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The Conversion of Conversations From Melymbrosia to The Voyage Out

Monica Girard

Résumé

The article begins by exploring the impact of Bloomsbury on the creative process of Virginia Woolf’s first novel, Melymbrosia, published in 1915 as The Voyage Out. Within this fertile artistic microcosm, conversations enlarged the author’s social and intellectual experiences and also nourished her fiction, since they undoubtedly put an imprint on the gestation of her first novel. When examining the different stages of the revision of The Voyage Out, it appears that the conversational patterns and configurations are already rooted in the novel from the very beginning of its composition. However, the author endeavours to modify most of her characters’ dialogues from Melymbrosia and resorts to developing and enhancing silence. Thus, the protagonists become elusive and dissolving as their voices are gradually wiped out.

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Conversation as Social and Artistic Apprenticeship

  • 1 Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt Brace & Company (...)

1Before beginning her first novel in 1908, different conversations on aesthetics, arts, and literature at Bloomsbury contributed to Woolf’s artistic maturity. They were an important springboard which enabled the young author to create her own conceptions on the art of writing. The importance of talking is stated by Virginia Woolf in her autobiographical essay ‘Old Bloomsbury’: ‘Talk—even the talk which had such tremendous results upon the lives and characters of the two Miss Stephens—even talk of this interest and importance is as elusive as smoke. It flies up the chimney and is gone’.1

2Moving from Hyde Park Gate to Bloomsbury after her father’s death coincided with a new social life for the young Virginia Stephen. It also marked the beginning of her writing career, at first as a reviewer for The Speaker and Times Literary Supplement. Bloomsbury’s fertile artistic microcosm provided her with a creative environment and an ideological background. The conversations hinged around music, theatre, the form and structure of a painting, sculpture, and various reflections on modern aesthetics. In this ideological environment in which conversations abounded, Virginia Woolf discovered and formed her own stylistic identity and literary vision. Melymbrosia became her test-bed and the ‘workshop’ where she experimented with her novelistic ideas and put them into practice.

  • 2 ‘Naturally then, when the bell rang and these astonishing fellows came in, Vanessa and I were in a (...)

3Her initiation in the art of conversation began with the famous Thursday evenings in Bloomsbury when Thoby received his Cambridge friends, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Maynard Keynes, and others. The disciples of G. E. Moore are enthusiastic conversationalists; Virginia Woolf later endowed her characters in The Voyage Out with this trait. Talking with friends constituted an initiation in the art of conversation and opened up new perspectives for the novelist-to-be.2

4Virginia Stephen was an acute and attentive observer of the mechanisms of conversation. Silence, which is at the core of the conversation described in this excerpt, was difficult and heavy but also fascinating, being part of the discussions and the atmosphere of the conversations. Silence, which constantly infiltrated the conversations in her social circle and the Thursday evening receptions, is also a specific characteristic of the final version of The Voyage Out.

  • 3 ‘I remember trying to persuade Hawtrey that there is such a thing as atmosphere in literature. Hawt (...)

5Stimulating discussions were compared to building an edifice, stone upon stone, idea after idea. The solidity of the debate arose from the impression of having built something permanent and lasting to which everybody contributed, either by the ideas conveyed or simply by listening. Conversational elements such as silence, listening, and the circular arrangement of the speakers were transferred to her fiction, as will be shown later.3

  • 4 ‘It must have been in 1910 I suppose that Clive one evening rushed upstairs in a state of the highe (...)

6When Roger Fry began attending these social evenings in 1910, he made his own contribution to the conversations by enriching the debate and raising important artistic and aesthetic issues. Abstract philosophical discussions on religion and art acquired a new dimension and became more consistent. Roger Fry’s discussions to which everybody adhered were mainly about painting and literature. Similarly, Virginia Woolf’s characters in her first novel talk about religion, painting and literature.4

7While working on the first drafts of Melymbrosia, conversations with members of her family or close friends as well as letters from them put their imprint on Woolf’s fiction as they influenced the creative process of her novel. The author was still looking for the satisfactory form which would allow her to express her artistic vision. These conversations and written exchanges with her friends had an important impact on Woolf’s gestation of The Voyage Out, particularly during the early stages of revising her novel, before the author chose her characters’ names or defined their personalities. For instance, she took into account Clive Bell’s and Roger Fry’s criticism and advice and thus gave a new direction and a new form to the novel.

  • 5 Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (London: Pimlico, 1996) 212.
  • 6 Louise DeSalvo sorted four extant drafts, which she calls Drafts A, B, C, and D. She tentatively da (...)
  • 7 Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vol., ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (Lon (...)

8Clive Bell and Virginia Woolf had enriching exchanges about the art of writing. In 1917, she acknowledged the part he played in the beginning of her novelistic career: ‘[. . .] you were the first person who ever thought I’d write well. We talked so much about writing too [. . .].’5 In October 1908, Virginia Woolf gave her brother-in-law seven chapters of Melymbrosia6 (Draft A) to read, asking for his advice and opinion: ‘Will you think me a great bore if I turn to the dreary subject again, and ask you whether you have anything to say about that unfortunate work?’.7 The seven chapters, begun before May 1908 and completed in August 1908 consisted of about one hundred pages. Clive Bell replied to her letter, pinpointing specific details (that he called ‘excrescences’) and lexical choices (the overuse of certain words) but expressing his overall positive opinion, giving her encouraging advice and highly praising the form and style of her future novel:

I believe that this first novel will become a work that counts. ‘Become’, I say, because even seven chapters never are, or never ought to be, a work of any sort. [. . .] But the style, the general form, [. . .] the presentation of your ideas, seemed to me an immense improvement on all your other descriptive writing. The first 3 pages are so beautiful as almost to reconcile me with your most feverish prose. [. . .] your power (to which I think I have always done justice) of lifting the veil and showing inanimate things in the mystery and beauty of their reality appears once or twice to equal—to excel rather—[. . .]. (Bell 208)

9In February 1909, their letters focused on Draft B of Melymbrosia, now lost or destroyed. Clive Bell talked about the atmosphere of the novel which should be implicit, suggested, insinuated and not overtly and thoroughly described by the narrator:

We have often talked about the atmosphere that you want to give; the atmosphere can only be insinuated; it cannot be set down in so many words. In the old form it was insinuated throughout, in the new it is more definite, more obvious, and, to use a horrid expression—‘less felt’—by the reader I mean. (Bell 208)

10The conversations in the new draft of the novel are also a case in point. Between Drafts A and B, Virginia Woolf deleted a certain amount of discussions between characters. Even if characterized as ‘stiff’ and ‘unreal’ by Clive Bell, they had a useful role in the novel as they ‘created wonderful pictures of the speakers’ surroundings’ (Bell 209). Once again, he ended his letter by praising her prose:

I can now say, with a clear conscience, what I really think about your novel—that it is wonderful. As I read it I was perhaps most struck by what I took for the improvement in its prose. It seemed to me that you gave your words a force that one expects to find only in the best poetry; they come as near the truth underlying them as it is possible for words to come I should think. (Bell 209)

11It was Woolf’s turn to reply in this epistolary debate two days later: ‘You are really angelic to take so much pains to give reasons and advice. They seemed to me excellent; for you have laid your finger on spots already suspected by me’ (Bell 210). Although grateful for his encouragements, she defended her vision and method of writing based on construction, cutting out and then reconstruction of the text:

My intention now is to write straight on, and finish the book; and then, if that day ever comes, to catch if possible the first imagination and go over the beginning again with broad touches, keeping much of the original draft, and trying to deepen the atmosphere—Giving the feel of running water, and not much else. I have kept all the pages I cut out; so the thing can be re-constructed precisely as it was. (Bell 211)

  • 8 ‘Yesterday I finished the 8th Chapter of Mel: which brings them within the sight of the South Ameri (...)

12As Virgina Woolf and Clive Bell’s relationship changed, becoming less intimate, her letters about the following drafts became less detailed than they had been. She did not show him her new draft,8 nor did she ask for his opinion. Woolf was slowly detaching herself emotionally but also artistically from her brother-in-law, acquiring a ‘vision of her own’ of her work in progress.

  • 9 Louise DeSalvo. Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Litt (...)

13In April 1911, Virginia Woolf made a trip to Turkey where her sister Vanessa became unexpectedly ill while travelling with Clive Bell and Roger Fry. This enabled Virginia to get to know Roger Fry very well. Their conversations about painting and literature also had a tremendous impact on Virginia Woolf’s fiction. Her meeting with Fry occured after the revision of Chapter 8 and before that of Chapter 9. Louise DeSalvo noted the stylistic transformations after the trip, namely Woolf’s tendency of converting similes into metaphors.9 Once again, Woolf’s conversations moved her novel in a new direction.

