fever, delirium, and death.

But perhaps the point is that Rachel's death is gratuitous, and that, faced with confusion and loss, some readers will go to great lengths to establish a rationale that will explain away tragic senselessness, making unsupported interpretations along the way (for instance, that Woolf's earlier revisions and deletions of "bestial" passages give us a privileged view into her mind "at work in the unguarded act of creation. "^[36] Leaska follows the comforting Freudian formula of psychic determinism, the theory that no psychic event occurs by chance, and so he assumes that Rachel's death must be caused by deeper conflicts that Woolf is unwilling to confess (by definition, neurotics are not willing to examine what they have repressed). He gives himself license to supply what is not in the text, to make clear what has been left deliberately unclear, to center a decentered text, and he ignores the significance of obscurity, of absence, of meaninglessness—in essence, of modernism. Ironically, it is precisely this unlimited "end-less" state that characterizes psychoanalysis at its best—when it is still exploratory and potentially capable of tolerating the untoward chaos and pain of illness. By forcing a conclusion to Rachel's life (e.g., death by frigidity), Freudian critics not only gloss over Woolf's deliberately constructed textual strategies but also embalm psychoanalysis by prematurely explaining away contingency. Freud's dictum of psychic determinism is not a license to bury under theory all uncertainties, gaps, and elisions.

It is this liberty to speculate, without hope of an objective or conclusive answer, that frustrates Leaska and us, but it cannot and should not be avoided. Such freedom to perceive pointlessness is an integral part of subject-object relations. Often, like Woolf in "A Sketch of the Past," we face only a blank wall of nonbeing, of unmeaning (why did Margaret Hills die on her bicycle?). And yet Woolf obviously values these experiences, as when she tries to sum up her feelings about the deaths of Julia and Stella:

If there is any good (I doubt it) in these mutilations, it is that it sensitises [one]. . . to be aware of the insecurity of life. . . . Did those deaths give us an experience that even if it was numbing, mutilating, yet meant that the Gods (as I used to phrase it) were taking us seriously. . . ? I would reason that if life were thus made to rear and kick, it was a thing to be ridden; nobody could say "they" had fobbed me off with a weak little feeble slip of the precious matter. (Moments of Being 137)

Death mutilates feeling. This Leslie Stephen himself said in a letter to C. E. Norton apropos of Minny's death:

Grief like yours and mine seems to me to be not like an illness from wh. one recovers but like a permanent mutilation wh. can never be cured; though one may become accustomed to the [illegible] state of existence and lower one's ambition to suit one's capabilities.^[37]

Virginia acknowledged the hurt both her father and she felt at the loss of loved ones and security, yet clearly she surpasses him when she tells us that one must remain sensitive to it nevertheless; one must tolerate uncertainty, confusion, multiplicity. Knowing that even senseless experience was "the real thing" ratified her sense of self, a self brave enough to stare into the consuming fires without resorting to the comfort of illusions or a lowering of ambition. Shirley Panken dismisses The Voyage Out by concluding that Woolf "seems incapable because of her inexperience and warp in development of sorting out threatening emotions";^[38] I argue that this novel does indeed "sort out" confabulations of inner states and outer objects—but not in an order Panken expects or recognizes.

Perhaps because Woolf is more interested in depicting the existential contingency of mood shifts, she does not attempt to deal with madness and death as anything more than a final void that swallows up selves forever. In Jacob's Room, she explores the emptiness left by a character's death. By 1925, in Mrs. Dalloway, she shows us that even loss and death can be faced with some confidence that an essential feature of the self will remain intact;

and in To the Lighthouse, characters overcome the helplessness death and loss produce, touching one another across gulfs of time and mortality in ways that Rachel and Terence do not manage. The Voyage Out is but the first step toward depicting a self strong enough to survive the loss of meaning.