132 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
which embraces the metaphor of the feminized sea vessel: ‘She was a bride going
forward to her husband, a virgin unknown of men; in her vigour and purity she
might be likened to all beautiful things’.^6 Like the ship that carries her, and the
mythical being it is named aft er, Rachel risks being reduced to a mere category of
womanhood. Yet once she arrives in South America and is placed under the tute-
lage of Helen Ambrose, Rachel gains in knowledge and self-awareness, a process
accompanied by her continued movement into the South American landscape.
It is while on a Conradian journey on the Amazonian river that Rachel becomes
engaged to a fellow traveller, Terence Hewet, but on their return to the village
she dies of a fever and the marriage never takes place. While Th e Voyage Out
frames the multiple determinations of gender and space within the structure of
a journey narrative, it does not (to borrow Rachel Bowlby’s terminolog y) pro-
vide a single ‘feminist destination’ for its main protagonist.^7 Instead, diff erent
locations combine to give Rachel a broader knowledge of her surroundings, but
none of these spaces liberate her from the social expectations of her peers.
While critics have oft en claimed that Th e Voyage Out is a failed Bildung-
sroman, they rarely acknowledge the extent to which Woolf complicates that
traditional plot with subtle innovations in the use of space.^8 Rachel’s narrative of
development is as much about location as it is about action, and her independ-
ence is framed in the context of spatiality. In accordance with the sentiments
that she would later express in A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf not only asks
what women can do, but where they are best able to do it. Th ese questions had
been raised by contemporary writers of fi ction, but not in relation to geographi-
cal landscapes of such heterogeneity. For example, the New Woman novel was
‘largely an urban phenomenon’, oft en locating narratives of female independ-
ence within the masculine city space.^9 In contrast, Rachel’s development from
ignorance to experience is plotted in tandem with her movement away from
urbanized civilization. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the text’s topography
is that it does not provide the specifi city of real-world locations (indeed, the
town of Santa Marina is entirely mythical). Rather, Woolf ’s emphasis is on the
way that the space is experienced, and how it operates in the psycholog y of a
young woman. Within this poetics of space (to use Gaston Bachelard’s terminol-
og y), the idea or condition of spatiality itself, and its impact on an individual
woman, is brought to the fore. Th e South American space, in particular, depicts
a variant of Edward Said’s concept of ‘imaginative geography’– not used to
reinforce Western values, or even to defi ne them, but rather to interrogate the
ideologies that they sustain.^10 As Karen R. Lawrence has explained:
In Th e Voyage Out, the metaphor of the New World is played out as a kind of romance
of perception; the New World is a phenomenological space where objects come into
being for consciousness, as if perception and poetic image could be reinvented for the
woman protagonist.^11