Conversations in Melymbrosia and The Voyage Out

14Conversation was a means of artistic initiation in the author’s novelistic career but also an essential feature conceived from the first stages of The Voyage Out. In her letters, she talks about her aim of creating ‘oceans of talk and emotions without end’ (Letters 1: 60). The conversational atmosphere is prominent right from the beginning in both versions. During the conversations, the characters socialize. Their dialogues build intimacy, bring unity and communion. The author alternates between small talk, informal conversations and erudite, scholarly conversations about literature, debates about politics, and religion; there are also private, intimate tête-à-têtes between Susan and Arthur, Rachel and Terence, Helen and St John, Helen and Ridley as well as group or collective conversations.

15The spatial considerations of the novel particularly favour group conversations. Most of the time, the action takes place on a boat, at the hotel or at Villa St Gervasio in Santa Marina; confinement brings about an abundance of discussion among the characters. The geometry of conversation is also significant as the characters gather at breakfast, dinner, lunch, tea time, round the table, in circles or semi-circles. For instance, at one point during the ascent of Mount Rosa, they stop in order to picnic and gather around the hamper. The circular arrangement proves favourable for dialogue. Subsequently, the actual food becomes ‘food for talk’:

  • 10 All references are taken from Melymbrosia (New York: New York Public Library, 1982) and The Voyage (...)

‘I like looking glasses in hansoms’ said Rachel, ‘because–’ then she turned shy, for Miss Allen and the others had come to sit in a circle round the hampers.
‘Because?’ said Miss Allen. (
Melymbrosia 102)
Now the others cased to look at the view, and drawing together sat down in a circle round the baskets.
‘And yet those little looking-glasses in hansoms have a fascination of their own,’ said Mrs Thornbury. (
The Voyage Out 121)10

16The geometry of the group changes on the steamer which takes them to the native camp. The circle becomes a semi circle. By breaking the circle, the narrative takes into account kinetic elements: we follow the itinerary thanks to the movement of the boat, the description of the exotic landscape and its metamorphosis as the steamer moves forward. The scene is no longer static like the picnic episode, and thanks to the new display of the speakers, silent observing is on an equal footing with talking:

As it was Mr Flushing’s wish they had to sit in semi circle. The degree to which the country had been explored kept Hirst and Mr Flushing engaged in question and answer; the rest with legs stretched out, or chin poised upon the hands, gazed silently. (Melymbrosia 206)

Thanks to Mr Flushing’s discipline, the right stages of the river were reached at the right hours, and when next morning after breakfast the chairs were again drawn out in a semicircle in the bow, the launch was within a few miles of the native camp which was the limit of the journey. [. . .] Mr Flushing and St John were engaged in more or less continuous conversation about the future of the country from a political point of view, and the degree to which it had been explored; the others, with their legs stretched out, or chins poised on the hands, gazed in silence. (The Voyage Out 262)

17This change in geometry gives the characters the option of escaping the conversations and allows them to take refuge in the silent observation of the landscape.

18Inside the circle or semi circle, a favourable space for talking, each character has a precise role in a group conversation: some of them begin the conversation, some others keep it alive and prevent if from dying, and a few of them are translators or intermediaries between the different speakers. For instance, when Mrs Thornbury introduces Mrs Flushing to Helen and Ridley, she fulfils a defined role. She initiates the conversation by uttering commonplace remarks, providing subjects of discussion and smoothing the dialogue.

In the confusion of setting chairs round the tea table, it was only obvious that Mrs Flushing was nervous, and sat very upright, jerking her head from side to side. Mrs Thornbury smoothed the way. (Melymbrosia 145)

She [Mrs Flushing] had a strongly marked face, her eyes looking straight at you, and though naturally she was imperious in her manner she was nervous at the same time. Mrs Thornbury acted as interpreter, making things smooth all round by a series of charming commonplace remarks. (The Voyage Out 181)

19Mrs Thornbury makes Mrs Flushing comfortable before she joins in the conversation. In the final version, the role of Mrs Thornbury is emphasized moreas she becomes an ‘interpreter’: she explains the position of each character, situates them socially and intellectually, thus establishing a link between them. By hinting to a few subjects of conversation, she breaks the ice and lays the foundations of their discussions.

