Locating Women’s Shared Trauma and Precursors to the #MeToo Movement in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and Moments of Being

Abstract

Virginia Woolf, like many other female writers who came before, attempts to use the novel to document her experiences with childhood sexual abuse. Campbell argues that The Voyage Out serves as a testimony of Woolf’s individual sexual trauma with limited success, while also working as an example of the cultural work from the modernist period representing women’s collective sexual and social trauma. Woolf more successfully comments on women’s collective sexual trauma and her own individual trauma years later, as is common with trauma victims, in the essays that would become her nonfiction collection, Moments of Being, which was published posthumously. In some of its essays, like “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf explicitly documents the sexual abuse she personally suffered, as well as the relationship between male privilege and female sexual agency. Through a discussion of the relationship between these two works, and an analysis of Woolf’s own testimony of her abuse, Campbell suggests that The Voyage Out reflects the struggle to disclose sexual abuse and assault in the available mediums of the day.