From England to Eden 143
out of the published version, but this notion of silencing remains implicit; as
Rachel falls beneath Helen’s hand ‘the grass whipped across her eyes and fi lled
her mouth and ears’.^45
Th roughout the course of Th e Voyage Out, Woolf ’s depiction and use of space
can be seen to function at the core of her narrative and its political undertones.
On an elementary level, Woolf challenges the physical mobility permitted to real
and fi ctional women by creating a heroine who engages in a vast physical journey.
Of the many voyages implied by the title of the text, the most literal is in some
ways the most revolutionary. Rachel’s ‘voyage out’ thus functions as a metaphor
for the increasing visibility of women in the public sphere, and is suggestive of
the smaller physical and social journeys made by women like Woolf, who stepped
beyond their strictly domestic environments. But Rachel does not merely travel
through space, she also functions as a way of interrogating it. As Susan Stanford
Friedman has argued, Rachel’s ‘voyage out becomes a voyage in – into the heart
of the ideological confi gurations of empire, gender, and class that her story both
acts out and resists’.^46 As I have argued, the gardens in this novel provide a specifi c
category of space through which to view Rachel’s development, as well as allow-
ing an insight into Woolf ’s feminist commentary. Th e binaries and convergences
fi gured by the gardens in the text – between the built and organic, private and
public, interior and exterior – express the complex tensions between the socially
inscribed, civilized environment and the less human, even primeval, natural
world. By using the garden space as a lens through which to perceive the changing
social and physical landscapes in the work, it is possible to gain a unique perspec-
tive on the novel’s underlying aesthetic and political project.