Virginia Woolf: Travelling, Travel Writing and Travel Fictions

Abstract

The aim of this study is to read, to analyze and to decode Virginia Woolf’s fictional and non-fictional texts from the vantage point of cultural or ethno-methodological studies. My interest is to consider travel as the voyage out and the voyage in or metaphoric travel, which serves the novels or travel fictions in this particular sense. The motif of travel plays a significant and central role in Woolf’s five travel narratives or travel fictions: The Voyage Out, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves. Her texts are typical examples of modern travel narratives during the twentieth century that fulfil the intercultural relations. I am concerned with deciphering and analyzing Woolf’s travel narratives based on the following points. First, I focus my argument on tracing the signs of travel and tourism in her works, for instance in The Voyage Out, which includes description of a ship, the Euphrosyne that transports a group of English tourists to South America. I attempt to give Woolf’s models for the mere tourist and the anti-tourist or Barthesian tourist. Second, my understanding is that Woolf, as an anti-tourist, intellectual tourist or Barthesian tourist avant la lettre, acts like an ethnographer who is concerned with the various signs of cultures, and translates them based on her world of understanding. She reads, decodes and deciphers the major sights of Europe through her feminine, Europeanized, and in a sense, her own imperial gaze. Third, I would like to show how Woolf’s travelling gaze illustrates the significance of London or Heimat as a cultural market that is the centre of power relations constructed by the British bourgeoisie in the twentieth century. What I am doing here is a Foucauldian and Barthesian analysis of power based on Woolf’s real adventures recorded in her writings. Fourth, I focus my interest on illustrating how her travelling eyes move towards the Orient. For instance in Orlando, Woolf illustrates different dimensions of an imperial society and her own understanding of Orientalism. Orlando mirrors the transformation of men’s concept of travel and women’s sense of adventure from the sixteenth century up to the 1920s, which is extracted from a grand historical picture, the outlines of all Woolf’s friends and their experiences of travels in the continent and abroad. Fifth, I want to confirm that Woolf is in quest of personal and communal identities that certainly follow colonial conquest and rule. Metaphorically, she criticizes the antagonistically expansionist imperialism of the colonizing powers, and specifically the principles that support imperialism. Therefore, she focuses her travelling gaze on colonial oppression, on resistance to colonization, on the self-fashioning of colonizer/colonized, on the patterns of interaction between those identities and on the consequent hybridity of Eastern and Western cultures. What makes Woolf’s travel narratives significant for post-colonial studies is her interest in feminist criticism of the patriarchal society of England, which…