‘You know the country very well, Mr Ambrose? We are going to ask your advice. Mr Flushing is a collector. Can you tell us anything about native manufactures?’ (Melymbrosia 145)

‘I’ve taken it upon myself, Mr Ambrose’, she said, ‘to promise that you will be so kind as to give Mrs Flushing the benefit of your experience. I’m sure no one here knows the country as well as you do. No one takes such wonderful long walks. No one, I’m sure, has your encyclopaedic knowledge upon every subject. Mr Wilfried Flushing is a collector. He has discovered really beautiful things already’. (The Voyage Out 181)

20During Rachel’s illness, St John’s role is to animate the conversations at the villa. Silence weighs everybody down. Its heaviness is a sign that something terrible is happening. St John’s conversations make them avoid thinking about the seriousness of Rachel’s condition. Talking becomes a contract that his friend Terence sometimes breaks, taking refuge in silence:

Hirst was the messenger because Hewet did not like to leave the house, and the chief topic of conversation during the time of Rachel’s illness was the behaviour of Hirst’s horse, christened Sancho, which was or could be made to be an animal of character. (Melymbrosia 227)

  • 11 Quotations marked by an asterisk do not have an equivalent in the corresponding version.

St John was naturally irritated when Hewet sat in complete silence all through dinner, and the story of Sancho and the geese carefully preserved for that hour failed entirely. It seemed like a breach of their contract. (Melymbrosia 228)*11

21It is Hirst who begins and revives the discussions in The Voyage Out: ‘At certain hours they went into the dining-room, and when they sat round the table they talked about indifferent things. St John generally made it his business to start the talk and to keep it from dying out’ (The Voyage Out).* Contrary to Melymbrosia, the author multiplies the commonplace remarks in order to prevent the conversation from ending. The seriousness of the situation is counterbalanced by the superficiality of the small talk:

Nevertheless the day followed the usual forms. At certain hours they went into the dining-room, and when they sat round the table they talked about indifferent things. St. John generally made it his business to start the talk and to keep it from dying out.
‘I’ve discovered the way to get Sancho past the white house,’ said St. John on Sunday at luncheon. ‘You crackle a piece of paper in his ear, then he bolts for about a hundred yards, but he goes on quite well after that.’
‘Yes, but he wants corn. You should see that he has corn.’
‘I don’t think much of the stuff they give him; and Angelo seems a dirty little rascal.’ [. . .]
‘Two degrees higher than it was yesterday,’ said St. John. ‘I wonder where these nuts come from,’ he observed, taking a nut out of the plate, turning it over in his fingers, and looking at it curiously.
‘London, I should think,’ said Terence, looking at the nut too. (
The Voyage Out 317)

22Although here talking is necessary, being a strategy of avoiding thinking about and mentioning other sensitive events, in most of the discussions in The Voyage Out, speech becomes superfluous.

Silence: ‘the things people don’t say’

23The author modifies most of the conversations from Melymbrosia. For example, a recurrent conversion consists in the transformation of discourses. Instead of direct discourse, omnipresent in this version, she diversifies the characters’ conversations from a linguistic point of view in The Voyage Out. Here the narrator sums up the discussions, abridges and compacts them. He is more intrusive than in the first version; he often interferes in the middle of the conversations, making remarks and overtaking the characters’ voices.

24Certain conversations, in which the author originally used direct speech, are transformed so that indirect speech becomes dominant. In the following example, the voices present in Melymbrosia are no longer identified as they become anonymous and filtered by the narrative voice in the published version:

  • 12 Italics mine.

After all this handshaking had taken place, people were still unsatisfied. There are times when desires are general, as public inscriptions testify; this was one. The desire of the public was to do something to please the engaged couple; the desire of the engaged couple was to show their gratitude to the public.
‘We must contrive some festivity’ said Miss Allen.
‘Something in which everybody can join’ said Hewet.
‘The worst of mountain expeditions is the insufficiency of asses.’
‘How would a dance do?’ said Miss Allen.
‘O do let’s dance!’ cried Evelyn M. who had joined the group under the leopard which held a lamp in his paws. (
Melymbrosia 115–16)
When Susan’s engagement had been approved at home, and made public to any one who took an interest in it at the hotel—and by this time the society at the hotel was divided so as to point to invisible chalk-marks such as Mr Hirst had described, the news was felt to justify some celebration—
an expedition? That had been done already. A dance then. The advantage of a dance was that it abolished one of those long evenings which were apt to become tedious and lead to absurdly early hours in spite of bridge. (The Voyage Out 137)12

25The dialogue and the suggestions made by the characters in Melymbrosia do not appear as direct speech in The Voyage Out. The sentence in italics has an ambivalent linguistic value as it can belong either to the narrator (like the passage which precedes it and the one which follows it) or to the characters. The original text shows that the exchange took place among Miss Allan, Hewet and Evelyn M. The sentence from The Voyage Out is a condensed version of this former conversation. The free indirect speech in the middle of the narration is a polyphonic discourse as the author operates an intricate and intimate fusion between the narrator’s voice reigning and reverberating in the whole paragraph and the characters’ voices. In Melymbrosia, the author clearly identifies the origin of the voices and scrupulously marks their sources (said Miss Allan, cried Evelyn M). This is no longer the case in The Voyage Out.

