Carl Nilsson-Polias

Given that the dominant discourse reflects a masculine point of view, a woman writer must search for a means of expression more suitable to her self-understanding and her understanding of the world.

In a patriarchal society where the values and mores are set down in a firmly masculine discourse, female authors must strive to find the means for honest self-expression. In Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse we have perfect examples of modern novels in which the authors have been actively searching, not necessarily for a uniquely feminine voice, but for a style that can represent both the feminine and masculine experiences. This sense of androgyny or humanism becomes a tool not only for finding self-expression but also for subverting the male discourse and forming new concepts of the subject in literature.

The importance of narrative in everyday life cannot be denied. As Joanne Frye asserts, “the need to narrate is an apparently pervasive human need” (18). There is an innate requirement to give experiences the shape of a story and to hear the stories of others because, in so doing, one is able to “assess cause and effect in a pattern of significance, to relate ourselves to a sense of purpose, to claim a shared reality with other people, and to identify a specificity and a continuity of self through memory” (Frye 19). In other words, one’s identity and one’s sense of position in relation to family, society, world and universe are inexorably interconnected with narrative. This also leads to the possibility of alienation and a lack of identity for women in that they cannot find an honest and free form of expression within the bounds of the dominant male discourse.

The importance of the novel in society is closely tied to the significance of narrative in humans understanding their experiences. In many respects, the novel is the form of literature which most approximates the structure and style of “natural narrative” (Frye 20). Therefore, the novel has been of great interest to feminist critics because the discourse of the novel closely resembles that of popular culture(Frye 18). Importantly, the novel is seen not only as a mirror to society but also as something capable of enacting change through what Mikhail Bakhtin sees as its “dialogic capacity” (Frye 22). In other words, the novel’s flexibility can yield new interactions with the social reality, allowing for new comprehensions, new sets of values and new frameworks to become part of the society.

This power would appear to be of great advantage to female authors were it not for the fact that, throughout the nineteenth century, the novel was thoroughly male-dominated. As some feminist critics see it “the novel has its ideological base in the social structures of patriarchal society” (Frye 24) and would appear to have little revolutionary capability, at least in terms of women. So, in this bleak picture, female authors are “‘enclosed in an architecture of an overwhelmingly male-dominant society’”, while simultaneously being limited in their artistic vision by the literary constructs and codes of the novel that either implicitly or explicitly suppress the female voice (Frye 29-30).

Hence, the Realist novel and the formal and societal conventions that were bound up in it were hindrances to the free and honest expression of female authors’ self-understanding. However, rather than abandoning the novel altogether, authors like Rhys and Woolf substituted in innovations in the broadly defined areas of plot, character and reality to give the novel renewed relevance, power and expression.

Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark is the story of a young woman, Anna, in early twentieth century England. Through a first person narrative, it deals with her physical exile from her birthplace in the West Indies, her emotional exile from a hypocritical society, her unhappy encounters with men and her breakdown as she plunges further and further into the depths of the Edwardian demimonde.

A study of Rhys’s novel is best preceded by a brief discussion of the role that is played by Jacques Derrida’s notions of Deconstruction. In particular, two elements of Derrida’s writings become useful in analysing Rhys’s use of the feminine voice in her work. First, the activity of deconstructive reading is a common way in which feminist critics show how a great deal of literature naturalises the power of the dominant discourse as much by what remains unsaid as by what is said (Norris 24). Second, Derrida’s revolutionary attack on logocentrism has great relevance in the destabilisation of the male/female binary by undoing “the given order of priorities and the very system of conceptual opposition that makes that order possible” (Norris 31). In other words, Derrida sets out a broad framework that in its emphasis on “activity” rather than “ready-made concepts” (ibid) can be used successfully in seeing the power of the literary innovations of Rhys and also Woolf.

The clearest and most important manifestation of Derrida’s ideas in Voyage in the Dark appears in the tension and opposition between what are in effect two separate voices that run through the novel. The first of these is the more frequent general narrative and dialogue, while the second is shown as the less common, often italicised, passages that give us an insight into the narrator’s subconscious and conscious thoughts. So, Rhys conveys to the reader both the events that actually do occur in the world of the text as well as those events which Anna imagines or would like to happen. This can be most pointedly seen as a contrast between the spoken and the unspoken.

The difference between what is spoken and what is unspoken lies at the heart of Rhys’s effort to put forward an honest and true female self-expression that avoids entrapment by the male discourse. As Nancy Harrison writes, “being suppressed by the conventions of masculine discourse and control is not a configuration through which a woman can speak” (71). So, Rhys brings our attention to this suppression by writing novels that are about just this: “the attempt [by a woman] to speak and, in speaking, to be heard” (ibid). Rhys achieves this, not through creating female protagonists who succeed in their world, but simply by Rhys herself expressing these ideas through the novel. In other words, while the attempt to speak and be heard is “frustrated in the lives of the heroine-narrators, [it] is achieved in Rhys’s record of their attempts” (ibid). This is illustrated in the contrast between the phrases that point to what Anna would like to say and what is actually said.

I got up. I meant to say, ‘What are you doing?’ But when I went up to him instead of saying, ‘Don’t do that,’ I said. ‘All right, if you like – anything you like, any way you like.’ And I kissed his hand. (VD 33-34)

In this extract, it is clear that the phrases Anna wanted and, indeed, intended to say come from a far more powerful and confident position than the meek, obsequious statements that she eventually does utter. In this way, it could appear that Rhys is merely reinforcing the power and domination of the male discourse through her writing by steering her character down a conventional path of female acquiescence. However, the exact opposite is true because, while Anna may fail to stand up against the patriarchy, Rhys does not because she has said exactly that which would conventionally remain unspoken. Indeed, by being marked as unspoken, these phrases stand out all the more (Harrison 72).

The idea that the ability to speak is something that is granted to women rather than something that is taken as a given is apparent throughout Voyage in the Dark . In an early part of the book, Anna recounts an episode in a restaurant where she is dining with her ‘lover’, Mr Jeffries.

The waiter sniffed. Then Mr Jeffries sniffed. Their noses were exactly alike, their faces very solemn. The Brothers Slick and Slack, the Brothers Pushmeofftheearth. I thought, “Now then, you mustn’t laugh. He’ll know you’re laughing at him. You can’t laugh.” (VD 17-18)

Here, there is a strong sense of the unity of men through their mutual power relative to Anna (Harrison 77). This is significant as it suggests that even a man serving a woman still holds a higher status in a society where the values, mores and discourse are male-dominated. There is also an indication that Anna must sublimate her desire to laugh at the two men’s ridiculous appearance because in her position of inferiority it would be highly inappropriate. Rhys follows up this passage a few pages on in the book:

He laughed. I laughed too, because I felt that that was what I ought to do. You can now and you can see what it’s like, and why not? (VD 20)

Anna “can [laugh] now” because it is permissible. Because, by Mr Jeffries laughing, she has been given the metaphoric nod from the patriarchy that laughing here is “what [she] ought to do”. Furthermore, the laugh carries with it just as much meaning here as speech (Harrison 77). On the one hand, the restaurant scene’s context had Anna laughing at the two men, at men in general. On the other, the laughter in the latter context, the permissible laughter, is at her own expense and this of course is the reason that the laughter is permissible (Harrison 78). However, here the laugh is, for Anna, not a form of self-expression but simply her allowing herself to channel the male discourse.

The unspoken elements in Rhys’s writing are seen throughout the text, culminating just before the end. As Harrison notes, within the italicised passages an associative narrative unfolds that is not bound by a strict sense of chronology (83). These passages also lack the conventions of punctuation and sentence structure inherent in the male discourse. All of this points to the text having two fundamentally different frameworks operating around the one story (ibid). There is the conventional plot and dialogue of the spoken text and the “sub-conversation” of the unspoken that is, in fact, highlighted so that it becomes the dominant conversation for the reader (Harrison 82-83). The end effect of these unspoken elements in Voyage in the Dark is to undermine the dominant male discourse presented in the ‘real’ dialogue of the novel by implanting this insistent female discourse into the readers consciousness. Hence, Rhys explores the female experience by juxtaposing its discourse with its male counterpart and, because of the differences that become evident, finds the means by which she can most effectively express a feminine self-understanding.

