'The earth instead of being brown, was red, purple green': Imaginary Americas in Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out

Critics have often wondered why Woolf set this novel of English manners in a South American town, rather than in the London where she herself lived, and from which most of its characters come. Her diaries record an acute awareness of the way in which the unfamiliarity of a foreign country may lead the travellers to cast a critical perspective on their own accepted cultural habits and customs. The protagonist’s physical and spiritual voyage involves such a process.In addition travel and, as a consequence, movement suggest crossing cultural boundaries, trespassing, visiting, and capture; travel and displacement stage encounters with caste and division as well as with other significant and signifying barriers. Cultural dislocation foregrounds maps and mapping; maps represent barriers we know we are crossing, and often we are compelled to redraw the borderlines. Such a process may imply a necessity to search for alternatives modes of signification: a new place is an opportunity for cross-thinking, out of which something different may emerge, something that transforms, transvalues, and translates.