26Every time the author makes discursive transformations, the characters’ voices become subdued and controlled by the narrator. This dominant voice gets stronger, guiding the narration more than was the case in Melymbrosia, originally conceived as a conversational novel in which discussions on different subjects would abound. The narrator monopolizes the text, at times filtering the characters’ voices and sometimes letting them emerge indirectly as shown in the example above. The conversations are thus condensed and compacted and shown from an exterior point of view.

27The linguistic and narrative form in which the conversation is rendered changes from Melymbrosia to The Voyage Out, whereas the meaning and subject of conversation remain the same. In the passage drawn from the final version, Virginia Woolf is concerned both with saying the things less overtly and with the form used in order to achieve this goal. In one of her letters, she refers to her literary preoccupations:

  • 13 Italics mine.

[. . .] and then there’s the whole question, which interested me, again too much for the books [The Voyage Out and Night and Day] sake, I daresay, of the things one doesn’t say; what effect does that have? And how far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?—and all this further complicated by the form, which must sit tight, and perhaps in Night and Day, sits too tight; as it was too loose in The Voyage Out. (Letter 1095, 19 November 1919)13

28The two excerpts from Melymbrosia and The Voyage Out illustrate her effort to tighten the loose form by compressing the dialogue. In spite of shortening the conversations, the form still seems loose to her, as shown by the statement in the letter written a few years later after the publication of the novel. The formal frame of the book is still not satisfactory.

29Between the writing of Melymbrosia and The Voyage Out, the author seems preoccupied with another aspect of her novel, that is capturing the silence and the things people do not say. This is also Terence Hewet’s aim expressed in The Voyage Out: ‘“I want to write a novel about Silence”, he said; “the things people don’t say. But the difficulty is immense”’ (The Voyage Out 204).

30The characters’ voices are often replaced by the monolithic voice of the narrator in the final version. For example, the first breakfast in Melymbrosia is characterised by the profusion of voices and a mosaic of juxtaposed fragments of conversations, whereas in the final version the narrative voice purposefully leaves things unsaid. Words do not emerge to the surface any more, they remain unsaid.

The voyage had begun; friendship perhaps had begun too. The sense of untapped resources was comforting; and it depended upon a great number of years and events which were present in the mind, and gave the breakfast a kind of beauty. When Ridley said, ‘She’s not like her mother,’ when Helen sighed, ‘Of course one loves Theresa’s child’ when Rachel groaned ‘How I hate old friends!’ when Willoughby mused, ‘How strange that Theresa isn’t here’ when Mr Pepper wondered, ‘There are advantages in a fortunate marriage, I daresay’ they were all making the first breakfast memorable. In after years, very probably, the entire voyage would be represented by this one hour; and the hooting of the sirens perhaps the night before. (Melymbrosia 8)

The voyage had begun, and had begun happily with a soft blue sky, and a calm sea. The sense of untapped resources, things to say as yet unsaid, made the hour significant, so that in the future years the entire journey perhaps would be represented in this one scene, with the sound of sirens hooting in the river the night before, somehow mixing in.
(
The Voyage Out 17)

31In Melymbrosia, the juxtaposition of voices and sentences uttered by the different characters gives us a sample of polyphony and makes the voyage significant and memorable. The author substitutes the characters’ voices in Melymbrosia (Ridley’s, Helen’s, Rachel’s, Willoughby’s, Mr Pepper’s) with the narrative voice in The Voyage Out. Silence and the unsaid become idiosyncratic features of the final version. The priority is given to the invading silence which prevails (‘things to say as yet unsaid’). The first breakfast in the published version reflects the whole novel. The last two excerpts show Woolf’s new novelistic project; her priorities change between the writing of Melymbrosia and The Voyage Out. In the latter the characters are deprived of their voices and words are suspended and denied.