Rhys reinforces the effect of these stylistic innovations in the novel’s plot and sense of reality by creating a central character that in its very conception undercuts the traditional masculine codes of literature. The common typing of female characters as one or other of the virgin/whore binary in Realist novels (Frye 41) is a case in which Derridean insights into logocentrism and Deconstruction come into play. In the case of Voyage in the Dark , critics approaching the central character of Anna from a traditionalist perspective will come across the paradox that she is “both and neither” (Hite 23) because this essentialist standpoint denies the possibility that a woman might be more than one thing at any given time. Rhys’s characterisation of Anna goes further in undermining the dominant discourse by placing someone who could be described as passive and masochistic at the centre of the narrative. As Molly Hite suggests, “the bourgeois ideology informing the [traditional] novel” puts a focus on the protagonist as an agent of freewill capable of overcoming obstacles, particularly “the intangible obstacles erected within the mind by upbringing and received opinion” (26). In other words, the main character should be decisive, proactive and autonomous—conditions that would appear to force Anna into having only an incidental role. It is precisely these preconceived notions of agency that Rhys is looking to attack by placing a marginal character at the centre of her fiction in that it “decentres an inherited narrative structure and undermines the values informing this structure” (Hite 25). This effort by Rhys to create a complex, non-typed female protagonist shows once more how, through subverting the dominant male discourse she is giving voice to a feminine understanding of the world.

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is at its core the story of a family’s holidays in Skye and the eventual journey to the eponymous lighthouse. From this, Woolf builds a novel that focuses not on events but on personalities, not on actions but on thoughts, not on plot but on the self. These shifts in priorities from the traditional novel are made in order for Woolf to express herself more freely, to be able to express the sensibility and experience of the self in a way which the structural limitations of masculine codes of literature do not allow for. It is also in these innovations that Woolf finds the means to express a viewpoint that is not wholly masculine. It was her aim, not to convey purely a feminine voice, but to write in an androgynous fashion.

For Woolf, aesthetic innovations and feminist convictions were deeply interwoven, and it was through the concept of androgyny that she was able to mediate between the two (Minow-Pinkney 8). Woolf’s thoughts on the matter can be traced back to Coleridge’s conception of the great mind being androgynous (Woolf 54). While Coleridge may have been referring to a sexless form of androgyny, Woolf was instead concerned with the synthesis of the masculine and the feminine. As she wrote in A Room of One’s Own , “it is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties” (ibid). For Woolf, it was “fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly” (Woolf 57). These ideas are best seen in the light of what she was reacting to—the traditional Realist novel.

Woolf felt that the pre-existing literary conventions—the purely masculine discourse—were inadequate in depicting subjective experiences, the fragmentation and the uncertainty of life in a post-Great War society (Frye 36). In To the Lighthouse , Woolf created perhaps the best manifestation of her theories through a story which is told through personal recollections of the characters in such a way as to decentralise the conventional narrative voice and, thereby, undermine the authority of the male discourse. This writing style also serves to reinforce the notions of androgyny by blurring the distinctions between male and female voices. All this is achieved around the subtle, underlying structure of two main stories—that of Mrs Ramsay and that of Lily Briscoe. These differing women’s voices in themselves represent the paradigm shift from the Realist to the Modernist discourse in the contrasting social positions and forms of femininity to which the two characters aspire.

Critics have diverged greatly on the nature of Mrs Ramsay’s character and this is to be expected due to the way in which she is depicted. As Sue Roe points out, “It is as though with each conception of Mrs Ramsay two alternative versions emerge: she belongs both in reality, and in the observer’s ‘fiction’” (67). This ‘fiction’ is a reference to the way in which Woolf tells the story not from the position of an omniscient narrator or a fully conscious protagonist but from the characters’ consciousnesses. Hence, there is none of the “narrative authority” (ibid) so characteristic of the male discourse. Rather, the author’s control over the characters is deliberately undermined in order to successfully depict the language of the characters’ mental and emotional experience. In other words, to express the female and male self-understanding it is necessary for Woolf to deflect some certainty because the characters themselves are not entirely self-conscious. In Mrs Ramsay’s case this can be explained by her constant wish to draw attention to the virtues of her husband, family and home—symbols of her success as a matriarch in the traditional sense—while deflecting attention from her own self.

