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In one of her most renowned essays, “Modern Fiction,” Virginia Woolf (1925) defines life as “… a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (p. 154). While the imagery of the passage primarily connotes containment, Woolf goes on to ask if it is not the “task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit …?” (emphasis added). The tension in the passage between enclosure and infinite extension points to a condition of boundary confusion one finds expressed throughout Woolf's personal writings. This essay focuses on the way Woolf's lifelong feelings of disintegration and wholeness are reflected in a pattern of spatial imagery in her autobiographical writings, and how that same pattern of imagery is translated into her first novel, The Voyage Out.
The spatial figures and metaphors—the images of enclosure, engulfment, and expansion—found in Woolf's letters, diaries and autobiographical essays point to the probability that, in the language of self psychology, she suffered from a weakened or defective self; that in object-relations terminology, Woolf never satisfactorily resolved her wish for symbiotic connection with the mother.1 Before turning to The Voyage Out I will offer