From England to Eden 141
her for a lifetime, and for a lifetime would preserve that second ... she was able
to seat herself in its shade’.^35 Th ere is a dark irony in the reference to Rachel’s
lifetime, which we later discover is to be cut short. Woolf seems to be suggest-
ing that this moment is a turning point for Rachel which changes the course of
her life. In many cases this moment does change her life, as it coincides with the
acknowledgement of her feelings for Terence, which will eventually lead to their
engagement. Th e pressures of civilization, represented by Gibbon’s text, require
Rachel to be married if she wants to conduct a serious romantic relationship,
something which threatens to return her to a subservient and frustrated state.
Th e last section of Th e Voyage Out is dominated by a river expedition into the
Amazonian jungle. It constitutes the fi nal stage of voyaging ‘outside’ of civilized
spaces, presenting a seemingly timeless landscape that had not been altered by
anything other than natural forces:
Since the time of Elizabeth very few people had seen the river, and nothing had been
done to change its appearance ... Changing only with the change of the sun and
clouds, the waving green mass had stood there for century aft er century, and the water
had run between its banks ceaselessly, sometimes washing away earth and sometimes
the branches of trees, while in other parts of the world one town had risen upon the
ruins of another town, and the men in the towns had become more and more articu-
late and unlike each other.^36Th is virgin territory, supposedly untouched by the men in their towns, appears
to be located in a time and place that precedes civilization and the ‘diff erences’ it
brings. As Anne McClintock argues of the imperial narrative:
Th e colonial journey into the virgin interior reveals a contradiction, for the journey is
fi gured as proceeding forward in geographical space but backward in historical time,
to what is fi gured as a prehistoric zone of racial and gender diff erence.^37Th is rendering of the Amazon temporarily displaces the native inhabitants, and
encourages a perceived relationship between the jungle space and narratives of
origin, in particular the myth of Eden. Th is relationship is made quite overt by Mr
Flushing in the Melymbrosia draft of the text, when he states that when Western
colonizers fi rst came to the country, they ‘thought they’d discovered the garden of
Eden’.^38 Other references to Eden in both the draft and published versions are less
obvious, but they bear signifi cant similarities to those made by Woolf previously
in the text. As in the scene where Rachel realizes her love for Terence, there are
numerous references to the beginning of the world and to trees. In Melymbrosia,
the river itself is described as ‘lying like the root of some enormous forest tree,
massive in the middle, with lesser roots lying across the blue sand’.^39 Th e river, like
the ‘avenues’ of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, is presented by Woolf as a route back
through the various stages of civilization and into the origins of humanity: