When Woolf’s early heroines do voyage out of their civilized settings, the results are most telling. Woolf’s more diminutive expeditions into the South American jungle occur for one of the principle reasons Conrad takes us there in the first place: the shrinking scale of human beings in the natural world post-Darwin. This sensibility is intensified in Woolf’s fiction.
Melymbrosia, the earlier narrative drafts of The Voyage Out, describes the river journey into the
thick of the woods with complete omniscience, both temporal and spatial: “Where from the top of the mountain they could see a dark cloud of green, there the river ran, further and further away, leaving civilization behind it, passing through unlit reaches…” The sounds and lights of civilization disappear: “only birds cry, trees come down, and the fruit can be heard slipping and dropping on the ground.; and now and then some beast howls in agony or rage. Wild creatures seeing you glitter their eyes at you from the branch, and the butterflies circle in your path.”92 Woolf’s aerial perspective cuts its own path through the forest, but this is not a biblical Eden. Only after months of traversing the forest are Woolf’s readers given a hint of the source of
things: “You are now encircled by the earth, in the very heart of stone and dust. As leopard and birds have been born of the forest, so have human beings. But after stepping a few hundred miles into this world, they have ceased as though on the verge of a precipice, or on the edge of the sea.”93 This is not the dark wood of Dante, or even Hawthorne’s wilderness, which his sinners approached to glimpse a world wilder and larger than the one made by their puritanical forefathers. The search for human origins here is apparent, and the impenetrable forest serves as a frontier of awareness. Physically to cross it is to enter the expanse of time and descent that evolutionary theory proposes. Woolf’s woods are not a Christian tribulation or a spiritual journey. The landscape is post-Christian because it is post-Darwin. The time frame is evolutionary.
All of this occurs before Woolf even begins the “proposed voyage” of her characters. While the narrator makes these grand omniscient sweeps of space and time, the characters’ journey itself has not begun. By the time Woolf revises The Voyage Out’s expedition up the South American river and into the woods, her narration now makes a sharper delineation between the prehistoric past and the English presence. “Since the time of Elizabeth,” Woolf’s narrator tells us,
very few people had seen the river, and nothing had been done to change its appearance from what it was to the eyes of the Elizabethan voyagers. The time of Elizabeth was only distant from the present time by a moment of space compared with the ages which had passed since the water had run between those banks, and the green thickets swarmed there, and the small trees had grown to huge wrinkled trees in solitude.94
93Ibid. 280.
Woolf’s absorption of evolutionary theory has grown more sophisticated. In Melymbrosia, Woolf slips into hyperbolic phrasing to describe these prehistoric forests. Melymbrosia’s “trees … have stood since the beginning of the world,” for instance.95 Hints of origins are still there in
The Voyage Out, but the temporal dimensions are more precise. A geological time enters her
conception of the present, the time of Elizabethan explorers, and the expansive past that records the river’s earliest tributaries, first thickets, and the ensuing centuries of flora growth. At the same time, omniscience vanishes. Though the narrator discourses upon evolutionary and geological surveys of the terrain, the aerial perspective is limited to the parameters of her plot. Now the grand view is recalled by the expedition party members who, a few weeks before, ascended a nearby mountain and took in the few miles of river visible.
In revision, Woolf subtly transforms the descent through time and history to one that her characters share and experience. When the boat churns up the river, “They seemed to be driving into the heart of the night, for the trees closed in front of them, and they could hear all round them the rustling of leaves.”96 The passengers grow less talkative while “clustered together” and take in the “same spot of deep gloom on the banks.”97 Terence and Rachel traverse the forest themselves, feel for themselves the thick fecundity of life within the woods: “the light grew dimmer…The path narrowed and turned; it was hedged in by dense creepers which knotted tree to tree, and burst here and there into star-shaped crimson blossoms.”98 Gillian Beer pays specific attention to this particular passage due to its close rendering of a scene found in The Voyage of
the Beagle, but it is also the “tangled bank” of The Origin of Species, the thought that has its first
evolutionary implication in Darwin’s notebook of 1939 after he had landed upon his theory: “it is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war going on in the peaceful woods and smiling
95Melymbrosia 279. 96VO 309.
fields.”99 In The Voyage Out, “The trees and the undergrowth seemed to be strangling each other near the ground in a multitudinous wrestle.”100 The characters sense the implications of
evolution by traversing the primeval forests of South America; by seeing, smelling, feeling, hearing, and touching the remote past that has become present. They are located within rather than outside of the natural world. The destination of this expedition is enveloped in the prehistorical past.