The End of the Day: Act 2 Voyage: The Coast of Utopia

The second act of Voyage, is still filled with philosophies and conflicts within the family, but there is a slight change in the way that some of the characters discover things about their nature that they didn’t know. They are more passionate and not only are there changes in their love life but in the urge of some of them for revolution.

In the first pages of the second act, a new character called Natalie appears in the story. She is a very desperate girl that is searching for a man, and that tries to seduce Michael various times until she achieves it. This woman is only desperate but she has very low self esteem and when she is rejected she answers in the following way, “Don’t you think I’m pretty?”(76) When she says this, she argues that she has been rejected because she is ugly, making of herself a victim. She’s probably thought she was pretty but then with one rejection she thought the worst. This character is very similar to Sonya, in Uncle Vanya. They are both desperate in their own way, looking to fall in love and after a man. They also suffer a lot with their looks. While Sonya sees herself as simply ugly, Natalie thinks that she is being rejected because she is not pretty enough. The way both of these characters are structured shows a pattern in the way that apparently Russians see women. Both of those plays have a woman that is weak and desperate, especially for men. This may represent the image that some people had during those times about women and their roles in society, or maybe it is just an element used in literature about Russia. It is not very surprising to notice that women were seen as inferior and unable to perform important functions within their intellectual and academic world.

The other topic that appears many times in this act is revolution. Michael is very motivated to make part of a revolution with the help of Belinsky. His ideas are based on the different philosophies that he has been studying and under the influence of his friend. “He’s discovered revolution. Now he knows where he was going wrong.”(114) When Tatiana says the quote above, she is referring to Michael and to his final decision of what he wants to do with his life. After studying so many philosophers and changing his mind on who had the right ideology, he decided to stick to revolution. He had finally knew where he went wrong and was beginning to aim towards a clear goal. As I had said before, this is very contradicting because Michael wants revolution when he is a person that represents a tyrant due to the fact that his family owns so many serfs. The topic of revolution is very constant in these types of plays, especially if they are about Russia, because of the importance that the Russian Revolution had over the rest of the world.

Finally, the ending of the play has a last scene that impacts the reader. Alexander goes blind and he insists to go and “watch” the sunset. This is apparently a scandal, especially for his wife, but as they talk of Michael and how he rebelled and dropped the army, he begins to ask about the sunset. When they are done speaking he says, “I saw it go down.”(119) This may be a metaphor that he is using to express his feelings about what happened with Michael. When he mentions that he did see when it went down, he may be referring to Michael and how he was blind at first when he didn’t see as a father that his son didn’t want to do all those things that were expected of him, but that now he saw how it all fit into place. He realized that Michael was now where he wanted to be, although it was degrading for his family and its dignity. A sunset at the end showed how his hopes faded away and how he did notice it when it happened.