Listening To The Silence In The Voyage Out

Virginia Woolf is one of the greatest writers in Britain, and a precursor of modern feminism literary criticism. In the male dominated literary world she insists on exploring the great tradition of female literature and creating a great deal of works, ranging from reviews, essays, to novels. The Voyage Out is her first novel, which is not deeply studied in China. The writing of silence in this novel is what the thesis tries to analyze.Writing of silence in this novel is usually regarded as a representation of Woolf's unique way of narration and the study of silence has been conducted from the perspective of narration only. The thesis tries to make a breakthrough on it. After an exploration of Woolf's understanding of silence, this thesis attempts to analyze silence in The Voyage Out thematically from three spectra: textual analysis, psychoanalysis and sociological analysis.With the observation of her education and writing experiences, Woolf's understanding of the silence is apperceived from two perspectives: breaking the silence and keeping the silence. Breaking the silence is actually to break the traditional discourse pattern and to search for women's own language so as to rediscover a tradition of female literature. Keeping the silence is to develop a way to write silence, such as silent observing, perceiving, thinking and etc. Through a textual close reading of the silence in the novel, the thesis clarifies that silence functions as a linkage of the discontinuities in narrations and a carrier of transcendent meaning in the tumultuous world which Woolf tries to create in the novel. A psychoanalytical reading of the novel, on the basis of Freud's the 'pre-Oedipal' theory, makes possible a reasonable interpretation for the heroine Rachel's silence and death at a young age. Finally, a sociological analysis, based on Foucault's power and discourse theory, is given to demonstrate why women though 'no worse' than men, stay as 'the silent majority' in specific times.After the analysis on the silence in the novel, the thesis expounds that silence is not merely the absence of expression, but actually with far more connotations in it, which is worth exploring.