32In order to make the conversations sound more natural, silence, pauses and hesitations infiltrate the dialogues. The germs of silence, which were already present in Melymbrosia and which frame the following extracts, are developed and enhanced in The Voyage Out. In an example illustrating how conversation is completely changed from one version to the other, silence invades more and more the final version, becoming as important as speech.

The silence was now profound.
‘That’s not my idea of you,’ said Hewet. ‘Your idea of me’ said Rachel. She stopped to look at him. ‘You often know me better than I know myself. It’s true. I’m not frightened.’
‘You’re the least frightened person I’ve ever met’ said Hewet. ‘You really want to know.’
‘Yes’ she said. Everything. Everything. Not only human beings—Besides people I love the world.
‘And everything that comes to you’ said Hewet. ‘You don’t think I’ve known you without knowing that.’ He seemed to put some constraint upon himself.
‘I wish you’d tell me all you can about yourself. Tell me everything—I want to know.’
‘What is there to tell? Richmond you know; I’ve told you about my Aunts, and my father. And the rest—how can one tell that?’
‘That’s just what I want to know,’ he pressed.
‘I used to want to talk; I never had any one to talk to. I used to think there must be a key to everything. I used to walk along those roads—I was very lonely I suppose, but happy,’ she broke off recollecting.
[. . .] ‘You know I love you’ he whispered. The messenger had arrived.
‘Is it possible?’ she exclaimed.
‘And you?’
For answer she opened her arms. [. . .]
Sounds stood out from the background making as it were a bridge across their
silence; [. . .].
(Melymbrosia 196–97)

  • 14 Italics mine.

Not only did the silence weigh upon them, but they were both unable to frame any thoughts. [. . .]
The
silence was again profound.
‘Does this frighten you?’ Terence asked [. . .]
‘No,’ she answered, ‘I like it.’
She repeated ‘I like it’. [. . .] There was another
pause.
‘You like being with me?’ Terence asked.
‘Yes, with you,’ she replied.
He was
silent for a moment. Silence seemed to have fallen upon the world.
‘This is what I have felt ever since I knew you,’ he replied. ‘We are happy together.’ He did not seem to be speaking, or she to be hearing.
‘Very happy,’ she answered.
They continued to walk for some time in
silence. [. . .]
‘We love each other,’ Terence said.
‘We love each other,’ she repeated.
The
silence was then broken by their voices which joined in tones of strange unfamiliar sound which formed no words. . .Sounds stood out from the background making a bridge across their silence. [. . .]
‘We love each other,’ Terence repeated. . .She said ‘Terence’ once; he answered ‘Rachel.’
‘Terrible—terrible,’ she murmured after another
pause.
(
The Voyage Out 256–57)14

33Not only is the subject of conversation between Rachel and Terence entirely changed, but Rachel’s echoing of Terence’s words becomes the backbone of their conversation. Silence links and cements the verbal exchanges. It sometimes threatens to put an end to the conversation but at other times it acts as a resourceful springboard to the character’s next sentence. Thus, thanks to silence and pauses, the conversation in the published version becomes more emotional, intense, and less verbose. It acquires an epiphanic quality that Melymbrosia did not possess. Most of the exchanges in The Voyage Out become minimal, not only because they are shortened by the author, but also because words are replaced by gestures, onomatopoeia, silence and pauses.

34After the publication of the English version of The Voyage Out in 1915, the New York publishing firm Macmillan planned to publish Woolf’s first novel in America. In 1919, Woolf revised her novel once more, this being the tenth and final revision. She inserted 728 words and deleted 3 519 words, 80 % of these deletions occurring in Chapter XVI in which Rachel and Terence are walking alone and talking. An illustrative example from this chapter shows how the two characters communicate less and less directly. Terence asks Rachel what she did after lunch in Richmond:

We did something that had to be done—the taps might be leaking. They visit the poor a good deal—old charwomen with bad legs, women who want tickets for hospitals. Or I used to walk in the park by myself. And after tea people sometimes called; or in summer we sat in the garden or played croquet; in winter I read aloud, while they worked; after dinner I played the piano and they wrote letters. If father was at home we had friends of his to dinner, and about once a month we went up to the play. Every now and then we dined out; sometimes I went to a dance in London, but that was difficult because of getting back. The people we saw were old family friends, and relations, but we didn’t see many people. There was the clergyman, Mr Pepper and the Hunts. Father generally wanted to be quiet when he came home, because he works very hard at Hull. Also my aunts aren’t very strong. (The Voyage Out, Duckworth edition 198)

