{"id":153334,"date":"2021-07-06T13:56:48","date_gmt":"2021-07-06T17:56:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=153334"},"modified":"2021-07-06T13:56:48","modified_gmt":"2021-07-06T17:56:48","slug":"seeing-and-being-are-not-the-same","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/07\/06\/seeing-and-being-are-not-the-same\/","title":{"rendered":"Seeing and Being Are Not the Same"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Virginia Woolf, 1902. Photo: George Charles Beresford. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

When Virginia Woolf\u2019s The Voyage Out<\/em> begins, Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose are making their way from the Strand to the Thames Embankment, where a rowboat will take them to a steamer that will take them across the Atlantic to South America. Helen Ambrose\u2014fortyish, beautiful, hard to please\u2014is quietly weeping. \u201cMournfully\u201d she regards the old man who rows the boat and the anchored ship he rows them to, for they are \u201cputting water between her and her children.\u201d They are joined on this journey aboard the Euphrosyne<\/em>\u2014the first voyage out\u2014by Mr. Pepper, a prickly scholar who went to Cambridge with Ridley Ambrose, and twenty-four-year-old Rachel Vinrace, the Ambroses\u2019 niece, whose mother is dead. She\u2019s been raised (to unsatisfactory fashion, in Helen\u2019s eyes) by her father, Willoughby Vinrace, upon whose ship they travel, and her other aunts. Among this group on the ship, Helen fears she\u2019ll be \u201cconsiderably bored.\u201d (The specter of boredom is important in Woolf\u2019s work; Orlando<\/em> strikes me as a novel about life\u2019s infinite richness, and how life is still somehow a bore.)<\/p>\n

The ship drops anchor again in Lisbon, where they collect two additional passengers for part of the journey, none other than Richard and Clarissa Dalloway, characters Woolf would go on to write several stories and another novel about. The Dalloways\u2019 snobbishness puts Helen off, but they connect on the subject of children. \u201cIsn\u2019t it detestable, leaving them?\u201d Clarissa asks. \u201cIt was as though a blue shadow had fallen across a pool,\u201d Woolf writes. \u201cTheir eyes became deeper.\u201d Their talk makes moody Rachel feel excluded, \u201coutside their world and motherless.\u201d Helen is consumed with thoughts of her children now, but soon she will seem to forget them almost entirely. It is just one example of the book\u2019s most prevalent theme: the limiting nature of perspective. The people in England and the people on ships are unreal to each other. \u201cBut while all this went on by land, very few people thought about the sea. They took it for granted that the sea was calm \u2026 For all they imagined, the ships when they vanished on the sky-line dissolved, like snow in water,\u201d Woolf writes. \u201cThe people in ships, however, took an equally singular view of England. Not only did it appear to them to be an island, and a very small island, but it was a shrinking island in which people were imprisoned.\u201d Much as it\u2019s nearly impossible to imagine being hot when one is freezing cold, or happy when one is miserable, the passengers on the Euphrosyne<\/em> can hardly imagine what life is like in London, or that it goes on at all. <\/p>\n

Helen and Rachel initially regard each other with mutual underestimation. Scant formal education has allowed Rachel to flourish in music, as she simply pursued her own interests. But she knows almost nothing about the world\u2014her lack of schooling leaves her with \u201cabundant time for thinking,\u201d but thinking is not equivalent to experience\u2014which baffles and frustrates Helen. Meanwhile Rachel\u2019s ageism is such that she imagines the middle-aged are ready to die: \u201c\u2009\u2018My aunts said the piano would come through the floor, but at their age one wouldn\u2019t mind being killed in the night?\u2019 she enquired.\u201d<\/p>\n

Everything changes when Mr. Dalloway kisses Rachel. This comes as a shock (\u201cLife seemed to hold infinite possibilities she had never guessed at\u201d), a shock so great she\u2019s not sure if she liked it or not. There\u2019s \u201csomething wonderful\u201d about it\u2014suddenly she sees herself \u201cas a real everlasting thing, different from anything else\u201d\u2014yet she\u2019s so disturbed she gets up in the night to lock her door; \u201cShe could not sleep again.\u201d The following day, the Dalloways disembark, and Helen and Rachel discuss them. Rachel had been mesmerized by their social position, their taste; Helen says Richard was \u201cpompous and sentimental.\u201d Rachel tells her about the kiss, which seems to her inexplicable and terrifying. Helen considers:<\/p>\n

