《出航》敘述一位不諳世故的女子瑞秋為增長見聞，自英國家鄉遠遊南美，最後卻不幸因病客死他鄉的成長故事。本文旨在探討吳爾芙如何透過文本中鏡子的意象探索瑞秋創傷與悲劇的成因：深植於女性反思機制中的父權思想。在小說中，女主角瑞秋不斷在反思/鏡射/回顧中為自己的存有感到羞愧與罪咎：她為自己在鏡中平凡的外貌感到沮喪；當她回顧到自己與達洛威先生的曖昧關係，也為自己未加把持的放縱行為感到污穢、罪孽深重；在劍橋學子聖約翰(在小說中，曾被他的朋友泰倫斯以鏡喻之)的面前，她則因未曾聽過知名歷史學家吉朋的名字而被當成像小孩一般無知的女人。總結以上觀察，本文指出，造成瑞秋問題的核心，實為根植於她反思機制中的父權思想結構。欲獲得救贖，瑞秋的當務之急，因而是「航向域外」，走出以父權思想為核心的反思結構、語言再現與男性中心符碼系統。

This paper examines Virginia Woolf’s use of mirror as a trope in The Voyage Out to account for how a patriarchal English society of the Edwardian period can victimize a Victorian daughter like Rachel through the domination of her reflective mechanism. In the novel, Rachel kept feeling shameful about her own being: she felt dejected when she looked at her unsatisfactory looks in the mirror; she felt guilty when she reflected upon her erotic relationship with Mr. Dalloway; she felt sad about her reflection as an ignorant woman in the Cantabrigian St. John’s eyes only because she had not heard of Gibbon, a celebrated historian. Based on Rachel’s tragic life ended with her death in a foreign country, this paper argues that her tragedy is not simply a personal issue involving her infinite reflection upon herself. Rather, it is a cultural issue involving social conditioning functioning through the construction of a society’s collective reflective mechanism. Rachel’s death at the end of the novel, in turn, is interpreted as her eventual salvation by taking the voyage out of the sphere of mirror reflection, language representation and masculine codes.