35Rachel’s soliloquy and the abundance of details disappeared in the American edition. Loquacity turns to silence as Rachel’s words are replaced by the narrative voice:

She summoned before her a typical day’s life, and in describing it became much interested in her narrative; not only did the actual incidents of her life present themselves vividly before her, but in describing them to Hewet she was unconsciously, reviewing her past under the influence of his eyes. At length she broke off. (The Voyage Out, American edition 379)

36Details from Rachel’s life as well as her vocal characteristics are wiped out. The comparison of the two passages is a step further into abstraction and silence; it exemplifies once more the new direction chosen by Virginia Woolf after Melymbrosia. As she was revising The Voyage Out, she was also working on An ‘Unwritten Novel’ and had begun Jacob’s Room. Along with these works, The American edition of The Voyage Out was the harbinger of a new literary path; it foreshadowed her future novels in which characters are vaguer and vaguer, more and more absent, less and less talkative, like voiceless ghosts.

  • 15 Virginia Woolf. ‘Memories of Meredith’, The Times Literary Supplement, Thursday, 18 December, 1919, (...)

37Conversations, which enlarged Virginia Woolf’s social and intellectual experiences, also nourished her literary career. She was fully aware of the importance of dialogue and conversation in fiction. In a review she published on December 18th 1919 entitled ‘Memories of Meredith’, she states that ‘dialogue is one of the crucial problem in fiction and Meredith provided an original solution.’15 The examples drawn from Melymbrosia and The Voyage Out show the way in which Virginia Woolf provides her own original solution to the profusion of conversations to be originally found in Melymbrosia. One of the solutions is part of the author’s global project of creating a silent novel. Saying less, leaving things unsaid are now part of Woolf’s new strategy. Thus, conversations become minimal and interrupted by pauses and silences.

38Another solution is compacting the conversations and at the same time using a variety of linguistic devices which make the narration more economical and concise, tighten the text and put it under the control of the narrative voice. At times, the characters’ voices are no longer clearly and directly heard, they can be merely surmised whenever they manage to penetrate the narrative discourse. Re-writing almost all the conversations and dialogues shows Woolf’s concern with the elusive and dissolving position of characters, as their voices are gradually wiped out.

39Even though conversations were conceived from the very beginning of the writing process of The Voyage Out, their successive transformations are a sign of the author’s evolving literary conceptions and her changing perspective as far as several essential ideas are concerned: the preponderant role of silence and the unsaid, the relationship between characters, the domination of the narrative voice as well as the emergence or, on the contrary, the suppression of other auxiliary voices. Woolf converts the conversations from Melymbrosia not only because she finds them unsatisfactory, ‘stiff’ and ‘unreal’ as Clive Bell once pointed out, but also because they are at the core of her new artistic project and underlie her changing vision on the art of the novel.

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Notes

1 Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (San Diego: Harvest/Harcourt Brace & Company, 1985) 187.

2 ‘Naturally then, when the bell rang and these astonishing fellows came in, Vanessa and I were in a twitter of excitement. It was late at night; the room was full of smoke; buns, coffee and whisky were strewn about; we were not wearing white satin or seed-pearls; we were not dressed at all. Thoby went to open the door; in came Sydney-Turner; in came Bell; in came Strachey. They came in hesitatingly, self-effacingly, and folded themselves up quietly [in] the corners of sofas. For a long time they said nothing. None of our old conversational openings seemed to do. Vanessa and Thoby and Clive, if Clive were there—for Clive was always ready to sacrifice himself in the cause of talk—would start different subjects. But they were almost always answered in the negative. ‘No’, was the most frequent reply. ‘No, I haven’t seen it’; ‘No, I haven’t been there.’ Or simply, ‘I don’t know.’ The conversation languished in a way that would have been impossible in the drawing room at Hyde Park Gate. Yet the silence was difficult, not dull. It seemed as if the standard of what was worth saying had risen so high that it was better not to break it unworthily. We sat and looked at the ground. Then at last Vanessa, having said perhaps that she had been to some picture show, incautiously used the word ‘beauty’. At that, one of the young men would lift his head slowly and say, ‘It depends what you mean by beauty.’ At once all our ears were pricked. It was as if the bull had at last been turned into the ring. The bull might be ‘beauty’, might be ‘good’, might be ‘reality’. Whatever it was, it was some abstract question that now drew out all our forces. Never have I listened so intently to each step and half-step in an argument. Never have I been at such pains to sharpen and launch my own little dart. And then what joy it was when one’s contribution was accepted’. ( Moments of Being 190)