From the little she knew of Rachel\u2019s upbringing she supposed that she had been kept entirely ignorant as to the relations of men with women. With a shyness which she felt with women and not with men she did not like to explain simply what these are. Therefore she took the other course and belittled the whole affair.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, well,\u201d she said, \u201che was a silly creature, and if I were you, I\u2019d think no more about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d said Rachel, sitting bolt upright, \u201cI shan\u2019t do that. I shall think about it all day and all night.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At this point, Rachel becomes Helen\u2019s project, a substitute child. She decides it\u2019s her duty to teach Rachel \u201chow to be a reasonable person,\u201d to achieve some awareness of herself and her place in the world, and proposes to Willoughby that Rachel stay with her and her husband when they reach South America, rather than traveling into the Amazon with him. This takes some persuasion, but \u201cHelen prevailed, although when she had won her case she was beset by doubts, and more than once regretted the impulse which had entangled her with the fortunes of another human being.\u201d This is not the first hint that things will go poorly when they reach their destination\u2014but \u201cthe moment for presentiments\u201d has passed, or there was never any moment at which fate was not unfolding, fate both random and inexorable.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In Santa Marina, a fictional South American port, Helen and Rachel take up a habit they call \u201cseeing life,\u201d \u201cstrolling through the town after dark\u201d to look at strangers. On one of these evenings, the women push open the gate of a large hotel and go up to the terrace, with its \u201crow of long windows open almost to the ground\u201d: \u201cThey were all of them uncurtained, and all brilliantly lighted, so that they could see everything inside.\u201d From this viewpoint the hotel people look unreal to them, as if lit up onstage, as if they could not see their audience through the fourth wall. But they can be and are seen, when Terence Hewet turns \u201chis full face towards the window,\u201d where his friend St. John Hirst is sitting, \u201cnear to them unobserved all the time.\u201d Discovered, the women flee.<\/p>\n

Woolf\u2019s next move is to take us deeper inside the hotel, where Helen and Rachel could not go\u2014all the way into the minds of the guests. It\u2019s one of several key scenes in the novel with a sudden perspective shift, from outside to inside, observer to observed or vice versa. Inside the rooms, the guests are of course real people, from their own perspective, that is\u2014real by virtue of having interior lives. Another concern of the novel is the question of reality versus illusion, the \u201ctwo different layers\u201d of existence: the \u201creal\u201d world of thought and feeling under the surface world, the theater of pretense. (If The Voyage Out<\/em> is less experimental in form than the later novels for which Woolf is best known, its characters are all the more moving for the ways they try to break convention from within the conventions of Edwardian fiction\u2014reminiscent of Forster.) Here we meet the rest of the book\u2019s important characters, who end up forming what you might call the women\u2019s karass<\/em>\u2014Kurt Vonnegut\u2019s term in Cat\u2019s Cradle<\/em> for a team that forms, beyond rational understanding, to \u201cdo God\u2019s will\u201d\u2014more lives whose fortunes become entangled with theirs. Most significant among them is Hewet, an aspiring novelist who falls in love with Rachel.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s Hewet\u2019s suggestion, prompted by a comment of Hirst\u2019s (\u201cDid you notice how the top of the mountain turned yellow to-night?\u201d), to haul this karass<\/em> up the mountain on donkeys for a picnic. This trip up the mountain is the second of three nested voyages in the novel. Like the kiss on the ship, it opens up the sense of the possible. It\u2019s an idea, a whim really, that comes together easily\u2014a decision acted upon, or at least a decision that feels like an action. It\u2019s also an excuse to spend time with the women they encountered at the hotel window. Hirst, a promising, arrogant young scholar who insults everybody, is fascinated by the older, unavailable Mrs. Ambrose, whom he thinks the most beautiful person he\u2019s ever seen. And Hewet is drawn to Rachel, for mysterious reasons; she\u2019s not a beauty or a charming conversationalist; people think of her as \u201cvague.\u201d She doesn\u2019t understand them and they don\u2019t understand her either. But some force pulls him to her.<\/p>\n

At the summit, there\u2019s another reversal of perspective. Arthur and Susan, two other guests on the expedition, sneak off alone and become engaged. First, we experience the moment as they do, as bliss: \u201c\u2009\u2018Well,\u2019 sighed Arthur, sinking back on the ground, \u2018that\u2019s the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me\u2019 \u2026 \u2018It\u2019s the most perfect thing in the world,\u2019 Susan stated, very gently and with great conviction.\u201d Hewet and Rachel, also walking alone, come across the couple in the trees, and their view of the scene is quite different:<\/p>\n

