Woolf, Postcards, and the Elision of Race: Colonizing Women in The Voyage Out

When Helen and Ridley Ambrose jostle their way through London's narrow streets toward a ship bound for South America in the opening pages of Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, Ridley momentarily becomes "entangled . . . with a man selling picture postcards." 1 When Rachel Vinrace, another passenger on board the Euphrosyne, attempts to recall London life while strolling through a South American town, she begins by acknowledging the kind of entanglement Ridley tries to leave behind: "First there are men selling picture postcards" (VO, 91). It makes sense that Rachel's effort to think her way back into England should begin with the selling of postcards, for by 1915 a craze for picture postcards had made them a prominent feature of everyday life. The first picture postcards apparently emanated from the Paris Exhibition of 1889, and many more were produced in England for such large-scale exhibitions as London's Imperial International Exhibition in 1909 and the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924. This essay situates the story of Rachel's education within the cultural politics propagated by colonial postcards and imperial exhibitions, and argues that the novel's culminating scene of cross-cultural encounter uses race to address issues of gender and sexuality that are part of Rachel's baggage on her voyage out of England. 2