ヴァージニア・ウルフの『船出』における自己消去 : 覗き見とレイチェルの死

The sentence “[t]he look of the things has a great power over me” in Virginia Woolf’s diary of 1928 highlights the fact that the problem of seeing or looking is a central topic in Woolf’s writing. Indeed, in her first novel, The Voyage Out, she explored the problem of the power of looking or the gaze, distinctively accompanied by the problem of being unseen.
The heroine of The Voyage Out, Rachel Vinrace, lost her mother in her childhood, and lives with her father, Willoughby Vinrace, and her two aunts. She has been living as her aunts told her, so she has grown up without knowing the way of the world although she is twenty-four years old. Therefore, it is safe to say that the title The Voyage Out can indicate or imply Rachel’s growth (and death) through her voyage to the tropical island of Santa Marina.
While The Voyage Out seems to be a kind of Bildungsroman which describes Rachel Vinrace’s development, one of the themes of this novel is a phenomenon which can be called self–deletion. The term indicates the characters’ detachment from the world. They delete themselves from the social or artificial world and unite themselves with the landscape in ways which cannot be objectified through any forms of social definition such as their social class, their jobs or their appearances. First, I define Rachel’s idea of music and Terence Hewet’s idea of the novel as self–deletion in that both attempt to delete their existence from the gaze of the social world. Then, I reveal that such attitudes towards the real world are represented through their daily behaviours such as peeping and eavesdropping. The characters’ desire to free themselves from social definitions—in a sense the gaze of the world—induces the self–deletion. Lastly, I read closely the scene of the chicken abattoir, which at first sight seems to have nothing to do with the main plot of the novel, focusing on the strange fact that Rachel’s first voyeuristic experience was at this bloody place. I will read this chicken abattoir scene with Sigmund Freud’s essay “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” and Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression in order to analyze Rachel’s strange vision on her deathbed. At the same time, consideration of this process discloses the relevance both of the language of psychoanalysis and of the discourse of Jacques Derrida to The Voyage Out.
Rachel, perhaps, contracts a fever owing to the expedition to the native camp in the deep forest of Santa Marina, and dies. My reading suggests that the vision Rachel sees on her deathbed should be attributed to the shocking sight she experienced at the chicken abattoir and that her vision is ex post facto replaced with the tableau of the sexual intercourse between Susan Warrington and Arthur Venning, which Rachel and Terence inadvertently witness. It may be possible to say that this sexual tableau becomes or is replaced with her witnessing of the primal scene. The tableau is engraved as
the primal scene upon her (literal) “archive”—that is, the scene becomes a repressed impression—and the effect of this impression, namely female castration anxiety, afflicts her with (or as) the fever as if it were a disease. That is, I argue here that her unexpected self–deletion (her peeping) drives her into her ultimate self–deletion—her death.