We even watch as the hero, Terence, demonstrates how to simulate death. What do all of these morbid references mean? First, they are a foreshadowing mechanism, preparing us for what is to come. Second, they serve as a reminder of the insidious proximity of death.

We are then led to evaluate our heroine, Rachel, through the eyes of her more experienced Aunt Helen. Helen quickly sizes Rachel up as an awkward, naive young woman: “Yes! how clear it was that she would be vacillating, emotional, and when you said something to her it would make no more lasting impression than the stroke of a stick upon water” (p. 16). Rachel’s naivete makes more sense when we learn about her isolated upbringing and her incomplete education. Her mother died when she was eleven, and she was raised by maiden aunts while her father traveled with his shipping business. What little education Rachel received in a finishing school left her ignorant and somewhat helpless; indeed, “there was no subject in the world which she knew accurately,” whether it was “the shape of the earth, the history of the world, how trains worked, or money was invested” (p. 28). Woolf makes it clear that although Rachel’s ignorance may be extreme, even for a less educated era, it is by no means exceptional in a society that strives to keep women powerless and innocent in an effort to preserve their virtue and ensure their subservience.

Helen, however, blames Rachel’s ignorant condition not on society but on her brother-in-law Willoughby. She suspects him of “nameless atrocities with regard to his daughter” (p. 19). We are never told exactly what these “nameless atrocities” were, but we slowly discover that Rachel’s haphazard upbringing has left a void that makes it difficult for her to understand both her own and other people’s emotions. We first see this in Rachel’s response to Helen’s display of physical affection. After Rachel accidentally sees Helen kiss Ridley she is somewhat baffled and looks down at the bottom of the sea, where “beneath it was green and dim, and it grew dimmer and dimmer until the sand at the bottom was only a pale blur” (p. 22). This is the first of numerous associations of desire with the bottom of the sea — associations that link darkness to Rachel’s feelings about men and sex. Just as darkness is the absence of light, Rachel appears to envision the bottom of the sea as an absence of feeling, a black vacuum capable of absorbing all of her confused emotions and restoring her to stillness and calm.

The balance of power on board the Euphrosyne shifts when the Dalloways, a conservative politician and his socialite wife, board the ship for a short interval. The Dalloways are on an extended tour studying foreign countries for what they claim is the benefit of England; they are so assiduous in their task that in Spain they even “mounted mules, for they wished to understand how the peasants live” (p. 34). The Dalloways’ sense of entitlement extends to the ship, and at dinner they dominate the conversation. Mr. Dalloway drones on about the “utter folly and futility ” (p. 38) of the women’s suffrage movement, while Clarissa attempts to charm Mr. Pepper, who mistakes her platitudes about learning Greek for sincerity and offers to teach her. Clarissa regrets her false enthusiasm that night when she has nightmares about “great Greek letters stalking round the room” (p. 48). Richard and Clarissa are obviously absurd, but they are also glamorous, and in any case they are the people who run England, and so, they believe, the world. Indeed, for the Dalloways the world seems to exist only insofar as it suits their own purpose, an attitude Woolf encapsulates beautifully with Richard’s image of English foreign policy as “a lasso that opened and caught things, enormous chunks of the habitable globe” (p. 46).

Although the Dalloways serve as a vehicle to satirize English hypocrisy and entitlement, their real purpose is to act as a catalyst to incite Rachel’s emotional journey.