The woman, who now appeared to be Susan Warrington, lay back upon the ground, with her eyes shut and an absorbed look upon her face, as though she were not altogether conscious. Nor could you tell from her expression whether she was happy, or had suffered something. When Arthur again turned to her, butting her as a lamb butts a ewe, Hewet and Rachel retreated without a word. Hewet felt uncomfortably shy.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t like that,\u201d said Rachel after a moment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From her angle this moment of radical change in Susan\u2019s life looks like violence. Seeing<\/em> and being<\/em> are not the same. (\u201cOne doesn\u2019t want to be things,\u201d Hewet says, explaining his chosen vocation; \u201cone wants merely to be allowed to see them.\u201d) Finding their own little clearing, Rachel and Hewet talk, the impression of the lovers still lingering. Rachel attempts to tell Hewet about her life back at home, in Richmond, \u201covercome by the difficulty of describing people.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s impossible to believe that it\u2019s all going on still!\u201d she exclaims. In some sense \u201cit all\u201d isn\u2019t; what Woolf shows us is all that goes on. She is the \u201cundoubtedly mad\u201d god, to borrow Hirst\u2019s words, in charge of their fate. But even in the world of the novel, Richmond doesn\u2019t quite exist\u2014not in Santa Marina. Do things continue out of sight, so far away, and run on the same clocks? It\u2019s looking, or being looked at, they believe, that makes things real. But looking has limited power.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

There is one more voyage. A smaller group\u2014each voyage further separates this cluster from the rest of the world\u2014embarks on a risky expedition up the river, deeper into the jungle. (The wealthy eccentric Mrs. Flushing says to Helen, \u201cIf you want comforts, don\u2019t come. But I may tell you, if you don\u2019t come you\u2019ll regret it all your life.\u201d) On this voyage, Hewet and Rachel again break away and become engaged. They unknowingly mirror the earlier scene on the mountain, now as actors, not as audience: \u201cThis is happiness,\u201d she says, though doing what before she had only watched now fills her with a \u201csense of unreality\u201d: \u201cthe whole world was unreal.\u201d In one of the novel\u2019s strangest passages, Helen appears to find them walking and then tackles Rachel to the ground, where they roll in the long grasses: \u201cA hand dropped abrupt as iron on Rachel\u2019s shoulder; it might have been a bolt from heaven \u2026 Helen was upon her.\u201d It\u2019s an animalistic gesture both affectionate and protective. For Helen has another premonition of disaster: \u201cShe became acutely conscious of the little limbs, the thin veins, the delicate flesh of men and women, which breaks so easily \u2026 Thus thinking, she kept her eyes anxiously fixed upon the lovers, as if by doing so she could protect them from their fate.\u201d There is the question, now, as to which voyage out will not correspond with a voyage in, which bracket will not be closed.<\/p>\n

Helen cannot protect them. They all return from the riverboat, seemingly safe; then disaster arrives in the form of a fever that traps Rachel in bed, separating her from Hewet: \u201cher heat and discomfort had put a gulf between her world and the ordinary world which she could not bridge\u201d; \u201cher bed had become very important.\u201d She is now \u201calone with her body.\u201d Her bed is her ship, and such is her delirium\u2014an exaggerated form of her usual confusion\u2014that the others are barely visible. As Woolf writes in her 1926 essay \u201cOn Being Ill,\u201d \u201cthe whole landscape of life lies remote and fair, like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea.\u201d Hewet cannot reach her either, and the abyss between their \u201creal\u201d selves grows, so that being in the room with her, in physical proximity, is torture.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t get the sense that Hewet and Rachel had each found their one true predestined love. Instead there is a sense of contingency, of chaos prevailing. Earlier, reading in the equatorial heat, she\u2019d felt \u201cawe that things should exist at all.\u201d And why these things and not others? And how long can they exist? It\u2019s this underlying meaninglessness that makes Rachel\u2019s life so tragic. Because her knowledge is limited, her desires are small. \u201cIt isn\u2019t as if we were expecting a great deal,\u201d Rachel says at one point to Terence, imagining their life ahead, together, back in England, \u201conly to walk about and look at things.\u201d I wrote \u201cNo!\u201d in the margin. They want so little, and won\u2019t be allowed to have it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Elisa Gabbert is the author of five collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently <\/em>The Unreality of Memory and Other Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and <\/em>The Word Pretty (Black Ocean). She writes a regular poetry column for the <\/em>New York Times, and her work has appeared in <\/em>Harper\u2019s, <\/em>The New York Review of Books, <\/em>A Public Space, <\/em>The Nation, and many other venues.<\/em><\/p>\n

Introduction by Elisa Gabbert to a new edition of the book <\/em>The Voyage Out<\/a>, by Virginia Woolf. Introduction copyright \u00a9 2021 by Elisa Gabbert. Published by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Elisa Gabbert on Virginia\u00a0Woolf\u2019s first novel, \u2018The Voyage Out.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1241,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-153334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSeeing and Being Are Not the Same by Elisa Gabbert<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Elisa Gabbert on Virginia\u00a0Woolf\u2019s first novel, \u2018The Voyage Out.\u2019\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/07\/06\/seeing-and-being-are-not-the-same\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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