Virginia Woolf's last novel, Between the Acts, shows in its way what it was in June 1939. The present then consisted not only of what was happening and what was then, but also of what had been in the long past since the prehistoric era. The history of England was there, and timeless nature as well. The lily pond in the novel engulfed human deeds and remained still unchanged. Woolf wove a remarkable tapestry of June 1939 with these various elements. It was rather difficult to make up the tapestry mostly with Woolfian "moments of being" which were in the realm of individual psychology. Here arose an impetus to going beyond the individuality into the realm of a sort of "the collective conscious." Though she did not write such an extraordinary work as Joyce's Fimegans Wake, Woolf was compelled to find her hope in the future of the collective English people at large. It seems to be much more important at that stage for an individual author or actor to be common than to be particular. The pageant in Between the Acts was played by common villagers rather than professional actors. There would be some possibility for the disharmonious tragic conditions of modern men to be harmonized by annihilating individuality and by getting into a common cause.

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Of special interest to Virginia Woolf is 'Silence,' or 'the things people don't say,' the innermost feelings kept privately concealed. Also she realizes the difficult situation that female expressiveness faces. In one of her book reviews in 1905 and a short story "The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn" (1906), Woolf shows both men and women devalue women's experiences and feelings. Female speech, because of this devaluation, has been considered as 'a chattering and garrulous-mere talk.' Woolf believes, however, what women really are is revealing itself in their 'chatterings.' This is why, in The Voyage Out, she dared to make the heroine break the silence and talk about what she feels. This paper is an attempt to consider what effects the heroine's chattering has on the male hearers in The Voyage Out, focusing on the scenes where Rachel Vinrace has a chance to talk alone with Richard Dalloway (Chap.4) and with Terence Hewet (Chap. 16). After briefly discussing the essay and the short story mentioned above, I examine the conflicts between the heroine and the male characters, and how Rachel gradually overcomes her own hesitation to tell her story and begins to talk freely. Finally, Rachel comes to express in words her joy and freedom of being a woman. One of the most crucial moments in the novel is when she describes her vision of herself as a free and self-subsistent being like "the wind or the sea." The text reveals that when Rachel talks it is an undeniable truth, however her statement is called "nonsense" by Terence. Woolf knows the difficulties that female speech has faced, but she believes in the value of women's Voice' and she tries to show this in this scene.

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Virginia Woolf was a woman writer whose powerful bonds with women were a crucial factor in her life, and sexual and emotional orientation of being a woman profoundly affected her consciousness and creativity. In fact she wrote about sexual love between women in some of her works. In Melymbrosia, an early draft of her first novel, The Voyage Out, she wrote a scene in which Rachel, her heroine, scuffles on the ground with her aunt Helen. But when The Voyage Out was published, the strong lesbian undertones which the scene contained had been transformed into non-lesbian ones. Such a change illuminates not only the artistic evolution that Woolf s fiction underwent before publication, but also the author' s consistent tendency to obscure lesbian overtones. She was being silenced by the homophobic and misogynistic society to which she belonged, and forced to adopt internal censorship of her writings. In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf gave her heroine Clarissa lesbian sexuality, and tried to write overt lesbian moments among Clarissa and women. But she had to describe them by using the expression of man's sexual orgasm, not woman's. Woolf had not clarified lesbian language yet, like most of lesbian writers in her age. In A Room of One's Own and "Professions for Women", it seems that Woolf prophesied the birth of real lesbian literature in the near future and explored the new canon of sexualilty of men and women. She believed that this concerns itself deeply with woman's independence and evolution and really helps to expand all woman' s possibilities whether lesbian or heterosexual. Woolf's works will probably be fated to be misread and misunderstood if they are analyzed without considering her lesbian orientation and world view. Perhaps the time has come for us to recognize her as a lesbian writer.

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