From England to Eden 133
Th e concept of a ‘romance of perception’ is well suited to understanding the
space that forms the focus of this essay. Gardens may not appear to be central
to the narrative of Th e Voyage Out, but they are found at signifi cant points
in the text and at every stage of Rachel’s journey. As conceptually suspended
between private and public, nature and culture, rural and urban environments,
they can be read as points of mediation in the text. Not only do they provide
links between diff erent physical spaces by appearing throughout the narrative
as a whole, between them they also demonstrate how these landscapes compare
and are perceived. In their articulation of social, cultural and political diff erences
between locations, they provide a lens through which to view Rachel’s develop-
ment, and a way of tracing her perception through a single spatial category.
Gardens feature continually in Th e Voyage Out, occurring in the descriptions
of Rachel’s upbringing through to Woolf ’s rendering of the South American
landscape. Th ey are typically enclosed and cultivated spaces, ranging from the
domestic gardens of private homes to the public parks of Richmond. Th ere are
also gardens in the town of Santa Marina, and at the hotel and at the villa occu-
pied by Rachel and Helen. Th ese are radically diff erent to the gardens and parks
that Woolf uses to typify the English landscape. In the latter part of the text the
allusions to gardens are more mythical than physical, and allude in particular
to the Garden of Eden. It is in the Edenic wilderness of the Amazonian forest
that Rachel becomes engaged to Terence and contracts the illness which leads
to her death. Diff erent gardens stage a series of interactions with the natural
environment and provide Rachel with varying levels of access to knowledge and
independence. Although gardens feature throughout Woolf ’s writing, this is the
fi rst and only time in her oeuvre when they are depicted across a range of geo-
graphical environments, and in tandem with a narrative of female development.
I
Images of the traditional garden or parkland space are oft en used in Th e Voyage
Out to epitomize Rachel’s life in England, and to allude to the social structures
and expectations which have contributed to her state of ignorance. Gardens
are central to Woolf ’s depiction of Rachel’s adolescence, which involves ‘hun-
dreds’ of walks in the same gardens and parks.^12 At one point she argues that
her knowledge of Richmond Park is so detailed that she can tell Terence ‘how to
get from place to place, and exactly what trees you’d pass, and where you’d cross
the roads’.^13 When Evelyn Murgatroyd alludes to Rachel’s naivety by telling her
that ‘you look – well, as if you’d lived all your life in a garden’ she unwittingly
strikes on the fundamental condition of Rachel’s unworldly and restricted life.^14
As part of the physical landscape of England and the psychological landscape
of Rachel’s restrictive upbringing, these garden spaces perform as locations of