Now, Voy­ager is a 1942 Amer­i­can movie Bette Davis, Paul Hen­reid, and Claude Rains, and direct­ed by Irv­ing Rap­per. The screen­play by Casey Robin­son is based on the 1941 nov­el of the same name by Olive Hig­gins Prouty, who bor­rowed her title from the Walt Whit­man poem The Untold Want:

The untold want by life and land ne’er grant­ed,
Now, voy­ager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.

Walt Whit­man, being one of America’s nation­al trea­sures, is oft-quot­ed on screen and in music: O Cap­tain! My Cap­tain in Dead Poets Soci­ety springs to mind, and more recent­ly Bob Dylan’s I Con­tain Mul­ti­tudes is a line bor­rowed from Song of Myself. “Now, voy­ager, sail thou forth, to seek and find” fits the sto­ry­line well, as we’ll see.

Char­lotte Vale (Bette Davis) is a shy, neu­rot­ic and over­weight young woman who is in thrall to her dom­i­neer­ing har­ri­dan of a moth­er (Gladys Coop­er). The ver­bal and emo­tion­al abuse dished out to her daugh­ter has cre­at­ed a woman on the verge of a ner­vous break­down. Indeed, fear­ing just that, Charlotte’s sis­ter-in-law Lisa intro­duces her to psy­chi­a­trist Dr Jaquith (Claude Rains), and Char­lotte spends some time in his san­i­tar­i­um. This proves to be a turn­ing point, and away from her moth­er’s clutch­es, Char­lotte blos­soms, los­es weight and gets her­self a whole new wardrobe. Both Lisa and Dr Jaquith encour­age Char­lotte not to go home yet but to instead go on a cruise.

Char­lotte agrees, and although ini­tial­ly too shy to mix with the oth­er pas­sen­gers on the ship, she meets and becomes friend­ly with Jer­ry Dur­rance (Paul Hen­reid), a mar­ried man trav­el­ing on busi­ness. Jer­ry is sym­pa­thet­ic to Charlotte’s new-found but still inchoate con­fi­dence and opens up about his own young daugh­ter Tina and her strug­gles with shy­ness. Char­lotte learns that it is only Jer­ry’s devo­tion to his daugh­ter that keeps him from divorc­ing his wife, who is a manip­u­la­tive and jeal­ous woman. On an excur­sion from the ship in Rio de Janeiro, Char­lotte and Jer­ry are strand­ed on Sug­ar­loaf Moun­tain. They miss the ship and spend five days togeth­er before Char­lotte flies to Buenos Aires to rejoin the cruise. Although it is clear they have fall­en in love, they decide not to see each oth­er again.

When she dis­em­barks from the ship, Char­lot­te’s fam­i­ly is stunned by the dra­mat­ic changes in her. The for­mer­ly qui­et and shy Char­lotte is inun­dat­ed with fond farewells from fel­low pas­sen­gers. Back home, her moth­er tries to brow­beat her daugh­ter all over again, but this time Char­lotte remains res­olute, empow­ered by her expe­ri­ences aboard the ship and the mem­o­ry of Jer­ry’s love. This time, she can fight back and when lat­er she deliv­ers some home truths, Mrs Vale, per­haps robbed of her rai­son d’être as effec­tive vira­go, dies of a heart attack. Guilty and dis­traught, Char­lotte returns to the san­i­tar­i­um but is quick­ly divert­ed from her relapse by meet­ing Jerry’s daugh­ter Tina and tak­ing her under her wing.

When Tina’s con­di­tion improves, Dr Jaquith allows Char­lotte to take Tina to live with her at her home to Boston, on the con­di­tion that her rela­tion­ship with Jer­ry remains pla­ton­ic. Jer­ry is delight­ed to see the improve­ment in his daugh­ter, but the love he and Char­lotte share must seem­ing­ly remain in check. Char­lotte tells Jer­ry that she sees Tina as her way of being close to him. When Jer­ry asks her if she is hap­py, she deliv­ers the clas­sic line at the very end of the movie: “Oh, Jer­ry, don’t let’s ask for the Moon. We have the stars.”