138 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
Th e garden at the villa also plays a role in Rachel’s narrative of development,
as it appears to assist her in the process of learning and thinking for herself. In
the villa she has a ‘large, private [room] – a room in which she could play, read,
think, defy the world’, and it is situated above the garden.^22 Rachel’s thoughts are
contained not only by the room itself but merge with the space of the garden
outside of the window: ‘the morning was hot, and the exercise of reading left
her mind contracting and expanding like the mainspring of a clock. Th e sounds
in the garden outside joined with the clock, and the small noises of midday.’^23
Th e landscape outside Rachel’s window and the pattern of her thoughts are thus
brought together in a way that suggests mutual enrichment. Th e blending of
interior and exterior space lends itself to the subject of her thoughts, being the
character of Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House. She ‘gazed out over the
furniture through the window opposite which opened on the garden. Her mind
wandered away from Nora, but she went on thinking of things that the book
suggested to her, of women and life’.^24 Th e garden here helps Rachel apply the
particularities of the text in hand to the much broader reality of ‘women and life’,
perhaps even providing an antidote to the ‘house’ space that governs Ibsen’s text.
III
Th e gardens in the fi rst half of Th e Voyage Out are featured as physical, cultivated
landscapes, but in the latter part of the text they are imaginatively expanded
from the material to the mythic. Th e many allusions to the Garden of Eden in
the later chapters of the novel deepen Woolf ’s discussion of gender, culture and
landscape, while building on the previous representations of gardens in the text.
Th roughout this section of the text, Rachel is attempting to reconcile her feel-
ings of resistance with her eff orts to understand the logic of social conventions
and masculine culture. Th e Garden of Eden has an inevitable relevance to this
since, as Christine Froula has argued, the Genesis myth ‘eff ects and authorizes,
indeed sacralizes, the appropriation of culture by the male’.^25 As Rachel gains
insight into the workings of society she increasingly rejects its doctrines, recog-
nizing the injustice of gender equality, renouncing Christianity and doubting the
institution of marriage. As these developments unfold, several narrative themes
emerge that are shared with the Eden myth. In the fi rst instance, Woolf ’s plot
concerns a woman who seeks out knowledge, but in doing so she struggles with
masculine authority and deviates from her socially inscribed environment. Th is
results in two forms of exile: in Eve’s case, she is expelled from Eden; in Rachel’s,
she is exiled from life itself. Death is also a signifi cant aspect of Eve’s narrative,
since an additional punishment for her actions is mortality.^26 In both narratives
they are exiled because they have transgressed from the laws of a higher power.
Rachel’s death follows her engagement to Terence Hewet and can be read as a