3 ‘I remember trying to persuade Hawtrey that there is such a thing as atmosphere in literature. Hawtrey challenged me to prove it by pointing out in any book any one word which had this quality apart from its meaning. I went and fetched Diana of the Crossways. The argument, whether it was about atmosphere or the nature of truth, was always tossed into the middle of the party. Now Hawtrey would say something; now Vanessa; now Saxon; now Clive; now Thoby. It filled me with wonder to watch those who were finally left in the argument piling stone upon stone, cautiously, accurately, long after it had completely soared above my sight. But if one could not say anything, one could listen. One had glimpses of something miraculous happening high up in the air. Often we would still be sitting in a circle at two or three in the morning. Still Saxon would be taking his pipe from his mouth as if to speak, and putting it back again without having spoken. At last, rumpling his hair back, he would pronounce very shortly some absolutely final summing up. The marvellous edifice was complete, one could stumble off to bed feeling that something very important had happened. It had been proved that beauty was—or beauty was not—for I have never been quite sure which—part of a picture. From such discussions Vanessa and I got probably much the same pleasure that undergraduates get when they meet friends of their own for the first time’. (Moments of Being 190)

4 ‘It must have been in 1910 I suppose that Clive one evening rushed upstairs in a state of the highest excitement. He had just had one of the most interesting conversations of his life. It was with Roger Fry. They had been discussing the theory of art for hours. He thought Roger Fry the most interesting person he had met since Cambridge days. So Roger appeared. He appeared, I seem to think, in a large ulster coat, every pocket of which was stuffed with a book, a paint box or something intriguing; special tips which he had bought from a little man in a back street; he had canvases under his arms; his hair flew; his eyes glowed. He had more knowledge and experience than the rest of us put together. [His mind seemed hooked on to life] by an extraordinary number of attachments. We started talking about Marie-Claire. And at once we were all launched into a terrific argument about literature; adjectives? associations? overtones? We had down Milton; we re-read Wordsworth. We had to think the whole thing over again. The old skeleton arguments of primitive Bloomsbury about art and beauty put on flesh and blood’. (Moments of Being 197)

5 Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (London: Pimlico, 1996) 212.

6 Louise DeSalvo sorted four extant drafts, which she calls Drafts A, B, C, and D. She tentatively dated the earliest 1908. Draft B (published in 1982 as Melymbrosia) was begun in 1909. Draft C was written between 1910 and 1912. Draft D was begun in the early part of 1913. It was delivered to Duckworth and Company on March 9th, 1913. For a detailed general description of the revising stages of Melymbrosia, see ‘Introduction’ to Melymbrosia, edited by Louise DeSalvo (New York: New York Public Library, 1982).

7 Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vol., ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth, 1975–80) I: 451.

8 ‘Yesterday I finished the 8th Chapter of Mel: which brings them within the sight of the South American shore. That is a third of the book done, I think. From sheer cowardice, I didn’t bring the other chapters here. If I thought ‘There! That’s solid and done with’ I’m sure I should have the palsy. Some of it, I’m certain, will have the pallor of headache upon it. But it’s no good attempting to rewrite’ (Letters I: 566).

9 Louise DeSalvo. Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980).

10 All references are taken from Melymbrosia (New York: New York Public Library, 1982) and The Voyage Out (1915; London: Penguin, 1992). Italics mine.

11 Quotations marked by an asterisk do not have an equivalent in the corresponding version.

12 Italics mine.

13 Italics mine.

14 Italics mine.

15 Virginia Woolf. ‘Memories of Meredith’, The Times Literary Supplement, Thursday, 18 December, 1919, 765.

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Monica Girard, « The Conversion of Conversations From Melymbrosia to The Voyage Out »Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], Hors série | 2005, mis en ligne le 09 juillet 2024, consulté le 12 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/15024 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12cwj

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Auteur

Monica Girard

Monica Girard is a lecturer in British literature at the English Department of the University of Nancy 2. In November 2003 she obtained her PhD entitled ‘A Voice of One’s Own: Examining Virginia Woolf’s Literary Allotropes, Melymbrosia (1908) and The Voyage Out (1915)’ (French title: ‘De Melymbrosia (1908) à The Voyage Out (1915): l’invention allotropique du projet woolfien d’écriture’). Her thesis offers a comparative analysis of the two versions by taking into account various aspects of Woolf’s evolving literary composition.

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