The Voyage Out

“But some enchantment had put both man and woman beyond the reach of malice and unpopularity. In his case one might guess from the moving lips that it was thought; and in hers from the eyes fixed stonily straight in front of her at a level above the eyes of most that it was sorrow. It was only by scorning all she met that she kept herself from tears, and the friction of people brushing past her was evidently painful.”

Despite their ostensibly unlikeable exteriors, Ridley and Helen Ambrose are characterized here through their more sympathetic qualities: Ridley’s deep intellect and Helen’s sorrow. Woolf doesn’t reveal the source of this sorrow, though the depth of her emotion signals an internal conflict that is both extremely private and important to her character development. Here, Woolf also reveals how, when people are struggling with internal conflict, they project their resentments onto the people around them. This heightens the stressful stimuli of the city, which also heightens the importance of Ridley and Helen’s sailing voyage.

“As for the mass of streets, squares, and public buildings which parted them, she only felt at this moment how little London had done to make her love it, although thirty of her forty years had been spent in a street. She knew how to read the people who were passing her; there were the rich who were running to and from each other’s houses at this hour; there were the bigoted workers driving in a straight line to their offices; there were the poor who were unhappy and rightly malignant.”

In this quote, Woolf uses Helen’s perspective to emphasize two important things. The first is that London is an exhausting metropolis comprised of different types of people. Characterizing London through its overwhelming population emphasizes the need for Helen to leave London for the voyage. The second is Woolf’s satirical depiction of London society. Helen may be surrounded by different types of people in London, but that doesn’t mean that she knows many different types of people. She labels workers as “bigoted” and the poor as “malignant,” two critiques of her society that imply she looks down on people in lower social classes.