He was a failure, he repeated. Well, look then, feel then. Flashing her needles, glancing round about her, out of the window, into the room, at James himself, she assured him, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by her laugh, her poise, her competence … that it was real; the house was full; the garden blowing. … So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent … (TL 45)

The two stories of Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe are delineated by the intermediary ‘Time Passes’ section. Through these passages, Woolf, in a parallel with Rhys, juxtaposes two very different styles of writing. There is the elegiac prose typical of Mrs Ramsay’s style and then there are occasional interjections of brusque factual statements of which Mr Ramsay would have approved (Roe 70). The combination of what could be seen as distinctly masculine and feminine voices, together with the historical events outlined, usher in the need for a fundamentally different perspective on the world. In an age where T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land seems most apt in describing the degradation and corruption of society, Woolf saw art as being the only avenue to truth, meaning and transcendence and the personification of these traits can be ascribed to Lily Briscoe.

Mrs Ramsay’s story is one typified by the “harmonising principle” (Roe 66) of her “tendency to edit or censor knowledge” (Roe 68) for the sake of people’s feelings—something her Platonist husband denounces her for yet benefits from. On the other hand, Lily Briscoe’s task is to lift Mrs Ramsay’s veil from meaning to expose—just as Woolf herself did with literary conventions—the core frameworks that form the basis of her world. A world in which Mrs Ramsay sees her power as a matriarch coming from her deference to her husband and her subordinate position in the home (Roe 65). Lily Briscoe represents an alternative to this in her willingness to define herself as something other than wife and mother (ibid). While Herbert Marder considers Mrs Ramsay an “androgynous artist … a perfect symbolic figure toward whom her husband and [Lily] can turn in aspiration as toward a liberating ideal” (128) it would seem that it is actually Lily Briscoe who, in turning away from the conventions of the male discourse, best embodies the androgynous storyteller through her painting. Whereas Mrs Ramsay’s feeling of self-worth was bound up in seeing herself reflected favourably in others, Lily overcomes this need for a mirror; she can see beyond the reflections of reality present in Mrs Ramsay’s story to “something ‘nobler’” (Roe 73). Her painting, the symbol of her journey of self-discovery and realisation, which takes shape over the course of the text, is clearly made analogous to the novel and, hence, Woolf’s own search for honest self-expression, in the final lines:

It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. (TL 237)

In the light of this analysis, it is clear that both Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf searched for and found ways in which they could express a woman’s self-understanding and view of the world. In both cases, they achieved this not by ignoring the male discourse but by addressing its flaws, its limitations and the unspoken elements that lay beyond it. In Voyage in the Dark , Rhys emphasises the feminine voice that conventionally lies silent and, through this, undermines the male discourse that had trapped so many women’s freedom of expression within patriarchal bounds. On the other hand, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse also undermines the male discourse through stylistic innovations but also achieves the remarkable feat of breaking down society’s distinctions between the feminine and the masculine in order to convey an androgynous narrative that tells a story belonging to humanity rather than a single gender. Through the efforts of these and other female authors, the ‘dialogic’ potential of the novel has been realised and society’s discourse is gradually moving closer and closer to Woolf’s ideal of androgyny.

Bibliography

Frye, J. “Politics, Literary Form and a Feminist Poetics of the Novel.” Living Stories, Telling Lives . Ann Arbor, U of Michigan P, 1986, 18-47.

Harrison, N.R. Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text . UP of North Carolina, 1988.

Hite, M. The Other Side of the Text . Cornell UP, 1989.

Marder, H. Feminism & Art; A Study of Virginia Woolf . U of Chicago P, 1968.

Minow-Pinkney, M. Virginia Woolf & the Problem of the Subject . Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1987.

Norris, C. Deconstruction: Theory and Prctice . London: Methuen, 1982.

Rhys, J. Voyage in the Dark . London: Penguin Books, 2000.

Roe, S. Writing and Gender: Virginia Woolf’s Writing Practice . New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990.

Woolf, V. To the Lighthouse . London: Penguin Books, 1971.

———— A Room of One’s Own . Sydney: Project Gutenberg, 2002.